Alice Notley’s Symphonic Everything

---

After the last West Coast reading that Alice Notley would ever give, in a lecture hall at Portland State University on November 9, 2023, there was the inevitable Q & A. These, we all know, can be edifying or a chore or both of those things at the same time. Most of the questions were fairly standard, ones that Notley had answered many times before: Question: What did she think of the second-generation New York School moniker that had been bestowed upon her? Answer: She didn’t think much of it; she had lived all over; her work was significantly different from other writers identified with the New York School label; that said, she had come to accept it. Question: How often did she revise her writing? Answer: After more than fifty years, not very often; she knew what she wanted out of her work and the forms she wrote in found themselves fairly quickly these days.        

Toward the end of the Q & A an undergraduate took the mic, a freshly declared creative writing major. In a nervous tone she advanced a stop-start line of inquiry, mostly rooted in her own experience of writing. Sometimes when she was writing, the young woman attested, she felt like she was the best writer in the world. Then the next day she would look at what she had written and hate it. The greatness previously noted had vanished and she didn’t know whether she was a great or horrible writer. It was an ongoing dilemma. After a robust pause, Notley responded, “Is there a question in there?” It wasn’t nice. The reading was packed, with 150 or so people in attendance, and it took courage to raise one’s hand, wait for the microphone to be passed, then ask something of one of the “U.S.’s greatest living poets,” as Notley had been introduced. Especially for someone who had self-identified as a “pretty new writer.”

I felt bad for the young woman. I think everyone in the room did. At the same time, however, I had an inkling of the uncertainty the woman was feeling.    

•

The previous night, November 8, my partner and I had dinner with Notley to celebrate her seventy-eighth birthday. Although this was my first time meeting the canonical poet in person, I’d been in touch with her for years, first as a fan, then as her editor. Alice, as I always knew her (“Please call me Alice” was the first sentence she ever wrote to me, after a 2013 email wherein I had addressed her as Ms. Notley), was warm and firm and quick and opinionated and brilliant. After sending her a few fan emails between 2013 and 2015, in 2016 I reached out with a specific inquiry—would she be interested in Fonograf Editions (FE), my literary record label, putting out an LP by her? After a few back and forths, her answer was yes, but she didn’t know anything about LPs—she was a poet—and I would have to do all the heavy lifting. With audio sourced from a reading that Alice gave on April 5, 2017 in Seattle, Live in Seattle was released by FE in November 2017. It was the label’s third release, after 2016 LPs by Eileen Myles and Rae Armantrout. Throughout the process working with Alice was easy—she was very open to my editing of the audio (I spliced some of the Q & A discussion with Alice’s actual poetry reading), the LP cover design, and the overall album packaging. I got the sense that she thought the whole thing was a good-natured lark. 

By 2021 FE was in the process of shifting from putting out records to books. For a magazine that the press released in 2022, I solicited Alice for work, and that solicitation turned into a larger conversation regarding the press releasing a full length book of hers. Her main publisher, Penguin, could not keep up with her output and she always had a lot of work—but at the same time she wasn’t going to let just anyone publish it. She wanted to see some sample titles and wanted to know more about the transition from record label to book press. She wasn’t afraid of working with a new, somewhat unknown press, but she wanted details. And a decent royalty rate wouldn’t hurt either.

FE passed the test, releasing Early Works and The Speak Angel Series in February 2023. Containing Notley’s first four out of print collections and a variety of early uncollected work, the former text was roundly celebrated by old and new Notley readers alike; the archival book became one of our best sellers. The volume’s editor, Nick Sturm, did most of the heavy lifting on Early Works, with Alice writing a buoyant intro full of insight into her process and the challenges she faced early in her career.

Consisting of six loosely interrelated books and totaling 641 pages, The Speak Angel Series, an entirely new work, was met with the respectful bafflement that at least a few of Alice’s later books received. Although several of these late period Notley texts—including Culture of One (2011), Benediction (2015), Certain Magical Acts (2016) and For the Ride (2020)—received some reviews and some acclaim, they are hard, dense, expansive poetic epics. They can’t be summed up in a pithy 250-word award citation statement and they didn’t win any awards. Even—and maybe especially—longtime fans of Notley’s found them challenging. Trying to drum up publicity, prior to The Speak Angel Series’s release I had a phone conversation with a prominent longtime literary radio show host, since retired. One of the first things he matter-of-factly said to me was, “Now, Alice used to be one of my favorite poets, but she’s not anymore, she’s lost me.” Two years after the publication of The Speak Angel Series, I was talking with a fellow publisher of mine, a Notley fan and the head of a significant national press that largely publishes experimental and off-kilter work. Contra Early Works, he referred to The Speak Angel Series as “the unreadable one.” Grace and time is what a book like The Speak Angel Series asks of its reader, two things in short supply both literally and otherwise right now. Artistically Alice never remained in one place, to be sure, but the sometimes garrulous, sometimes insolent, sometimes exuberant New York School style that the beginning part of her career largely lived within was not her go-to poetic mode in the last decades of her life. She still worked within it when it suited her, but it was merely one tool in a much larger box. Even Notley’s most celebrated text, 1996’s The Descent of Alette, is a breezy read compared to some of the later volumes. Alette is also an epic, but even in its fractured polyvocality, it maintains a clear and distinct narrative. The same can’t be said for a book like For the Ride, which is disjunctively interplanetary, linguistically complicated, and hard to fully grasp on a first, second, third reading. In her review at The New York Times writer and critic Elisa Gabbert championed the book, lauding its nerves and swerves, while also noting how the book “deeply annoyed” her. (“In Defense of Poetic Nonsense, With a Character Who Shares Your Frustration” was the title of Gabbert’s essay.)    

The Speak Angel Series took me four months to read. Midway through I excitedly emailed Alice that it was like Coltrane’s album Ascension, “a symphonic everything everywhere, buoyant, sprawling, all at once.” The next day Alice emailed back; up until the last few months of her life she was always a prompt communicator. She wasn’t familiar with that Coltrane album, but the description didn’t read right, not at all. She was confused by it and if I was going to be her editor such confusion needed to be dispelled immediately. In short, the book was a redemptive work of myth, at a very large scale. Multilayered, yes, with several different voices and, per Ascension, symphonic might actually work. But it was also ordered, of sturdy shape and form(s), and in its own way compact. In her email to me she went on: “You’re the first person to have read it. I’ve published very little of it in journals, and there are several parts I’ve never read aloud from in public. However, I suspect it is an extremely important work; I’ve spent a lot of time on it and put my whole self into it. I totally care about it. It actually scares me.” 

While working with Alice on The Speak Angel Series she made clear that she wanted an editor, not an acolyte. She asked for edits on the texts—“I’m just the author, anyway”— and when I didn’t have too many to give (I didn’t know where to begin, and if I had, didn’t know what to say or how to articulate it), she was fine with it. At the same time, however, the book was itself, completely and utterly, and if I’d had wholesale sweeping edits and revisions I doubt she would have taken them. Listened, but then done what she wanted. She’d earned that right and the book—which was, of course, actually six books in one—was in her eyes not going to work if we cut one of those texts for purposes of length. Early in the process, I asked her about this possibility: “No.” This was it, The Speak Angel Series, full stop, end stop. 

“I think I conceive myself as disobeying my readership a lot,” Alice confirmed in her well-known talk/essay “The Poetics of Disobedience” (1998), also asserting earlier in the piece how “It’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against…everything.” Such licenses gave the poet free reign to do what she wanted when she wanted, without any type of artistic stricture, reader be galvanized or reader be damned. Alice’s disobediences also marked her, in the sense that she did not play the game and the game reacted accordingly. She had a long, rich, and rewarding career, but Alice was not a careerist and, living in Paris for the last decades of her life, refused nearly all careerist apparatuses. Or perhaps refused is the wrong word—if they came her way, she was not going to refuse them. But she was also not going to modify herself or her work to accommodate institutional tastes or mores. She wasn’t tenured (a status she never aspired to) and towards the end didn’t teach, at least beyond one or two-day class visits on her yearly trips back to the States. She wasn’t on the judge’s panel, any judge’s panel, and as a result when those judges later got together to nominate other judges, judges that then nominated the books of those previous judges for the prize, she wasn’t in the conversation. The unruliness of her actual work surely played a role in this, but Alice’s stalwart iconoclasm played the bigger role. Her (wildly various) poetic practice was itself. She was herself. And although she did indeed want the big prizes (some of which she received) and the big money, the wider world was going to have to take or leave her on her own terms. As her son Anselm Berrigan, an accomplished poet himself, noted in an interview after his mother’s death, poetry is a “devotional art,” and the world we currently live in has little time for such devotion. Many contemporary poets have embraced the grind, joined academia, updated their CV’s, applied for the one-year visiting assistant professor position in Creative Writing at Mid Central Northwestern Dakota State on their way to applying for a three-year position visiting assistant professor position in Creative Writing at Southeastern Colorado State Tech or Eastwestern Carolina College Commonwealth. They co-chair panels and committees and post respectfully but floridly on social media, trying to build their professional brands. And onward, forward. I’m not faulting them—I get it. I’m partially there myself. But Alice wasn’t going to do that, none of it.  

Simply, she mattered and matters a lot to me, as both a writer and spirit. Our November 8 birthday dinner, then, was potentially set to be a mildly heightened affair for me, complete with first date jitters and nerves. But it turned out to be the opposite. Although I did probably pepper her with too many silly questions, she was accommodating and personable throughout. Warm, incisive. We disagreed about hot weather and the sculptor Carl Andre (she was for, I against) and agreed about Ireland (upon meeting my partner Airin, Alice said she had the “face of Ireland”), Peter Schjeldahl, writing daily, and celebrating one’s birthday with a sweet treat (the peach cobbler, in her case). Being back on the West Coast was great. The readings in San Francisco and Boise had been lively and she was happy that the new FE books seemed to be making their way into the world. As ever, she was working on new writing and it was coming along. Her recent knee replacement surgery, which had severely impacted her mobility, was the only thing slowing her down. After dinner, on the short two-block walk back to her hotel, Alice heavily leaned on me the whole way, tentative step by tentative step. Her frailty made me a bit nervous, even if, as she noted at dinner, it was just a temporary thing. She was by then seventy-eight. She died on May 19, 2025, aged seventy-nine.  

•

The next night, November 9, Alice read for about forty-five minutes, from Early Works and The Speak Angel Series. Sitting in the back, I had trouble hearing her at times, but on the whole thought it was great. She read fast, with little preamble, which worked to her favor; one got lost in the language, both its musicality and its refusal of music, along with the glimmering narrative stretches that scratched the surface before furtively ducking their heads again. Loud and long was the applause at the end. 

And then the Q & A and the raising of the young, newly declared creative writing major’s hand. The circumstances of her simultaneously loving and hating her work, followed by Alice’s “is there a question in there?” retort. After Alice said that, though, it didn’t end. Waiting for a brief moment, she then answered the non-question honestly. No, she didn’t have that issue anymore, not really; these days she thought it was all good. That said, she had worked for years and years to get to that point, and where the young woman was she had once been. Alice, though, kept coming back. She kept writing, working, persevering. Left unspoken was the directive that the young woman should continue writing, working, and persevering herself. Knowing Alice, however, that directive was there, implicit but shining.      

I hope she has.