Alice Notley

A poetic collage explores the realities of war veterans, strangers, the mentally disturbed, and the homeless as witnesses to the passing of the world

The Descent of Alette

A bold and strikingly original new work from one of America's greatest living poets Alice Notley is considered by many to be among the most outstanding of living American poets. Notley's work has always been highly narrative, and her new book mixes short lyrics with long, expansive lines of poetry that often take the form of prose sentences, in an effort "to change writing completely." The title piece, a folksong-like lament, makes a unified tale out of many stories of many people; the middle section, "The Black Trailor," is a compilation of noir fictions and reflections; while the shorter poems of "Hemostatic" range from tough lyrics to sung dramas. Full of curative power, music, and the possibility of transformation, In the Pines is a genre- bending book from one of our most innovative writers.

In the Pines

An important new work of poetry from Alice Notley, winner of the 2015 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize Alice Notley has become one of the most highly regarded figures in American poetry, a master of the visionary mode acclaimed for genre-bending book-length poems of great ambition and adventurousness. Her newest work sets out to explore the world and its difficulties, from the recent economic crisis and climate change to the sorrow of violence and the disappointment of democracy or any other political system. Notley channels these themes in a mix of several longer poems - one is a kind of spy novella in which the author is discovered to be a secret agent of the dead, another an extended message found in a manuscript in a future defunct world - with some unique shorter pieces. Varying formally between long expansive lines, a mysteriously cohering sequence in meters reminiscent of ancient Latin, a narration with a postmodern broken surface, and the occasional sonnet, these are grand poems, inviting the reader to be grand enough to survive, spiritually, a planet's ruin.

Certain Magical Acts

Alice Notley has earned a reputation as one of the most challenging and engaging radical female poets at work today. Her last collection, Mysteries of Small Houses, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Structured as a long series of interconnected poems in which one of the main elements is an ongoing dialogue with a seedy detective, Disobedience sets out to explore the visible as well as the unconscious. These poems, composed during a fifteen-month period, also deal with being a woman in France, with turning fifty, and with being a poet, and thus seemingly despised or at least ignored.

Disobedience

In a series of poems set in the American Southwest, the Pulitzer Prize-finalist author offers an array of verse based on a homeless woman who lives in her hometown's dump.

Culture of One

A major new book-length visionary poem from a writer "whose poems are among the major astonishments of contemporary poetry" (Robert Polito, the Poetry Foundation) Alice Notley has become one of the most highly regarded figures in American poetry, a master of the visionary mode acclaimed for genre-bending, book-length poems of great ambition and adventurousness. Her newest book, For the Ride, is another such work. The protagonist, "One," is suddenly within the glyph, whose walls project scenes One can enter, and One does so. Other beings begin to materialize, and it seems like they (and One) are all survivors of a global disaster. They board a ship to flee to another dimension; they decide what they must save on this Ark are words, and they gather together as many as are deemed fit to save. They "sail" and meanwhile begin to change the language they are speaking, before disembarking at an abandoned future city.

For the Ride

A collection of poems addresses the topics of the political turbulence, the American character, womanhood, love, and aging

Mysteries of Small Houses

Ephemeral and anarchic, Words and Drawings is the first collection of artwork by famed poet, critic and artist Alice Notley. These sketches, drawn on an iPad and first serialized on Notley’s Twitter feed, are a fascinating window into an evolving practice, collages of flowers and poetry, the white space of digital creation and overlaid colors erupting from the page. They defy containment and category, much like their creator—each a second in a day, an afternoon or evening in Paris, a thought so transient it can only exist in the medium of social media. With this collection, one of America’s most influential living poets and artists continues to prove her worthiness of that title.

Runes and Chords

Alice Notley vividly reconstructs the mysteries, longings, and emotions of her past in this brilliant new collection of poems that charts her growth from young girl to young woman to accomplished artist. In this volume, memories of her childhood in the California desert spring to life through evocative renderings of the American landscape, circa 1950. Likewise, her coming of age as a poet in the turbulent sixties is evoked through the era's angry, creative energy. As she looks backward with the perspective that time and age allows, Notley ably captures the immediacy of youth's passion while offering her own dry-eyed interpretations of the events of a life lived close to the bone. Like the colorful collages she assembles from paper and other found materials, Notley erects structures of image and feeling to house the memories that swirl around her in the present.In their feverish, intelligent renderings of moments both precise and ephemeral, Notley's poems manage to mirror and transcend the times they evoke. Her profound tributes to the stages of her life and to the identities she has assumed—child, youth, lover, poet, wife, mother, friend, and widow—are remarkable for their insight and wisdom, and for the courage of their unblinking gaze.

Poems

Poetry. Women's Studies. More than twenty years in the writing, BENEDICTION is Alice Notley's single long poem of mourning, desire, loss, and vitality.

Benediction

Poems 1975

Alice Ordered Me to Be Made

(The Language of Heaven) and Desamere

Close to Me & Closer

Selected poems from a visionary feminist poet.

New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005

Grave of Light

Poetry. "This is an immense book, one in which Notley takes language, as she has it, 'from hearsay to heresy' by the speed and awe of an unwavering attention to the seams, seems and semes of words and sentences. This is the work of an iconoclast, a semioclast, where semantics become seme-antics, and the byz-antics and -antiques from Christianity to Christine are molten down & recast into 21st Century mental shapes in the red-hot heart-red retort of a present day alchemist of mind. Alice Notley has the uncanny ability to go from the everyday mundane to the psycho-cosmic in one warp-speed stutter or typo-graphical stumble, at what Andre Breton called 'la vitesse grand V.' This is writing of the highest order"--Pierre Joris.

Reason and Other Women

Poetry. NEGATIVITY'S KISS is a noir poem, with characters and a story, violence, cops, everything one likes about the crime novel, minus its robotic, skippable detail. Plus language that rocks. However the poet doesn't know how to be straight enough to just do it--tone and genre--so this is pretty crooked. Satirical and feral, written at the time of Hurricane Katrina.

Negativity's Kiss

Richard Brautigan

Lewis Warsh

Bill Berkson

Ted Berrigan

Robert Creeley

Michael Bond

Jim Carroll

Aram Saroyan

Tom Clark

Anne Waldman

Joe Brainard

Bill Brown

Philip Whalen

Stephen Ratcliffe

Diane Di Prima

John Thorpe

David Meltzer

Lewis MacAdams

Phoebe MacAdams

Joel Weishaus

Arthur Okamura

Max Crosley

Bobbie Louise Hawkins

Duncan Mc Naughton

Jim Brodey

Ebbe Borregaard

Joanne Kyger

John Doss

Gailyn Saroyan

Keith Lampe

Lawrence Kearney

Charlie Vermont

Poetry. California Interest. Afterword by Lytle Shaw. The Song Cave presents an expanded edition of the long out of print City Lights Books classic ON THE MESA: AN ANTHOLOGY OF BOLINAS WRITING in celebration of its 50th anniversary. This is a gathering of poets, writers and artists living on or around the mesa in Bolinas, California. Not so much a school of thought as a meeting of those who happened to be at this geographical location at this wobbly point in time, several divergent movements in American poetry (Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance, Beat, and New York School poets) came together with new Western and mystic elements at the unpaved crossroads of Bolinas. Featuring work by: Gordin Bladwin, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Michael Bond, Ebbe Borregaard, Joe Brainard, Richard Brautigan, Jim Brodey, Bill Brown, Jim Carroll, Tom Clark, Robert Creeley, Max Crosley, Diane Di Prima, John Doss, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Lawrence Kearney, Joanne Kyger, Keith Lampe, Lewis Macadams, Phoebe Macadams, Duncan MC Naughton, David Meltzer, Alice Notley, Arthur Okamura, Stephen Ratcliffe, Aram Saroyan, Gailyn Saroyan, John Thorpe, Charlie Vermont, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Joel Weishaus, and Philip Whalen.

Alice Notley

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