Our first reader this evening will be Alice Notley.
I have the pleasure of introducing her,
and it's quite an honor.
She's a poet I've admired my whole life,
since I started reading, poetry probably.
She's a poet who defies conventions, genre,
what is considered polite, acceptable, or expected
in poetry.
In her poetic work and in her life,
I feel this has shown up in her work.
Alice Notley's work ranges from intimate lyrics
experimental diaries, traditional genres,
the postmodern series, the newly-invented epic,
political observation, and invective
and the poem as novel.
Notley was born in 1945 in Bisbee, Arizona,
and grew up in Needles, California,
currently living in Paris.
Sharing poetic affinities with William Carlos Williams,
Gertrude Stein and Frank O'Hara, Notley
was active in New York with her first husband, Ted Berrigan,
as part of the second generation New York School Poetry,
and later co-edited the journal Gare du Nord
with her second husband, Douglas Oliver, in Paris.
Alice Notley is the author of over 30 books of poetry,
including Waltzing Matilda, which was recently reissued,
The Descent of Alette, Mysteries of Small Houses,
which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Disobedience,
Alma, Or, The Dead Woman, Coming After, Essays on Poetry,
and Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005,
published by Wesleyan University Press in 2006.
She has received the Griffin Poetry Prize,
the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry ,
an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts
and Letters, and the Lenore Marshall Prize for Grave
of Light, her new and selected poetry.
She is the editor, with Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, her sons,
of the collected poems of Ted Berrigan,
put out through University of California Press in 2005.
There is no voice quite like Notley's, and hers is one
that alters and hides, confronts and shape-shifts in her work,
laughs and submerges in sorrow, delights
the mind, that sensorial world, and the people around her
as it moves through her oeuvre.
You may read one book and grow content, deeply familiar
with her voice, but you'll only pick up another text
and confront new characters in a new locale which
reproduces nothing.
A new country lifting multiple genres
and willing them into harmonious being, speaking in many tongues
and reviving and redistributing the life
of the mind and the contemporary lyric in one
fell swoop with such sleight of hand,
it may feel like a steam engine, a beautiful force
you have had the good fortune to collide with.
Please help me welcome Alice Notley.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]