Athens, Ga. – Alice Notley, Paris-based poet and author of more than 20 books of poetry, will give a reading at the University of Georgia on Tuesday, April 5, at 4 p.m. in room 265 of Park Hall. Notley won the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize in 2002 for Disobedience. According to the judges’ citation, Notley’s verse “has a caustic swish, the intimacy of a vivisectionist on the contemporary body politic. . . .[Disobedience] does what only the best poetry can do in times like these, surprise, denounce, dissent.”
Notley was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. Collections of verse include Mysteries of Small Houses, The Descent of Alette, Alice Ordered Me to Be Made and Waltzing Matilda. She also experiments with the visual arts; her work includes collages, watercolors, sketches and cover art.
Notley grew up in Needles, Calif., and received a B.A. from Barnard College and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She married poet Ted Berrigan in 1972 with whom she had two sons. She edited and wrote a new introduction to the late Berrigan’s The Sonnet (Penguin, 2000). In the early 1970s she resided in New York’s Lower East Side and was an important force in the second generation of the New York School of poetry. After Berrigan’s death in 1983, she married the British poet Douglas Oliver and relocated to Paris where they co-edited the journal Gare du Nord until his death. Notley’s collages grace the covers of two of Oliver’s books, Penniless Politics and A Salvo for Africa.
Notley’s reading, sponsored by the Lanier Series in the English department, is free and open to the public. The poet will sign books after her reading.
