Paris-based Alice Notley was the author of more than 20 books of poetry including The Descent of Alette (1996) and Mysteries of Small Houses (Penguin, 1998). She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. In the spring of 2001 she received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelly Memorial Award. She edited and wrote a new introduction to her late husband Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets (Penguin, 2000). Born in Bisbee, Arizona, Notley grew up in Needles, California. After leading a peripatetic life during the late 60s and early 70s, she settled in New York, where, for 16 years, she was an important force in the eclectic second generation of the so-called New York school of poetry.
Judges’ Citation
Disobedience stands in ambush at the virtual co-ordinates of our ‘post-modern’ inferno.
Selected poems
by Alice Notley
The first sentence (of my poem) must be “I left it.”
What is the second sentence
The form of the wave/weave comes to me in pictures
of stars swarming to be good
in their cage.
Man on métro speaks to himself
and so he can say anything he wants.
I wish I were him
always so constricted
by you, all you, the stars.
This page is not woven yet
but any wave of light is already woven
so as I tell you the past of the glassy future
I find I need a plot to show us truth,
the graph’s coordinates quotidian life and
my life forgotten from sleep or
the unconscious which must rise up
wounded from the escape, dripping blood.
Copyright © 2001 by Alice Notley, Disobedience, Penguin Books
from “Change the Forms in Dreams”
Voice: “Is that bump in any language?”
Voice: “… deformed image… it is self-contained.”
Must be a poem.
… something unexpected, full of foul humor.
As well as a ribbon,
a roar, a grace, a dialogue, a diary,
and an individual
act of disobedience, defiance of
whoever comes to mind
I can’t keep writing
can hardly remember my dreams now
Have I fed anyone.
Have I changed Your image of what a poem might be
and so, in some part, changed “reality.”
Monday morning, jackhammers
then in the interstitial space
between interior dark and matter-of-fact light
if I open the windows in either wall, can day and night blend.
A strange, a tossing ghostly seawater effect
in which I’m enveloped, just sitting
drowning in it…
They call your work “engaging” when
A) you’re a woman
and
B) it doesn’t conform to prescribed
models of pomposity or obfuscation
rather, “talks.”
“Engaging” is an asshole word,
not quite as obnoxious a cliche as “ground-breaking.”
Copyright © 2001 by Alice Notley, Disobedience, Penguin Books