Attending Alice Notley’s year-long workshop conducted during the 79–80 season at the Poetry Project was one of the smartest moves I made as a young poet. I had only taken up the Sullen Art a couple of years before and Alice’s workshop went far beyond what I experienced by those conducted by well-meaning local poets on the other side of the Hudson where I resided. Those classes were typical of the period—workshopping poems, with the neo-romantic lyric poem as the model we should aim for.
Alice rejected that common period model. The goal was to develop a regular writing practice—ranging from first lines to begin a poem with to the copying of overheard conversations. Alice felt that without this writing self, you were at risk of shutting down when some sort of emotional calamity surfaced. I could get with that. Just at the start of the workshop, I had a huge blowout with my best friend (over a woman—what else?) that cut me off from a close community of fellow lefties. I felt terribly isolated and Alice’s Friday workshop was my week’s highpoint. I don’t think I missed a class.
The workshop was held at the Third Street Music School, due to the disastrous fire at St. Mark’s Church. Like all the workshops at the Project of that period, it was free and all you had to do was show up. Who was in the class? I recall Danny Krakeur, Bill Kushner, and a bunch of the poets who lived at 437 E. 12th Street—dubbed “the Poetry Fortress.”
Alice would give out in-class assignments—like a list of ten disparate words and asking her students to make a poem using the first word in the first line, the second word in the second line and so forth until one got to the end of the list. When I asked Susie Timmons what she remembered about the workshop, she vividly recalled an exercise where Alice handed out pages from a book about Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton and asked the class to make something from it.
Alice also brought in the works of poets important to her. I was so taken by her frequent reference to Philip Whalen that, when his collected poems was remaindered at Strand Books for a buck a copy, I bought ten and gave them out to my Jersey poet friends, much like a Jehovah’s Witness handing out The Watchtower (and, sadly, with similar results).
Years later, when I began to teach poetry workshops, I found myself using many of Alice’s prompts and strategies. And I was even able to bring Alice to read her work at a long-running workshop I was holding in an apartment on the Upper West Side. I could barely get through the introduction, as I was a bit overcome by the dynamics of the situation. Alice gave a great reading and patiently answered questions from my group. And when she was leaving, she told me something that let me know that I had been paying attention in that long-ago Friday night workshop; “Joel, your students seem to respect you.”