About Alice Notley
Considered one of America’s greatest living poets.
Alice Notley (1945) was born in Bisbee, Arizona, and grew up in Needles, California. She studied at Barnard College and at the Iowa University Writers Workshop.
By the late sixties and early seventies she lived a peripatetic and outlawish life, being a radical poet in her texts and daily life. She lived in San Francisco, Bolinas, London, Essex and Chicago, until she finally settled in the Lower East, NY. There she took part in the second generation of what we know as the New York School of Poets. In 1999, Notley was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and she received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Prize and the Poetry Society of America´s Shelley Memorial. In 2007 she won the Leonore Marshal Poetry Prize and in 2015 the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
She has published more than forty books of poetry and some essays and prose. Among his titles, we highlight Alice Ordered Me to Be Made, Dr. Williams´Heiresses, At Night the States, To Say You, Close to Me and Closer…, Mysteries of Small Houses, Disobedience, Coming After, Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, Culture of One, Benediction, Fort he Ride and , rrecently, a book of more than six hundred pages, The Speak Angel Series. The translation of The Descent of Alette that we present here, one of her most radical books, is the first publication of Notley in our language.
“Alice Notley uses archaically determined poetry to tell this crucial story of the tribe. She is a master poet who returns art to its primal powers… an extraordinary feat”.
Robert Creeley
“An immense experimental and mythopoetic work… an extraordinary shamanic journey”.
Anne Waldman
Translated by Sebastián Gómez Matus
Excerpt
From the first book
“One day, I awoke” “& found myself on” “a subway, endlessly”
“I didn’t Know” “how I’d arrived there or” “who I was” “exactly”
“But I knew the train” “Knew riding it” “knew the look of”
“those about me” “I gradually became aware –” “though it seemed
as that happened” “that I’d always” “know it too – –” “that there was”
“a tyrant” “a man in charge of” “the fact” “that we were”
“below the ground” “endlessly riding” “our trains, never surfacing”
“A man who” “would make you pay” “so much” “to leave the subway”
“that you don’t” “ever ask” “how much it is” “It is, in effect,”
“all of you, & more” “Most of wich you already” “pay to
live bellow” “But he would literally” “take your soul” “Wich is
what you are” “bellow the ground” “Your soul” “your soul rides”
“this subway” “I saw” “on the subway a” “world of souls”