A Conversation: September 2002-December 2003

THE FOLLOWING CONVERSATION TOOK PLACE via e-mail, beginning in September of 2002 and ending December 31 2003 I first wrote Alice in 2000 after reading her volume length poem The Descent of Alette. The transcript of our discussion overlays many issues, including notions of religion, authority, poetics, first influences, etc For verity's sake, I've left a certain number of of the e-mail captions intact, because they give an accurate presentation of the time we worn out together (we have never met) I also include, here in this brief preface, issues of fact left without of the interview.

Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona, upon November 8, 1945, and grew up in Needle California. She is the author of above 20 books of poetry, including The fall of Alette, Close to me & Closer . . (The Language of Heaven), Desamere, Mysteries of Small Houses and Disobedience. A second-generation member of the fresh York School, she was married to the bard Ted Berrigan from 1972 until his death in 1983 In 1988 she married the British author of poems Douglas Oliver with whom she edited the journal Gare Du Nord in Paris, where she mov in 1992 before long after I wrote her in 2000 Douglas Oliver was diagnosed and died of cancer.

Though Notley says that T Berrigan was "the single greatest influence upon my being a poet and upon the way in which I was a bard . ." she says also that she "found it difficult to be influenced by means of his style." She cites her many influences as: first Faulkner (she studied fiction at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop), particularly in As I Lay Dying, Blake, Dickinson, Robert Creeley ("the first contemporary author of poems whose work I liked, . . but[I] didn't know what to do with it..."), Edwin Denby's sonnets; O'Hara and Whalen to whom she "open [her]self enormously," Gertrude Stein, Kerouac's novels and "at a certain point all of Shakespeare, in the way that Shakespeare's language was awash all above me and I can still order to appear that spirit up if I ne to." It was Anne Waldman and Bernadette Mayer whose voices, Notley says, she was first able to unfold "among":

In ways that are difficult to describe, I was probably greatest in quantity influenced of all by a kind of unfolding of voice which took place 'among' myself, Anne Waldman, and Bernadette Mayer, when we were real young ... Anne, Bernadette, and I heard a certain number of things in each other's voices that hadn't been in American poesy before. We heard a way a young woman might sound-I'm talking about when I was 26 years old-without imitating the literary unmutilated of the famous dead men I was obsessed with the fact that there was no uninjured in American poetry that with truth presaged mine; that there was no metrical composition that corresponded to my experience; that there was no rhyme with motherhood as its subdue I had my first child in 1972 and there was virtually nothing there in the rhyme to help me know who I was I can't overstate the case. with equal reason far I wasn't ineluctable in American poesy but I heard something in Anne's and Bernadette's work that might help me be included.

In all likelihood, I wrote Alice Notley because, as she had set "company" in the unheard unbroken she historically shared with Mayer and Waldman, I had heard in her work something I wanted in my have a title to work. I'll call it a diagnosis, individual that pointed to inequities of self-perception, of sex of politics, of poetry, of agriculture itself, without either removing the self from the point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled or more problematically, using the self to move the cure. While it was Nietzsche who first called artists and philosophers "physicians of culture" the French psychologist Gilles Deleuze pushed the definition to question issues of composition and the manner in which literary work implies a way of living, a form of life: "the aim of writing is to carry life to a state of nonpersonal power." In his essay "Literature and Life," he focuses upon the "detours," of syntax, of point of view, in all issues of what we commonly call writerly "style" that must take place to reach this state. I point this without not so much to place Notley in a French theoretical words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following (which she rejects), but to give a connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts for some of the questions I ask her regarding rhyme and poetics.

The other context-literal this time-that Notley's work turn backs to again and again is the untilled -specifically, The Mojave Desert, a region we now share, she through birth and I by transplantation.

Date: 9/4/2002

To: Notleya

From: Utopical

It's Claudia Keelan in Vegas. in what manner are you? The last time I wrote about a year ago, I think, I asked if you wanted to have a conversation, a conversation that goe upon about your poetry, etc. and you said ye Are you still willing? If in the way that here's a first question.

Reading you, I've draw near to see that you believe want is important. At the same time, I can't diocese that you share faith with the Franciscans, or have any allegiances to a whole of thought or religious principles, do you? by what mode did you come to believe that neediness is important?

Subj: How did you advance to believe that poverty was important?

Date: 9/6/2002