35th Anniversary Gala featuring Alice Notley (Archived)

SCHEDULE 

5:30 pm Reception

Cash bar, catered hors d’oeuvres, silent auction, mingling with Gala Honorees, featured artist Alice Notley, and numerous notable Milwaukeeans.  

7 pm Program

Presentation of awards to Gala Honorees; reading by Alice Notley

SPONSORS

Barbara Brown Lee in honor of Anne Kingsbury & Karl Gartung
David & Diane Buck
Lisa Corona
Anne Kingsbury & Karl Gartung
Anonymous
Peter Goldberg
Margrete & David Harvey
Paula Kiely
Debra Loewen & Daniel Grego
Mary J. Meehan
Josie Osborne & Kim Cosier
Overpass Light Brigade
Christine Prevetti
Patrick & Mary Reavey
Riverwest Currents
Jan Serr & John Shannon
Carolyn White Travanti
Wednesday Writer's Group

Become a Sponsor

Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona in 1945, and grew up in Needles, California. She received a BA from Barnard College in 1967, and an MFA in fiction and poetry from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1969. Notley was accepted by The Writers’ Workshop as a fiction writer on the basis of a short story and went to Iowa “to learn to be a novelist.” And this may have led to the development of Notley’s inter-genre approach to writing - an aesthetic that has come to be historicized as the Poet’s Novel.

Beginning with The Descent of Alette (Penguin, 1992), Notley’s work took certain architectural elements of the novel - plot and characters - and set them to her own poetic diction and cadence. Of prose fiction, Notley has said that it “limits experience too much, it believes in climaxes and endings as if life had them.” In contrast, her poetry “uses [these elements] for shapeliness and not much more.” As a practitioner of the late 20th century poetic counter epic, Notley has been referred to as “our present-day Homer” by the artist Rudy Burckhardt.

Notley traveled extensively throughout the U. S. during the ‘60s and early ‘70s, having lived in New York, Chicago, Rhode Island, and among the then-vibrant poetic community of Bolinas, California. She married poet Ted Berrigan in 1972, and the two lived together first in Chicago, and then Manhattan, becoming an indispensable part of the communities of poets and artists in both cities. Notley edited and provided the introduction for a posthumous re-publication of Berrigan’s The Sonnets (Penguin, 2000) and, along with their sons, the poets Edmund and Anselm Berrigan, edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California Press, 2007). Notley married the British poet and novelist Douglas Oliver in 1988, and the two moved to Paris in 1992.  

While she is often associated with the Second Generation New York School of poets - including Berrigan, Anne Waldman, and Ron Padgett - Notley’s writing strives for reinvention. Notley has said of her writing: “I always seem to be erasing and starting over, rather than picking up where I left off... This is probably one reason that I change form and style so much, out of a desire to find a new beginning, which is always the true beginning.” And this practice has allowed Notley to, in the words of Brian Teare, “[free] herself from any single notion of what poetry should be so that she can go ahead and write what poetry can be.”

Notley has authored dozens of books, including Culture of One (Penguin Books, 2011), Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), and Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2005 (Wesleyan, 2008). She has authored several award-winning volumes, including Mysteries of Small Houses (Penguin, 1998), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Disobedience (Penguin, 2001), recipient of the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Notley was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize earlier this year.

Recent publications include Manhattan Luck (Hearts Desire, 2014) and Benediction (Letter Machine Editions, 2015), along with a forthcoming Certain Magical Acts (Penguin, 2016). Notley continues to live in Paris, making several trips to the United States each year to give readings and lectures.