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Our first reader this
evening will be Alice Notley.

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I have the pleasure
of introducing her,

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and it's quite an honor.

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She's a poet I've
admired my whole life,

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since I started reading,
poetry probably.

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She's a poet who defies
conventions, genre,

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what is considered polite,
acceptable, or expected

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in poetry.

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In her poetic work
and in her life,

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I feel this has
shown up in her work.

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Alice Notley's work ranges
from intimate lyrics

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experimental diaries,
traditional genres,

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the postmodern series,
the newly-invented epic,

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political observation,
and invective

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and the poem as novel.

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Notley was born in 1945
in Bisbee, Arizona,

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and grew up in
Needles, California,

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currently living in Paris.

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Sharing poetic affinities
with William Carlos Williams,

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Gertrude Stein and
Frank O'Hara, Notley

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was active in New York with her
first husband, Ted Berrigan,

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as part of the second generation
New York School Poetry,

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and later co-edited the
journal Gare du Nord

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with her second husband,
Douglas Oliver, in Paris.

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Alice Notley is the author
of over 30 books of poetry,

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including Waltzing Matilda,
which was recently reissued,

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The Descent of Alette,
Mysteries of Small Houses,

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which was a finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize, Disobedience,

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Alma, Or, The Dead Woman,
Coming After, Essays on Poetry,

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and Grave of Light: New and
Selected Poems, 1970-2005,

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published by Wesleyan
University Press in 2006.

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She has received the
Griffin Poetry Prize,

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the Los Angeles Times
Book Award for Poetry ,

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an Academy Award from the
American Academy of Arts

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and Letters, and the Lenore
Marshall Prize for Grave

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of Light, her new
and selected poetry.

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She is the editor, with Anselm
and Edmund Berrigan, her sons,

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of the collected
poems of Ted Berrigan,

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put out through University
of California Press in 2005.

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There is no voice quite like
Notley's, and hers is one

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that alters and hides, confronts
and shape-shifts in her work,

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laughs and submerges
in sorrow, delights

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the mind, that sensorial world,
and the people around her

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as it moves through her oeuvre.

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You may read one book and
grow content, deeply familiar

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with her voice, but you'll
only pick up another text

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and confront new characters
in a new locale which

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reproduces nothing.

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A new country lifting
multiple genres

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and willing them into harmonious
being, speaking in many tongues

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and reviving and
redistributing the life

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of the mind and the
contemporary lyric in one

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fell swoop with such
sleight of hand,

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it may feel like a steam
engine, a beautiful force

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you have had the good
fortune to collide with.

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Please help me
welcome Alice Notley.

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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