‘Poetry Outlasts Everything’

Image

Named “one of America’s greatest poets” by the Poetry Foundation, Alice Notley ’67, who was known for her fiercely imaginative voice, died on May 19 in Paris. She was 79.

A boundary-defying force in contemporary poetry, Notley authored over 40 books, including 165 Meeting House Lane, Mysteries of Small Houses, and Culture of One. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry.

Notley eschewed labels, refusing to be constrained by specific movements, groups, or schools of poetry. “It’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against … everything,” she wrote in an essay for The Paris Review. “One must remain somehow, though how, open to any subject or form in principle, open to the possibility of liking, open to the possibility of using.”

Driven by a relentless appetite for experimentation, she explored the personal and the political, the mythic and the domestic. Hailed as “our present-day Homer” by artist Rudy Burckhardt, she challenged and reimagined traditional poetic devices and forms. One such example is Notley’s 1992 feminist epic, The Descent of Alette, which follows narrator Alette on a journey into the depths of a subwaylike underground world where she faces a tyrant. The poem is told in phrasal quotations — a technique that plays with a syntax and rhythm to create a narrative that feels more immediate and spoken.

Born in 1945 in Bisbee, Arizona, and raised in Needles, California, Notley studied at Barnard, graduating in 1967, and received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was the only woman in her genre and one of two in the entire graduate writing department. There, she met the poet Ted Berrigan, whom she married in 1972. During their early years together, they lived an itinerant existence, with stints staying with fellow artists in Southampton, New York, and Marin County, California. They settled in Chicago, where Notley founded Chicago, a legal-size mimeograph poetry magazine, before a brief move to England. During this period, she gave birth to their two sons.

The family eventually made their way to New York City in the mid-1970s, where Notley became a central figure in the second generation of New York School poets, though she always resisted easy categorization. “Oh, I’m pigeon-holed all the time, usually by people who have only read one part of my oeuvre,” she said in a 2014 interview with CutBank, a literary journal of the University of Montana. “Mostly I just keep writing in whatever way I want to next.”

Following Berrigan’s death in 1983, Notley lost her stepdaughter Kate Berrigan and then her brother Albert Notley. In her poetry, she reflected on their absences, weaving their voices into her work. “Sometimes I think that there is no poetry written without the intervention of the dead. It’s their voices speaking to you that allow you to find words from nowhere; they are the muse,” she told The Los Angeles Review of Books.

In 1992, she moved to Paris with her second husband, the British poet Douglas Oliver. Living abroad, she continued to write, channeling grief, myth, and memory. Over the years, Notley would return to the U.S. to conduct small 

workshops and give readings, including one given in 2007 organized by Barnard Center for Research on Women.

Notley is survived by her sons, Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, who are also poets. “Poetry outlasts everything,” she said in a 2024 interview. “It’s a primeval spirit. It’s probably the first speech. It comes with speech. It’s what children do, when they play with their first words. And it comes from nowhere, and it always goes on.”