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a forced voice always trembles

Sara Magenheimer's avatar
Sara Magenheimer
May 23, 2025
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RIP ALICE NOTLEY:

We lost Alice Notley this week. My friend C.A. Conrad wrote of her, “Is this what it felt like recently for the catholics when the pope died? YES, I believe so.”

When Alice read at the Poetry Project she had such a presence, such conviction; the kind of strength you can’t fake, the kind that changes witnesses.

To write vital poems, Alice Notley has said, “it’s necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against ... everything.”

I found this quote in my notes.

It came from this piece she wrote on “The Poetics of Disobedience.”

Alice says many brilliant things in the essay, but here are a few that I love:

In a book that will soon be published, Mysteries Of Small Houses, I was firstly trying to realize the first person singular as fully and nakedly as possible, saying "I" in such a way as to make myself really nervous, really blowing away the gauze and making myself too scared of life and death to care what anyone thought of me or what I was going to say. Saying I in that way I tried to trace I's path through my past. In a more subsidiary way I decided to go against my own sense that certain styles and forms I'd participated in formerly might be used up, that autobiography was, that the personal-sounding I (as opposed to the fictional I) might be, against the rumor that there's no self, though I've never understood that word very well and how people use it now in any of the camps that use it pro or con--I guess I partly wrote Mysteries in order to understand it better. I came to the conclusion, in the final poem of the book, that self means 'I' and also means 'poverty,' it's what one strips down to, who you are when you've stripped down.

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