by Hunter Larson

you who are alive, you who are dead
when I love you alone all night and
          that is what I do

(from ‘At Night the States’)

These things that you do, that you be you, a poet or whatever
              out of love
of being you, here, because you are -- that the hateful world
              only is because of
love, so love is terrible, because love isn’t love, it’s
              doing what you do.

(from ‘At the Foot at the Belt of the Raincoat’)

Alice Notley is the kind of poet that feels truly immortal. The kind of poet that you devote your whole life to reading. The kind of poet whose books you carry with you as talismans to give you some courage to face the day, the world, its brutal districts and crushing apathy. A great visionary, and spiritual guide. An iconoclast, a singular poet. A fuck you poet with exacting integrity. A poet of heartbreak, who navigated grief with a rare kind of tonal clarity. A poet who actually understood what the word ‘duende’ means. A poet of ‘deep time’. A poet dedicated to the frameworks she invented, formally daring, always intuitive, a master at ‘going on her nerve’. A poet of disobedience, perhaps the poet of disobedience. Swaggering, tender, honest, the kind of poet all the poets love, and the kind of poet your not-poet friends love too, because she was just that good. She spoke on a lot of levels. She spoke to the dead. The dead spoke through her. She was that good. Her readings were legendary. She read her poems with the kind of intensity that demands everything from both poet and audience. She was funny, she was serious, she was resilient, she could be alienating and inviting in the same poem; she could do it all. She did whatever the fuck she wanted to because, why not? And she did it with the kind of jagged wisdom that makes you understand the world better, makes you want to talk to your dead, makes you want to write a poem, which is to my mind the truest mark of a great poet. She didn’t write about her life, she wrote her life. ‘And I sing anything, as the wood woods however it can. I / write to make / the world exist’, she says -- yeah, that’s exactly it.

Alice Notley was also one of the great poets of love, a devotional poet of the truest order, a poet of love in the most intimate and the most cosmic sense, a poet of dimensional love. She once said “Love is what there is, I’m saying it’s the same as chaos, it’s the same as grace, it’s the same as serenity…I don’t see there being much else than love” i.e. love is the renovating force that drives us, a renewable vehicle of divine action, the tether that holds all human thought together. 

If today this feels like a radical gesture, it’s only because sincerity has been so obfuscated as to be functionally naive, and apathy is a stylistic tool we often use because, collectively, there’s a lot of real fear in the world. Which is why poets like Alice Notley are necessary, I think, to scrape some of the plaque off the collective heart, to formulate models of devotion outside the received forms. Dimensional love as a systematic deregulation of hierarchy, of structure; as a way of making permeable the defined boundaries of the ego. Poetry, composed of thought and the melodies of speech, presents itself as a singular methodology for achieving something like this, and I think Notley was acutely aware that she was tapping into some nebulous source beyond definition, dimensional love, or in her words, ‘love is recognition / Born in love.’

In a very manic period of my life, I used to listen to a recording of Notley reading from Songs for the Unborn Second Baby every night before I went to bed. I used to dream in her voice sometimes. No other poet has ever held me quite like that. I’ll never forget what it felt like the first time I listened to her read  ‘At Night the States’ and got my head and heart simultaneously shredded. There’s a before hearing that poem and there’s an after hearing that poem. About a year ago I observed a solar eclipse over Lake Champlain. The only book I brought was a library copy of At Night the States. I held the book close to my heart as totality locked into place and everything felt endless.

I’ve spent so many hours on Pennsound listening to Notley give readings, trying to catch her cadences, her myriad voices, really trying to understand how her poems work, how they always seem to shape themselves around whatever melody the poem itself might need in that moment. So weird, so awkward sometimes, lines just dropping off, splintering into shards of language--but I think I’ve realized it’s the idiosyncrasies of her voice, so particular, knotted, the way she modulated her speech patterns--it’s the way the poems unfurl from the body into air--so peculiarly Alice; so definitively Alice. Reading her poems gives us a chance to really listen to her, to blend our thinking voice with hers; or as she once wrote, “My voice connects the letters and words on paper; they won’t exist without it even after I’m dead. It will always be me that makes the poem work; it’s embedded in or with the fluid of my voice”, and she’s right, her body is gone but her voice is still here, it’s in every line, making the poems work. Or as Steven Zultanski writes of Notley’s voice, ‘it creates a sense of on-goingness’, an on-going riverine flow of life and language that can’t be cut off, even after its physical locus has shifted. 

Her voice was and is a vehicle for so much of what amounts to reality, existence, personhood, being. She wrote that poetry is ‘measurable, layered, and vibrates across itself, like one does’ and being composed of the liquid phenomena of speech, is able to activate the latent consciousness of the reader’s mind via a process of grafting or transposition of words. I.e. I hear Alice when I read her work, and am given access to my own reality through her poems, because language is a material that we share; a codex for modulating both our inner and outer worlds, the realities that we share and construct together.

When I first heard she’d passed it felt like a black gulf had opened up in the world, like poetry itself, the physical form of it, had shattered. I thought she’d live forever. I thought, ‘what is writing poetry like post-Alice Notley? where do we go from here?’ Simply: we go on. We keep writing, we do what Alice would have done, write a fucking poem, get back to work. There is no post-Alice Notley. There’s only the work we attend to, and the ways that she made that work possible, to be dedicated, devoutly; to be a poet above all else. 

Her influence is gravitationally felt, I imagine it as a kind of regenerative web with her in the middle -- and all of us devotees spinning lyrics at the edges, catching sparks off of the charged nexus of the work she did, and the work she continues to do from beyond. The doors she opened are open now forever. As she herself once wrote, ‘All the beloveds are / doormen forever / under the dry earth.’ 

If anyone is capable in the act of death, it’s Alice Notley; I imagine her greeting Death like an old friend, I imagine her joining the chorus of the dead, even as she is still here with us, lifeforce braided into the immortal words she left, voice forever in the air, threading through time like heat lightning. She was that good. And y’know what? She will live forever, in the collective heart of the song, in the wide eye of poetry, there she is, like an owl cutting across the moon, like a fucking legend. Say it with me: Alice Notley Forever!

Works Cited

Notley, Alice. At Night the States. Yellow Press, 1987.

Notley, Alice. At the Foot at the Belt of the Raincoat. Fivehundred Places, 2020

Notley, Alice. Coming After: Essays on Poetry. The University of Michigan Press, 2005

Notley, Alice. Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005. Wesleyan, 2006

Notley, Alice. Mysteries of Small Houses. Penguin, 1998

“What’s Love Got to Do with It? Alice Notley & Precious Okoyomon.” Camden Art Audio, camdenartaudio.libsyn.com/whats-love-got-to-do-with-it-1. Accessed 6 June 2025. 

Zultanski, Steven. Thirty-Odd Functions of Voice in the Poetry of Alice Notley. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020