Alice Notley

I hear this morning, by way of Jeffrey Pethybridge, that the poet Alice Notley has passed. I did not know her well enough to properly memorialize her, but I’m glad to have met her. Notley was among the first visiting poets I hosted in the Joynes Reading Room series at UT Austin, in 2006. It had been Hoa Nguyen who introduced me to Alice’s work, in The Descent of Alette. (Hoa and I had both worked briefly in the Texas Union—she as a building manager and I as a graphic designer. The work culture there was overly serious, almost corporate, and I think we were each delighted to find a colleague who shared a love of poetry.)

I recognized that Alette was an important and unique book, but I connected more with Disobedience, which felt immersive and forward-moving (profluent), almost like a novel. I bought many copies and gave them to students.

At Hoa’s urging, I invited Alice to come to Austin, all the way from Paris. What a gift it was to have the resources to finance such a visit.

The reading was well attended—probably the first reading in Joynes to fill the space to capacity. The night was a proof-of-concept for the reading series. It worked. People would come to this strange venue attached to a dorm on campus, and would leave transformed.

Alice must have been in town for a couple of days. I remember having lunch with her at Madam Mam’s, the Thai restaurant on Guadalupe street. I don’t recall what we talked about, but I remember enjoying her company. She also came to my apartment north of campus, where I had a small photo studio set up, where we made several portraits. This was with the Contax 645, shooting 60mm film with Visatec and Elinchrom strobes and a seamless roll paper background. This is the image she selected from our session, which she used as an author photo on her book Alma: Or the Dead Women.