Alice Notley (born November 8, 1945) is an American poet.
Notley was born in 1945 in Arizona. She grew up in California. She went to college and got a bachelors degree at Barnard College in 1967. In 1969, she got a master of fine arts degree from the the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.
She married the poet Ted Berrigan in 1972. They had two sons. They lived in Chicago until 1976. Then they moved to New York City. Berrigan died in 1983. She married British writer Douglas Oliver in 1988 and moved to Paris.
For her writing, Notley has been given the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2002, her Disobedience won the International Griffin Poetry Prize.
As a woman poet, Notley has said that one of her goals was to think about "subjects that hadn't been broached much in poetry and of how it seemed one had to disobey the past and the practices of literary males in order to talk about what was going on most literarily around one, the pregnant body, and babies for example. There were no babies in poetry then. How could that have been? What are we leaving out now?"
Books
Alice Ordered Me To Be Made (1976) Waltzing Matilda (1981) Tell Me Again (1982) autobiography The Descent of Alette (1992) Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) Disobedience (2001) Coming After (2005) essays Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970–2005 (2006) Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011) Benediction (2015) Certain Magical Acts (2016) Eurynome’s Sandals (2019) For the Ride (2020)