Early Work

302. Early Work. Alice Notley (2023). Here is a delightful collection of the early books and uncollected poems of Alice N, one of my favorite poets. What I like about it is that she uses New York school poetry techniques to talk about her own experience as a person. She never hides behind a style not her own, but uses certain features of that style (or set of styles) for her own ends. For example, she refers to Denby's sonnets. Now those sonnets by a man 42 years older than her are nothing like her own, but she read them in order to get where she is. The same with her influence from her husband Ted Berrigan, or Berrigan's model, Frank O'Hara. When she was writing, she says that nobody had written this kind of poem before, and she is correct. She says nobody had written about pregnancy and childbirth before 1972, and she might be correct. The NY school poets were mostly gay men, like Denby or O'Hara, or men of the other persuasion who were their disciples. Look at this cool cover art.