Alice Notley (1945-2025)

We note with great sadness the death of our dear friend, the beloved poet, Alice Notley, who passed away this past week (this past Monday), in Paris, where she lived for the last several decades. She was 79.

A tremendous loss of a unique and a hugely inspiring voice. We will miss her greatly.

from a 2014 interview  (on her poetic persona)

“Oh I’m pigeon-holed all the time, usually by people who have only read one part of my oeuvre. I am second-generation New York School, or I am the poet that lives in Paris, I am feminist, or I am the person defined by having loved Ted Berrigan or Douglas Oliver. I am personal, I am not personal, I am a poet of grief, etc, etc. Mostly, I just keep writing in whatever way I want to next. I am, at this point, an epic poet – I am like Virgil – and everybody better watch out because I am the one reshaping the myth and defining the world. I am international, interplanetary… ”

Alice’s (four-part) keynote speech at the Allen Ginsberg Symposium, in the Spring of 2018 at the St Marks Poetry Project in New York – on Allen’s internationalism – can be found here, here, here and here

and on Jack:

Our own celebrations on The Allen Ginsberg Project of Alice’s extraordinary achievements can be found, most notably, here, here here and here

Alice Notley on PennSound –  here and here 

Here’s some choice and selected Alice words – in memoriam

Alice Notley’s comprehensive  Spring 2024 Paris Review interview is available here

Nick Sturm’s 2017 interview for The Poetry Society of America is available here
(and a more recent PSA interview – with Kai Ihns – here)

More interviews: –  Sturm, again, for The Poetry Project Newsletter,  Ariana Reines for Gagosian,  Deanna Fong for The Capilano Review

Sturm‘s heroic editorial work on Alice needs to be commended.  See his “Alice Notley’s Magazines – A Digital Publishing  Project” – here

and “I make these collages and write” – (Sturm on Notley’s visual art)

See also here and here

Alice, the incomparable reader – those tender short works and those torrents of words – Here’s some video (her extraordinary reading with Anne Waldman at The Poetry Project last year)

Here’s some more video:

“The Descent of Alette” was also presented  in New York this past January  (sans Alice) as part of a mass group action (anti- the-Inauguration) – “Exorcising the Tyrant”

Alice,  the thoughtful and passionate and deeply-informed critic:

Alice, the mystic, the visionary (the transcendent over-arching quality that persists throughout her work):

Memorials and Appreciations – Since her passing on Monday there has been an outpouring of love and respect, and there will, unquestionably, be many more notices in the days to come.

Early observation: from the New York State Writers Institute

and a few brief gleanings from social media:

from the poet Eleni Sikelianos 

“This titan entered my life c. 1990 and showed me so many myriad shining ways to be poetry. Weeping while reading  “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” taught me to cry for poems. Showed me how poetry changes orders of reality. Her work will always speak to the past present and future because poets never die.  Her work will always be a big gathering voice in space checking the Tyrant at the gate. Alice, you have been preparing for this journey your whole poetic life. You know how to do it. We will miss you here on earth. We will learn how to go on without you because we have your works as guide. “You are a starring light shaped like a rag chalking words on the night.” (“From the Beginning”)”

from  Jeff Alessandrelli, her publisher at Fonograf Editions

“In correspondence, be it postal or email, Alice ended everything with love—Love, Alice. This was true when I first wrote her in 2013 (very nervous to do so—I was emailing Alice Notley!) to 2025. She was one of the best poets in the world but was the opposite of a poetry ice princess. She would tell you about the weather or growing up in Needles or, after her knee surgeries, her medical care. She was REALLY funny. A typical email send-off: “Sending you all my best! I have to try to stand up now.  love, Alice”

from musician Beth Levin

“The magnificent Alice Notley.  When great poets die, the phenomenon of their poetry as something eternal, yet already so knowing of death in their lives, comes forward: it blares; reading their poems, that Orphic paradox – I am so so grateful for her work.”

Ted Berrigan, her first husband, famously wrote:

The heart stops briefly when someone dies
a quick pain as you hear the news, & someone passes
from your outside life to inside. Slowly the heart adjusts
to its new weight, & slowly everything continues, sanely”

Our thoughts go out to Alice’s family (to her two great poet sons, Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan), to all her family and friends.
As her dear friend, Robert Creeley, used to say, “Onward!”