Award-winning poet Alice Notley, "who exulted in disobeying literary traditions in creating dreamlike worlds that drew from myth, motherhood and the voices of the dead," died May 19 in Paris, the New York Times reported. She was 79. Notley published more than 40 books over five decades. Her autobiographical collection, Mysteries of Small Houses, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1999 and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry in 1998. She received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation for lifetime achievement in 2015.
Notley "took traditional forms of poetry like villanelles and sonnets and laced them with experimental language that fluctuated between vernacular speech and dense lyricism," the Times wrote, adding that she "also created pictorial poetry, or calligrams, in which she contorted words into fantastical shapes." In For the Ride (2020) a calligram took the form of a winged coyote.
"The signature of her work is a restless reinvention and a distrust of groupthink that remains true to her forebear's directive: to not give a damn," David S. Wallace observed in the New Yorker in 2020.
"It's necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against... everything," Notley wrote in a 2010 essay.
She shirked the labels critics gave her: feminist, expatriate, avant-garde provocateur, the Times noted. "Each of these labels sheds a little light on Notley's work, but it's the fact of their sheer number that's most illuminating," poet Joel Brouwer wrote of her collection In the Pines (2007) in the New York Times Book Review. "This is a poet who persistently exceeds, or eludes, the sum of her associations."
Poet Ron Padgett praised Notley for her "vastness of mind.... Alice's main influence was herself and her interior life, and by interior life, I mean both her conscious waking thinking and her dream life, especially."
In the 1980s, several of Notley's loved ones died, including her husband, poet Ted Berrigan, her stepdaughter, and her brother. Notley said their voices had continued to speak to her, so she translated them into poetry. From the poem "At Night the States," written two years after her husband's death:
At night the states
I forget them or I wish I was there
in that one under the
Stars. It smells like June in this night
so sweet like air.
I may have decided that the
States are not that tired
Or I have thought so. I have
thought that.
After spending most of her childhood in California, Notley moved to New York to attend Barnard College in 1963, then pursued an MFA in fiction and poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she met Ted Berrigan. In early-1970s Chicago, she edited Chicago, an important mimeographed magazine, and helped build the avant-garde scene there. After marrying Berrigan in 1972, they settled in New York.
In the 1990s, she moved to Paris with the poet Douglas Oliver and they founded two literary magazines there, Gare du Nord and Scarlet. Notley remained in Paris until her death and continued her prolific output.
Her 2001 book, Disobedience, won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Times observed, adding that in 2023, Fonograf Editions reissued her first four collections and released The Speak Angel Series, six genre-defying books combined to form a 641-page epic.