General
Alice Notley, Poet Celebrated for ‘Restless Reinvention,’ Dies at 79
Once called “our present-day Homer” for her sprawling, experimental epics, she was honored with prizes and was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1999.
Alice Notley, a prizewinning poet who exalted in disobeying literary traditions in creating dreamlike worlds that drew from myth, motherhood and the voices of the dead, died on May 19 in Paris, where she had lived since the 1990s. She was 79.
Her sons, the poets Edmund and Anselm Berrigan, said she died in a hospital from a cerebral hemorrhage. She had been in treatment for ovarian cancer.
Hailed as “one of America’s greatest poets” by the Poetry Foundation, Ms. Notley published more than 40 books over five decades. Her autobiographical collection “Mysteries of Small Houses” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1999 and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry in 1998. She received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation for lifetime achievement in 2015.
“Mysteries of Small Houses,” one of Ms. Notley’s more autobiographical works, was a 1999 Pulitzer Prize finalist.Credit…Penguin
Ms. Notley took traditional forms of poetry like villanelles and sonnets and laced them with experimental language that fluctuated between vernacular speech and dense lyricism. She also created pictorial poetry, or calligrams, in which she contorted words into fantastical shapes. In her 2020 collection, “For the Ride,” one calligram took the form of a winged coyote.
“The signature of her work is a restless reinvention and a distrust of groupthink that remains true to her forebear’s directive: to not give a damn,” David S. Wallace wrote in The New Yorker in 2020.
