Hello Gentle Reader,
Alice Notley is a poet whose
name immediately elicits responses such as: difficult, challenging, uncompromising,
and exacting. One might even go so far as to describe Notley as that academic
poet. One whose vision is so esoteric it can only be appreciated and understood
after it has been sufficiently autopsied by bespeckled professors in tweed
jackets with elbow patches, who through sufficient reading and dissertations
can distill the essence of the poetry into a cohesive summary with authority. In
her early career, Alice Notley was lumped together with the Second Generation
of the New York School of Poetry, famous for being the antithesis of the
Confessional Poets. Their poetry was concerned with looking towards external
stimuli rather then inwards, and their style was marked for its more cosmopolitan
flare. Notley refuted being classified neatly with this chronological time
stamp, and her poetry expanded far beyond the limitations of being considered a
poet of the Second Generation of the New York School of Poetry. As a poet,
Alice Notley is admired for her continued change of form. No two collections
are alike. There is always a sense of seeking a new beginning. Notley’s poetic
and thematic range moved form discussions of and tropes of popular culture, to scenes
of the everyday, to ruminations on literature philosophical matters. In the
later periods of her work, Alice Notley’s poetry collections became elaborate pieces
of architecture, moving away from the poems being singular constructs wrangled
into collection, and instead poetry collections became unified as a whole,
devoted to a particular subject or engrossed in a specific form. “The Descent
of Alette,” is considered a landmark piece of text, showcasing Notley’s poetic
evolution. “The Descent of Alette,” is a single epic poem framed as a feminist
critique of the epic poetry genre and tradition. As the panoramic new and selected
poetry collection “Grave of Light,” provides the most adequate summarization of
Notley’s bibliography “[. . .] work that includes intimate lyrics, experimental
diaries, traditional genres, the postmodern series, the newly invented epic,
political observation and invective, and the poem as novel,” which only shows
just the breadth in which Notley wrote and her continued innovate approach to
expanding and exploring the possibilities of poetry. It comes as no surprise to
readers and lovers of poetry, why Alice Notley was often considered one of the
greatest writers of the form.
Rest in Peace Alice Notley.
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
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