I first met Alice Notley in Wivenhoe, Essex, England - 1975, I think it was - that would be 50 years ago! And her charismatic husbands (both of them) - Ted Berrigan and Doug Oliver. Friendships, affinities, lifetime affection - lifelong companions that changed my life, defined my life, inspired my life. It was at “Ted and Alice’s” at 101 St Mark’s Place that I first dropped anchor when I arrived in New York in 1977 (and never left!). I was in awe of her extraordinary intelligence, a prose writer who now was a poet, a mother who juggled the impossible, a luminous (even then) presence, and her commitment to her poems - those remarkable early poems, (now, many of them, happily gathered by her tireless devotee Nick Sturm, into a single volume, companion to the early books, Early Works).
She was and remains a lodestar and exemplar for me as a writer. What do writers do? They write. And they read. Alice wrote and read and found time too to make supper for Anselm and Eddie. Who else could combine Japanese Death Poems and the New York Post (a must-read - Patric Walker’s daily astrology column!). Ted had that eclectic and inspiring reading range too. What blessed times they were! We were fellow poets. We were fellow Scorpios. We were living on the Lower East Side. There was time. Yes, time - really! You can scarcely imagine. It was a whole different world!
Notwithstanding all that, the Alice that was unleashed first in The Descent of Alette - the epic, mythic, torrential, jaw-dropping, sui-generis, familiar poet of later years - is really not so very different to the domestic vernacular and lyrical freshness of some of those early works. Forgive me, but I’ll always be picturing her walking towards “Marion’s and Helena’s place" - (that would be the East 4th Street apartment, yes?) - wind rustling diaphanous dresses, “when she was alive.”
The influence of Doug on the poet she subsequently morphed into was certainly strong. Of necessity, she “suffered a sea-change” (the Alice of New York, the Alice of Paris), the poems became more politicized, more urgent, but all that conversing with the dead - the transmutation of love and loss, the transmutation of tragedy, the heroic transcendence into another world - even the hectoring, if I may call it that - (I remember being stunned by her jeremiad, “Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice”) - that was a natural extension of her person, her singular person, it was always and forever present.
And what continued also, and what impressed and continues to impress me the most, was her unflinching and absolute conviction of her vocation. What do poets do? They write poems. Never for one moment in her life did she ever short-change or deny her muse. On the contrary, she gave it 24/7 permission - Speak Angel. This was a calling, a responsibility. Whitman’s afflatus, the voices, call it what you wish, were flowing through her. She had, right to the very end, an absolute commitment to that understanding.
“Meant,” she wrote, “to recognize a painting/As beautiful or a movie stunning /And to adore the finitude of words / And understand as surfaces my dreams” - giving full honor, (as I honor her now), returning the favors, to that all-forgiving, all-embracing, “Goddess That Created This Passing World.”