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Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018
Alice Notley
Three decades of talks and essays from one of the most inventive poets now writing. Alice Notley has never had any interest in the well-behaved academic essay, and this collection — spanning 1991 to 2018 — thinks the way her poems do: restless, disobedient to convention, following the truth as it comes up. She writes on other poets from Homer to Ed Dorn to Allen Ginsberg, but also on noir fiction, the first Gulf War, dreams, and the strange business of devoting a life to writing. For anyone who wants to watch a major poet reason about the art from the inside — and reinvent the lecture form while she's at it — it is a bracing, unruly gathering.
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The author
Alice Notley is one of the major living American poets — author of more than forty books and a central figure of the second-generation New York School — long resident in Paris. Her work is famously restless and formally disobedient, and these prose pieces share that spirit: she has never been interested in writing the tidy academic essay.
The book
Published by The Song Cave in 2023, it gathers talks and essays from 1991 to 2018. The range is wide — appreciations of poets from Homer and William Carlos Williams to Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, bpNichol and Douglas Oliver, alongside pieces on noir fiction, the first Gulf War, dreams, and her own practice — and the forms bend to resist lecture-hall convention.
How it reads
As a poet's poetics rather than criticism proper: thinking that models the disobedience it praises. For readers who want to understand how a genuinely inventive poet reasons about the art, it is a rich, demanding pleasure.
For more context
Notley's landmark book-length poem The Descent of Alette and her Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems; and the New York School essay tradition of Frank O'Hara and Ted Berrigan.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Alice Notley
- Publisher
- The Song Cave
- Year
- 2023
- ISBN
- 979-8-9878288-1-6
- Shelf
- Poetry
- Location
- Maine