An Interview with Alice Notley by DM Rice

Alice Notley has been publishing her ‘doodles’ on twitter and instagram since September of 2019. Although the poems have always retained strong visual features, crossing words and lines together, enjambing with whimsy, and integrating (literal) visual imagery for expressive purposes, there is an undeniable growth which we have noticed in her artistic method, which becomes increasingly complex as time goes on (and continues to present). We (who sometimes find ourselves scrolling aimlessly, struck by a hastily posted passage or poem which exudes literary merit, despite its ‘unauthorized’ entry into the public discourse) felt a strong connection with the hybridic poesis of Alice Notley, an iconoclastic poet who is most commonly associated with the New York School’s second iteration. You can find her work on the site here and here.

-Could you walk us through the process of making these digital pieces? I believe you mentioned
using a drawing pad of some sort? Is it part of an ongoing 'ritual' approach or is your process more spontaneous?
These digital pieces are made with an Apple pencil in Notes on an iPad. I got a new ipad last September, a mini, and they were promoting apple pencils, so I bought one not knowing anything about them or what I might do with one. I immediately started drawing and writing both, in color, and then noticing I could do a sort of three-dimensional drawing/poem therewith. But it took me a while to figure out that these works would mostly have a virtual existence. Jamey Jones is supposedly publishing some in a print journal, The Hurricane Review, and he and I went through a process of getting some into a file to him . . . Then I just kind of gave in to them being online, but I guess I could make hard-copy copies, if I were that kind of person, I mean adept. I do them partly to relax and partly to make a kind of report to my community on Twitter and Instagram, particularly since I was confined, first in New York and then in Paris. But my reports are complex and turn into poems that don’t particularly make sense – and I don’t seem to want them to. They owe a lot to Philip Whalen’s more calligraphic and less colorful works in this spontaneous doodle genre. Though I never hink of him when I do it.

-I'm interested in the notion of 'simultaneous time' that you mention in a previous interview. Poetry as Divine Experience, consolidated through human consiciousness. It seems to relate to the notion of previous generations 'surviving' in a sense, in their cultural reliquae. How does this affect your relationship to tradition? Maybe a better way to ask is, how do you conceive your relationship to literary tradition at this point in your career, and has that changed significantly over time?
It has probably changed a lot, my relationship to literary tradition, since I seem to have stopped competing with the great dead. Also with my contemporaries . . . I seem to have lost interest in charts and maps of literary movements and in any sort of rating system. But I still do like to read a poem or listen to someone read one, and be in that moment. I don’t converse with the great dead though, if that’s what you mean. Sometimes as very particular individuals, maybe. I’m reading very very old things at the moment, Latin fragments, Roman philosophy, the Havamal. The Tradition is a very very old thing, and contemporary groups and movements are just a blip in it.

-This magazine was founded, some years ago, following discussions centered around what we called 'postmodern classicism.' Myself, and other writers with whom I was associated, found ourselves continually drawn to works which engaged with, reinterpreted, displaced and inverted the forms and figures of antiquity. We thought of literature as a reflexive matter, continually mutating and challenging its very tenets of form/function. Does this gel with your own conception of what literature is and can be? How do you relfect upon the (seemingly) postmodern elements of the classical (and vice versa!)?
Works that have lasted for a thousand, several thousand years have something in them that you can’t shake. Poets are attracted to them because they’re like that, then they see if they can shake them up, even destroy them, but they never do. If something’s good it’s good. I have a poem called “When I Was Alive” that is very good and seems really fragile, I wrote it in 1977. It still holds up. Ted kept trying to mess with it, he rewrote it even. His rendering is in A Certain Slant of Sunlight and is entitled “Creature” and dedicated to me. He told me that he had tried to destroy it (his words) but he couldn’t and he seemed fascinated by this fact. Now, my poem “When I Was Alive” takes its title and rhetorical setup from a poem by I think Li Po as
translated by Pound and Fenellosa. But the metrics and stanza form are based on William Carlos Williams’ “Sappho, Be Comforted,” which is in Sapphic stanzas. So this is what the tradition is like, and time as one is like, everything and everyone is everywhere all the time. My work is still pervaded by my reading, but I don’t have to keep it in the forefront of my mind so much anymore, it’s just there.

-Finally! We noticed some continuity between your published works and what we have included thusfar on the site (references to the occult, a Tyrant, etc). Do you often find old themes/characters returning to you, or is the process more abstracted?
Sometimes what I wrote about once is still going on. Like The Tyrant. I just wrote
another work in which I kill the tyrant, but I haven’t told anyone yet.