BIOGRAPHY


 Alice Notley was born in 1945 in Bisbee, Arizona. She received a B.A
 from Barnard College, in 1967, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa
 in 1969. She married the writer Ted Berrigan in 1972, with whom she had
 two sons. After Berrigan's death in 1983, she married the British poet
 Doug Oliver and relocated to Paris, France.

 Notley's writing and art responds to a broad spectrum of American
 culture. Her experiments with poetic forms and free verse owe as much to
 Gertrude Stein, Frank O'Hara, and Ted Berrigan as they do to William
 Carlos Williams. Like them, she believes that she is writing primarily
 to express her own personal tone of voice. She feels her speech is the
 voice of "the new wife, and the new mother" in her own time, but her
 first aim is to make a poem, rather than present a platform of social
 reform.

 Among the numerous collections of verse that Notley has published are
 INCIDENTALS IN THE DAY WORLD (1973), WHEN I WAS ALIVE (1980), WALTZING
 MATILDA (1981), MARGARET AND DUSTY (1985), and HOW SPRING COMES (1981)
 which received a 1982 San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award. In
 addition to her poems, Notley wrote a short autobiography entitled TELL
 ME AGAIN (1982).

 In addition to poetry, Notley has also experimented with the visual
 arts; her collection includes collages, watercolors, and sketches. Many
 of the collages are composed of everyday objects and images and are
 quite consistent with her poetry in that respect. A significant group of
 the collages are aimed at de-eroticizing images taken from pornographic
 magazines.


from:



                     University of California, San Diego
                                Geisel Library
                    Mandeville Special Collections Library


                                Register of the
                            Alice Notley Collection

                                  1969 -- 1997

                                    MSS 0319


                          This file created: 04/20/1998