Bolinas, California, 1971. Courtesy of Alice Notley.

Alice Notley lives in a studio apartment up a single flight of stairs, on the Right Bank in Paris. Her front door is labeled with her name, in looped handwriting on Scotch tape. The small kitchen, which I saw used only for the making of espresso, leads into Notley’s bedroom, the bed neatly made with gray sheets. Past that is the workspace jammed with countless books, many given to her or written by friends—among them Jim Carroll, Eileen Myles, Leslie Scalapino, Allen Ginsberg, and Anne Waldman. Several books on Latin prosody were gifts over the years from Al DiPippo, Notley’s high school Latin teacher in Needles, California—the dedicatee of Certain Magical Acts (2016). There are entire shelves occupied by the works of Ted Berrigan (1934–1983), her first husband and the father of her two sons, Anselm and Edmund (also poets); and those of Douglas Oliver (1937–2000), her second husband, with whom she moved to Paris in 1992. And then there are her own books—more than forty-seven of them, not including a flood of other publications: flat-stapled mimeographed editions, illustrated pamphlets, postcards for Alternative Press.

Notley works at a little desk that held a sprawl of new work being written and forthcoming books in copyedit: Being Reflected Upon (2024), a memoir in verse, and Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks and Essays, 1991–2018 (2023). Above it hangs a small egg tempera painting of a Tuscan landscape by George Schneeman, and the drawing that Philip Guston, another friend, made for the cover of Incidentals in the Day World (1973), the collection in which she began to fashion the daily rhythms of mothering into lyric poetry. Talismans have power here: overseeing the room is a tiny statue of a silver owl, which rests on a bookshelf alongside a plastic T. rex and a painted tin Virgin of Guadalupe. Opposite her desk, Notley has set up a music stand with sheet music. She has been learning guitar, mostly folk.

Experimentation is the hallmark of Notley’s poetry; in nearly every book, a new method or idea arrives by which to channel her voice. Her work, which draws on traditional lyric forms but abandons their strictures when they fail to aid the poet, is often described as difficult. Women’s domestic lives have been a generative subject for Notley, and some of her finest poems were written in the wake of loss: “At Night the States,” soon after Berrigan’s death; “Beginning with a Stain,” inspired by the death of Ted’s daughter, Kate, in 1987; and “White Phosphorus,” an elegy for her brother, Albert, a Vietnam War veteran who died in 1988. “I am conscious of the facts of grief and poverty, and I think that no one should ever forget that they exist,” Notley told me. “No poet has the right to.” Over time, her work has been increasingly fueled by her dreams and visions, and has gravitated toward length. She has devoted herself to reinvigorating the epic—most notably with The Descent of Alette (1996), in which the heroine traverses a mythic downtown New York subway underworld, preparing for a confrontation with its male overlord, “the tyrant,” who offers her an imperious challenge: “Kill me & change the world?”

Our conversations took place across four afternoons this past August. Notley sat in a black chair in front of her bookshelves, her feet up on an ottoman, often atop that day’s international edition of the New York Times, a paper she described more than once as “terrible.” Her mode of reminiscence might be described as “memory in feeling,” to use the words of Melanie Klein—she seemed to find herself back in time and place, to experience herself elsewhen. Discussing the seasons of grief she experienced in the eighties, she paused and said, “I am crying,” and suddenly she was.

INTERVIEWER

Where do you think great poems come from? There’s an idea in psychoanalysis that one thing artists are doing in their work is sublimating.

ALICE NOTLEY

That’s ridiculous. I’ve never sublimated. I’m never sublimating. No, I think the real answer has to do with suffering, and how you perceive things after suffering. You might just freeze, but if you don’t, other worlds open to you. I started hearing the dead, for example. And I felt that, because I had some new knowledge, I had something to give people—that I had things to say that would make them feel better.

INTERVIEWER

When were you first contacted by the dead, if that’s the right expression? Are you contacting them or they you?

NOTLEY

Sometimes they contact me, and sometimes I contact them. It’s hard to say when the first time was, because you get a lot of messages in dreams, from alive people and from dead people. Most people have had this experience. In my mother’s family the men particularly have talked with the dead. At my brother’s funeral, my uncle suddenly heard my brother calling to him and he got very upset—that sort of thing. There was a time after Ted died when it seemed as if my father was getting in touch with me. In one dream, he told me to build a raft for my sons.

INTERVIEWER

And did you build a raft?

NOTLEY

I wrote The Descent of Alette pretty soon after, but I don’t think that’s what he meant. I think he just meant that I had to have a safe structure for them. And when I started writing Alette, he told me that the book shouldn’t hurt anyone, and that was really good advice. I wouldn’t have formulated it to myself that way.

INTERVIEWER

Have you often used material from dreams in your poems?

NOTLEY

I was using a lot of it in Alette. I was trying to get essential information that I couldn’t get from anywhere else. Then I hit a point in my life when most of my dream matter was conscious, actually. While I was writing Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), I realized I’d started self-hypnotizing. Doug kept talking about the self, and people in Britain would say there was no self, trying not to use the word soul. I began a project to find out what the self was, what was permanent or impermanent in myself. I was going into a trance, trying to go back to when I was four years old. The idea was that I would walk into our house on the alley in Needles, California, and sit down, and once I could remember being four there, I could remember any other part of my life I wanted. I could observe myself moving through the rooms of my life.

INTERVIEWER

Like when you visited Morocco at twenty-three.

NOTLEY

Yes, and I did write a poem about that. Or I might think, I have to remember Ted’s death now. But first I had to go back to when I was four.