Alice Notley Read Bio Collapse
Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California in the Mojave Desert. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, and of essays and talks on poetry, and has edited and coedited books by Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver. She is the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Griffin Prize, the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, and the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Prize, a lifetime achievement award. Notley may be most widely known for her epic poem The Descent of Alette. Recent books include Eurynome’s Sandals, Certain Magical Acts, Benediction, and For the Ride. Notley is also a collagist, cover artist, and maker of hybrid art objects. An art book, Runes and Chords, was published in 2023.
# 144
The entire mystery of the universe was contained in the poetics and the fact that you can’t ever find the stress. You can’t locate it exactly because it’s this blank place. I think that when you write a poem, you actually enter a blank space. And when you’re writing, you are actually feeling nothing. What the poetry is about is not taking place. Some blank thing is happening. And then you define it by before and after. There’s some kind of bleeding between before and after your entry into the blank space.
