“I Don’t See How I Could’ve Done All the Work I Have Done Without Having Lived That Way”
Understanding plague as a social epidemic situates Alice Notley’s correspondence as a performance of embodied pragmatism, a term I use to emphasize how bodily experience inflects philosophical action. By embodiment, I draw on Judith Butler’s account of gendered performance as an incorporation of heterosexuality, and, as intersectional theorists have made clear, such performances are co-constituted with class, race, national and cultural positioning, age, and a variety of forms of abilities and disabilities. In bodily acts manifesting gendered positionality, other social positions are carried along in such a way that it becomes impossible to disentangle a universally present strand of gender. By pragmatism, I follow Richard Rorty in claiming that since humans are fallible, as a species we can never prove that our beliefs are true; instead, only that they meet standards of acceptance endorsed, for the time being, by our community. Generally, then, poets are working as pragmatist and exhibit a freedom to propose new “vocabularies,” tested not against the nature of reality but by how they enable artists to achieve their current goals, formulate better ones, and become better at being human. Seen together, these two frameworks illuminate how Notley’s suffering illnesses transform into survival via enduring writing practices.
Born on November 8, 1945, and died on May 19, 2025 at 8:45 p.m., Notley produced a body of work whose letters and poems consistently demonstrate radical formal invention. In a 2024 interview, Notley observes, “What we need to do is explain to people that difficulty isn’t difficult” (The Paris Review 176). While this article’s broadest concern is to trace this young poet’s perspective on the quotidian to light through a close reading of a selection of letters sourced from the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, I will also attempt to show how they function specifically in conversation with Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and John Dewey’s Art as Experience. All of this is for interested readers who want to better understand her life when she was developing her poetic voice. What’s more, Notley’s correspondence enacts a pragmatism that, in part, departs from Jacques Lacan’s notion that individual subjects are what they are in and through the mediation of the socio-linguistic arrangements and constellations of the register of the Symbolic. Her letters function as compositional methods that reorient post-1970 experimental poetics in a paroxysm of survival. This article clarifies Notley as clairaudient with herself, as documented by her early correspondences all the way up until 2024, when she confirmed the very subject matter of her letters in an interview with Hannah Zeavin for The Paris Review. This article takes letters as its formal concern. While illness names a range of bodily, psychic, and social conditions in this article, the letters remain its primary formal concern. Illness operates as a secondary force that a selection of Notley’s letters organize and mediate through their distinctive temporal and relational structures.
To situate Notley’s epistolary practice within the following theorists’ frames helps reveal how the letters function as sites where embodied vulnerability, aesthetic experience, and communal voice are negotiated under conditions of illness. Deweyan aesthetics, generally defined as emphasizing an importance of rhythm to the psychic lives, both in perception and in expression as the spirit of a creator tends to express its most intimate states, especially emotion, in rhythmic form. To put it simply, those moments when action, sensation, memory, and environment cohere into a felt, meaningful whole, and art is simply the most deliberate form of this ordinary human capacity; Sontag’s critique of metaphor and how for Notley, illness represents a prompt for relations with other people rather than determining illness as an identity: Notley’s doing it and I am showing it; Mladen Dolar’s theory of voice, and Byung-Chul Han’s reinterpretation of “eros” is to recognize that her letters construct a lived theory of how art is made under duress. They expose the ways in which illness becomes a mode of knowledge, how vulnerability becomes a method, and how friendship becomes an archive of aesthetic thought.
Presumptions I put forward run the risk of being anachronistic (a disease of presentism bias). I therefore acknowledge my own limits from the beginning as both acceptable and necessary; therewith, I present an ever expansive rhizomic adventure of past theories to help howl into the present. I believe our literary history can, in part, be preserved through active intervention: through close reading of letters that are often difficult to contextualize and that resist attempts to make sense of their contributions across time. What’s more, the use of affect in Notley’s letters is apparent, and this is fascinating how her stories might be passed down in the apocrypha and lore surrounding “The New York School,” a loose definition of post-war poets known for a witty, talkative ease that gathers urban life, pop-cultural ephemera, and a bright irony into spontaneous verse, with influences running through Surrealism and Abstract Expressionist that gesture rather than call somber attentions of Confessional poetry, a community of poets where communication itself, including, phone calls, letters, readings, enacted what Frank O’Hara satirically outlined in “On Personism: A Manifesto.” These exchanges were essential to the rhythms and arc of Alice Notley’s writing life. The deliberate refraction, and at times a push toward abstraction, of autobiographical material reveals that Notley stands well outside post-confessional and anecdotal modes; she eschews the merely personal as the Troubadours eschewed Rome.
The most distinguishing characteristic of the letters are their profound poise and naturalness, contributing to a sense of easy permanence. While examining her letters, one is not aware of the act of composing; rather, as though the themes, through some agency of the letters’ own, reproduced themselves. Firstly, I will present how her sharply selective yet tender treatment of location, community, and self achieves a level of authority not found in her novel works. Effectively, it is the measure of Notley’s genius to recognize primordial forms of an interior life and to present them with a simplicity that depends on her own informing interests of the everyday. Secondly, the flavor of the interiority which she adopts as a muse lends itself neatly to the act of “voicing,” which I will discuss below. Thirdly, Han’s views on the “Other” will pair well with Dewey’s to offer fresh insight to love as experience.
While I avoid presenting a comparatively framed argument, occasionally her letters stage an act of voicing that brings the threshold, by which I mean established writers as creative guides, into view, both from Notley’s perspective and that of her recipients. My scope includes Lewis Warsh (four letters) and Philip Whalen (two letters), to whom she wrote consistently from 1969 to 1978. These letters constitute a mode of associative living, the shaping of her life in relation to others where meanings arise through shared experience, co-creation, and the continual negotiation of her place. The documented moments are recurrently savored with directed intensity for what has happened before, in part, and with the whole that is to come. Notley’s embodied pragmatist approach to letter writing is that she imbues in her language a heightened animation for some of the smallest gestures. Indeed, as Dewey argues against a dualistic separation, positing that perception and emotion are unified in art, “[…] as concrete proof that man is capable of restoring consciously, and thus on the plane of meaning, the union of sense, need, impulse, and action characteristic of the live creature” (31). I refer specifically to his rejection of the divide between art and ordinary lived experience, a distinction Notley collapses as her letters merge creative practice with the daily labor of survival. If one cannot disentangle the poet from the letters, then one cannot view the correspondence apart from the poet’s worldview either.
In these acts, Notley performs a politics of interdependence amid any number of psychic, distant, or physical breakdowns. Importantly, Notley’s letters fit into Dewey’s claim that, “Aesthetic experience of things [...] are the fruits of a new vision [...] that there is esthetic form only when the object fits into a larger experience” and “restores continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience” (2). What Dewey means here is an advocation for a heightened way of moving through the ordinary, and as Aristotle said, “to reinvigorate moribund collective ideas” (Martha Nussbaum, 52) further clarifies how her correspondence throughout illness as a prompt for relations, becomes a site of renewal. All orients her correspondence a performance site where illness, art, and community converge to bulge the limits of aesthetic philosophy. Because letters are always a process: improvisational and contingent, they stage sequencings of thoughts and feelings and they dramatize what I call a “poetics of survival” in a manner that her formally composed poems do not always perform.
From an undated letter to Warsh from the autumn of 1969: “Have no job, little money, don’t know where I’ll be next. [...] I’m very thin these days [...] Already miss downtown [...] I’d rather be this way than empty, the way I was about 2 years ago, but don’t dig too much the suicidal type feelings. & Scorpio possessiveness & jealousy, worst things in the world!” (letter 1). The moment condenses into a layered snapshot, and although some might read the metaphor of loneliness and uncertainty in this letter as evidence that, for Notley, it was just a moment of personal difficulty, I see it as a chronic reoccurrence where she will consistently, over the next decades, write to Warsh in a way that demonstrates economic and bodily precarity. This 1969 letter demonstrates that Notley’s earliest epistolary voice emerges spatial dislocation, bodily depletion, and emotional volatility rendered in a compressed, telegraphic idiom. The letter’s fractured syntax and alternating tonal registers show a subject whose identity forms in relation to another’s listening. The letter exemplifies her personal networks of care, while the “I” is already relational, contingent, and distributed.
The letter also deepens Notley’s inherent dedication to producing meaningful textual work. In the same letter she includes the Reading List, a bibliography, she will use towards her MFA degree. She was just 24 when she wrote that letter, and like so many other young artists could have described herself as gifted, beautiful, and poor. But poverty is not the end of the world when one is 24; like everyone else, she set about making a career for herself. Here the close-reading stakes shift: in effect, the performance bibliography Notley achieves is latent with desire for lists and order, and to create a texture to accommodate the eros inherent in research. Indeed, literary movements survive primarily in the ruins of the texts they leave behind rather than in the unified literary histories that scholars create for them after the fact.
If, as Mladen Dolar argues, voice constitutes the social and psychic axis of subjectivity, then his framework illuminates how Notley’s letters transmute private experiences of illness into a communal, circulating vocal presence. He opines, “We are social beings by the voice and through the voice; it seems that the voice stands at the axis of our social bonds, and that voices are the texture of the social, as the intimate kernel of subjectivity” (A Voice and Nothing More, 14). If Notley can be said to write on paper and to communicate telepathically alike, as demonstrated in a letter to Whalen, “I’ve been writing you telepathic letters for a few months, so thought I’d just write one down on paper tonight” (February 22, 1978) it is then the axis Dolar has described. I further this notion by claiming that there is more at stake, including community, spiritual, and physical survival. Her letters go about opening a space of relative freedom in which to create new identities: this is a luxury of friendship Notley indulges.
My position is that the voice comes from a zone of intersectional subjectivity of a community, where the self will naturally and mechanically tune into frequencies of the recipient on the other side of the page. I use “intersectional subjectivity” here to describe the way Notley’s self is shaped simultaneously by gendered expectations, economic uncertainty, and the embodied pressures of illness, rather than to open the broader field of intersectionality, as articulated by the Combahee River Collective (1977). On the other hand, in the act of listening, the voice of Notley’s lyrical letter establishes itself most fully as an ethical medium, one that allows her to navigate her sense of self within lived community (outside the letters), while negotiating the pressures of invisible illnesses such as loneliness and viral infection, which I discuss later. By calling voice an “ethical medium,” I mean that Notley’s address performs care: her sense of self becomes legible only through the responsibility, vulnerability, and relational dependence that writing to another person requires. In this way, care is not supplemental to her correspondence but functions as the very condition through which its ethics take shape. Her inwardness is ontological and echoes what Henry Corbin called a “vertical” orientation of the self. In Man of Light, Corbin writes about the importance of orientation, directing us toward the “cosmic north.” He makes clear again and again that this journey is not horizontal, linear, or temporal, but vertical. It is realized through the embodiment of a particular “mode of presence” (2). In other words, the way forward is actually toward the center of one’s innermost being. Notley’s journey in letters embodies an inward or metaphysical center rather than a linear narrative of illness.
When private experience is recounted and exposes the limits of purely individual identity, the need for a relational theory of voice emerges. Dolar opines we need an account of voice that understands its relation to the “axis of social bonds.” Notley’s “I” makes for a montage of selves and experiences: “We run a sort of salon where hordes of young poets hang out between 1 & 10 P.M. & get Ted to tell them everything & me to be me & then they give us a few dollars for dinner & diapers” (February 22, 1978 to Whalen). Here, and through Dolar’s reasoning, “be me” becomes a performative request and reveals that Notley’s subjectivity depends upon being received, recognized, and momentarily inhabited by others. Her identity is enacted through co-voicing: a self sustained by the social resonances of those who gather to listen in the Butlerian sense that we only know ourselves through relational addresses of others. To be sure, whatever politics Notley has around her gender they are performing as evidenced through her relationships. This is a material analysis of illness as relational and not affective.
As Michelle de Montag writes, “friendship feeds on communication having no other model than itself.” (Anne Dewey and Rifkin, 5-6). The effect produced by a writer is immediate, as if a generation were waiting to be written. We can track histories remaining hidden in a traditional framework by sectioning off a small area in a new way by questioning time’s relevance to research into both ephemera and novel works by poets who maintain friendships, personal and public. Intimate correspondences with each throughout decades benefit from such an approach. Friendships develop a fuller range of social constellations as potential sources of self-definition and allow readers to note the dialectics laboring through the imperfect medium of Notley-as-poet letters and their inherent range of voices. I believe Dewey’s estimations on art as it affects individuals as readers, as makers, and how both sets experience moments of art together.
Against readings that isolate Notley within the post-confessional and/or New York School lineage, my approach defines her correspondence as a rhythmic endurance informed by the record of a creative life under constraint. Internal alterity is critical to the development of both individual and collective identities. The selection of letters are aurally enhanced and tangibly descriptive. They transcend context by multiplying meaning within a tradition that appropriates and subverts written language. My hopes are that this analysis redefines “plague literature” not as symptom, sarcasm, or allegory; instead, as a practice of making meaning communal by demonstrating how consistent literary creation emerges most candidly under the background pressures of disease when someone goes without financial stability. It seems fair enough to state that identity emerges from subjective expression of who one is through speech and action, and in this case, writing letters, as well as from the objective meaning assigned to those acts as reified by others.
Ultimately, I hope this form of critical biography through letters will reach a point at which the letters reveal what filmmaker and philosopher Andrei Tarkovsky indicated: “[...] the concentration is on its [the truth’s] affective function rather than on the intellectual formulae of poetic-shots, [so that] it is possible for an audience to relate to that conception in the light of individual experience” (Sculpting in Time, 184). To lend color to this idea, I’ll paraphrase Maurice Merleau-Ponty: if meaning occurs in-between things, one must look for the hidden elements that constitute connective tissues, and these I take to be letters. I am insisting upon the connection between experimental forms of writing and experimental forms of living and I do that because poetry as act does that to poets. This approach will allow me to move fluidly between theory and practice, contributing to ongoing conversations about the relationship between life, self, and art in communities.
Blurred genre projects, such as Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickson and others based on archival research and historical contextualization yield a shifting field of inquiry. For contemporary scholar, Stephen Voyce, “When texts combine media, genres, and languages, they map convergences between the communities who create, use, circulate, and interpret these artefacts. In a word, they make communities of these objects.” (Poetic Communities, 258). By investigating as Voyce defines blurred genre, a particularly neat psychic excavation of American unease with its brutal history in the latter part of the 20th century exposes the historical and affective pressures embedded in the letters’ making. It is through the process of itemizing that the voice of the letter is carried out spatially and able to register that which is removed from the site of utterance. This is a lyric poetry that has a capacity to address what Charles Olson called “The Distances,” but without departing from the exploration of voice that is its primary medium. This means that the voice of Notley’s letters has a determinate sense of what occupies its periphery. Her letters owe partly to the fact that they communicate a sense of space, and they register both the compromised civic environment and the fraught periphery that are the conditions of her contemporary utterance. Some further aspects of the writing require the following considerations: fragility of the utterance and the articulation of their shared subjectivity. To stutter or stammer or to repeat, as Notley is wont to do in her at-times far-ranging thematics in letters, is to then experience a series of breaks against the typical language of metaphor. The stuttering voice is not always readily able to establish its fluency, and this uneven tension I believe is due to forms of illness such as Hepatitis C (undiagnosed), loneliness, economic precarity, and a steadfast dedication to her craft of being a poet.
To adopt Notley’s perspective, let us occupy the mindset of a life writer. By ignoring audience in the conventional sense, we return to it in another sense. And what I personally take from pedagogue and psychologist Lev Vygotsky and the Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin is the notion that audience is not really out there at all but is in fact “always already,” to use that postconstructuralist mannerism, inside a writer’s interiorized world. That a specific audience exists in the conflicting languages of others: friends, teachers, peers, prospective readers, whomever, writers have to negotiate what not to write, and what pedagogue John Trimbur stakes, “that we do negotiate when we write whether we’re aware of it or not. The audience we’ve got to satisfy in order to feel good about our writing is as much in the past as in the present or future. But we experience it as ourselves.” (214). Letters, then, serve as a means for Notley to dialogue with ideas, to create a sensation in an intended audience albeit in her mind, but certainly an intimate of some kind, to leave an impression. Transnational Historian Pierre Yves-Saunier works with correspondence as, “[…] an aegis because this idea of conversation helps us to focus on relations as a process of dedication to a common goal,” (83).
Where the private meets the public, that’s where the attention to writing and craft exists. When a writer feels comfortable to explore the interior life of the imagination, which is where those two before-named polarities cross, that’s where a chiasma happens and the voice of a piece performs. This dialogic interaction benefits metalinguistic awareness at best; at the least, the composition experience will provide much fodder for a writer to reflect in their novel works. Letters thus become artifacts. An artifact is one way to examine the unedited mind and its ambition; in this case, an artifact of the poet’s labyrinth as an ever enlarging a definition of personhood. As Janet Altman notes, the letter operates as, “a reflection of self, or the self’s relations” (67), underscoring value that letters bring into a space of literary self-construction. Notley’s letters ought to be treated not as secondary biographical context, but as indistinguishable elements of the continuous textual flux. These are exemplary letters of poetry in their subject matter, offering unique perspectives relative to the protagonists in the search for one’s identity, a world of interiority. In essence, it is a conversation on how a reading of poets’ correspondence provides a new way of considering an author. There abounds much existing scholarship about letters as a separate genre of writing, such as “the conceit” of letters (Jack Spicer’s introduction by Lorca, for example) and other contemporary postwar poets.
This article claims that Notley’s epistolary voice becomes a site of survival, aesthetic labor, and communal interdependence. This reorients American illness writings by shifting attention from metaphor to practice, and from the solitary lyric “I” to distributed networks of care. The letters present an address to a reader, and this address interpolates us into a position as seer and knower in relation to what is being written. This does not deny or replace her novel works, but it does present a perspective on various elements of the letter and the way events are documented. In essence, letters are the stage for an eventual poem to perform. Notley, I believe, is trying to locate the right language that will best bring keen observations to light while being careful to forego naming them too heavy-handedly and thereby flattening all excitement inherent in nuance. In this article, I risk doing this very thing, but have tried to stay faithful to the Notleyan spirit by leaving room for unanswered questions while endeavoring to distill and clarify the nature of the relationship between human beings, identity, and art as envisioned by Notley. I hope to contribute to the dominant genealogies that place Notley solely within post-confessional and/or New York School traditions.
She is very much a child of the “New York School,” even though she was a Westerner (born in Arizona and raised in California) and spent a minimal amount of time there comparatively to her home in Paris, France. Reading a selection of her correspondence through the key ideas of the theorists named above allows both critical frameworks to shift: Dewey’s model of aesthetic experience as the unity of perception and action becomes re-embodied through Notley’s materially grounded, feminized, and affective practice of writing through illness, while Sontag’s critique of how metaphors distort our understanding of disease extends into the lived, everyday labor of language as a mode of recovery.
Poverty and addiction are shared symptoms of a cultural “plague.” In these intimate correspondent relations and the poetry that sustained them, readers find spaces of creative exchange, often more open to the surprises of difference and more revealing of the gendered conditions of poetic production. To read these dynamics in purely individual biographical terms would be to miss the full range of their significance. Community is central to their function. Friendships provide spaces for intersubjectivity and becoming through the discovery of common ground. The desire for a friend is often bound up in Notley’s identity, which forages dynamics of the relationship and goes unchecked by conventions of status, such as married or in love, or other commonplace institutional structures like mentorship.
“Letters Are So Nothing When You’re Not a Talking Person” (The Paris Review)
The usual difficulties of relocating one’s life must have compounded the sense of dislocation from community Notley experienced throughout her life. Visits from American poets were infrequent when Notley was living in England during the 1970s. Whalen’s letters from across the Atlantic at this time provided some of this attention, but more importantly, they maintained a sense of connection to the community Notley and her family left behind. Gossip provided a conduit to her poetic home, and their exchanges extended its literary conversation and energy. This manifests as the web of associations that provide a sense of contemporaneous family of voices, to return to Dolar’s idea of voice as a social act. One of facilitation, is in fact, the role Notley conceived for Whalen in her fantastical genealogy of American poetic innovation. In Dr. Williams’ Heiresses, she dubs him one of the two “male-females” (1) of his generation and thus in a position to usher women poetry into existence. Indeed, their correspondence was maintained even when she returned to the United States of America.
Just as the bardic tradition imagines the poet speaking from every moment of history, Notley’s perspective treats the self as a seer whose consciousness moves through multiple places, times, and events within the collective experience. This temporal permeability becomes legible in her correspondence with Philip Whalen, whose life was characterized by his deep integration of poetry and Zen practice, which influenced both his literary work and his spiritual teachings, and who, after becoming an ordained priest in 1973 and eventually receiving the dharma name “Zenshin Ryufu,” served as the abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center in San Francisco and was considered a patriarch of the Western Zen lineage. It is within this all-time continuum and cross-disciplinary space (spirituality, scientific health fact) of address that in her March 25, 1974 letter, when Notley was living in England, she writes to the monk: “Your poems are as if my psychiatrist, and I want to talk to you.” She also confesses a diagnosis with “postpueral depression.” Notley continues: “All of this jargony in-a-box knowledge was comforting—I’m glad a lot of other ladies feel as horrible as me—but I’m totally having it, these thoughts and feelings, and it doesn’t feel like something vaguely normal called postpueral depression it feels like spiritual and moral crisis.”
The letter stages a moment where the language of diagnosis collapses under the reality of her lived experience. Notley in this moment registers a violent split between bodily crisis and the cognitive, or “spiritual” crisis she insists it really is. This is the conceptual topography Sontag attempts to clear when she insists, “The most truthful way of regarding illness is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking,” (3). Notley’s paroxysms, however, exceed diagnostic vocabulary by exposing inadequacy of clinical diagnosis and metaphoric frameworks of understanding. Rene Descartes’ offers an historical articulation of the very dualism the letter contradicts, “it is certain that I am truly distinct from my body, and I can exist without it.” (Descartes, 235). Notley’s crisis writes against separating the systems. Retroactively, her statement clarifies the letter’s attempts of describing suffering; rather, epistemic struggle, “Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.” (The Paris Review, 188). Sontag notes that certain illnesses “invite the imaginative elaboration of feelings that cannot otherwise be owned” (59), and Notley’s letter to her “male-female” recipient shows how crisis and having recently given birth, crystallize into a language of feminine interiority that both conceals and reveals her need for community. Richard Pirier’s take includes, “Reading must be actively synchronized with the generative energies of writing itself. It is not enough to understand what is being said, since this is always less than what is being expressed.” (Poetry and Pragmatism, 176). Poirier believes that poetry expresses more than it says. In other words, his claim underscores again what is happening here: Notley’s language performs the very instability it describes and thus consecrates a site where body, mind, communal voice intersect.
In continuation of the same letter: “I was scared to go in the kitchen because the knife lived there! and so on, you can imagine” transforms an ordinary moment of bodily hesitation into a metaphorical eruption in which fear animates the domestic interior as a site of psychic danger. Sontag argues that illness metaphors materialize, “Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance” (58). The knife’s surprising function is as an internalized and gendered one: a latent wound she anticipates within herself. This particular letter stages intimacy as a terrain where vulnerability becomes both perceptible and linguistically productive. The precise, almost offhand phrasing, exposes how Notley’s language turns fear into a creative force, sharpening perception and catalyzing expression the moment the safety of the body feels compromised. Because Sontag exposes how illness becomes a cultural metaphor that obscures the lived body, her critique sharpens the stakes of Notley’s insistence on crisis as linguistic and material reality. Notley’s “knife” similarly externalizes an inner crisis, allowing the letter to perform the emotional labor of wanting to be able to name an illness in a way that does not require imported quotation marks: it is for what cannot otherwise be directly articulated.
Returning to the first letter presented in this article, it additionally functions as evidence for the structural “plague” of poverty, exposure, vulnerability. When she writes, “I guess my theory... is that you only have to know how to say a few simple sentences like I like it or I can use it, but I think these people want me to say a lot of sentences. If I failed would you still like me?” she expresses almost inadvertently a theory of value grounded in relational judgment in that it expresses a pragmatist epistemology how success, in her view, is explicitly tied to value over abstraction, while revealing how cognition is embedded in community, approval, anxiety, and affection. The letter’s deixis is the essence of her language. The signs work as an address that insists upon a response. While maybe banal, her question is meaningful in that the reader is taken through a series of subjective transitions and meaning comes across through her play between “me” and “you” as positions produced by an address.
There is an egoic component, certainly, to which the signifiers of deixis like “her” “there” “my” are keyed to the personal, the subject of being herself. Her body’s preoccupation in space and with the terms under which it does so. Diagnostic power is revealed: again, Notley’s self-worth is a relationally structured one that adds deep dimensions to the public image of Notley as “wife-poet” by exposing the cost of care as a poetic discipline, to hold others up, turns into material and psychic exhaustion. Letters could therefore be the truest form of gaining meaningful and fraught insights into a poet’s ways of living and producing. Additionally, this particular letter confirms a chronic rhythm of loneliness she’d endure for nearly her entire life, as shown by the 2024 interview in which reflections of grief, survival, and the moral dimensions of suffering as the ground of poetry, were explicitly discussed.
“I want all my vibrations to be coming off the paper, like real me: If it’s in the world it must all be in me, too . . .”
Disclosures of shaping forces in any individual’s life are still with us. It calls up the whole population of humanity and of the living to live in us. A brief example demonstrates how Notley’s correspondence performs this improvisational sequencing of voice, intimacy, and communal labor. In an undated letter, though written sometime between 1974 and 1980, to Whalen, she writes: “Ted finds himself unable to write to you on account of being constantly shell-shocked from teaching school and living in Chicago; so I am pleased to do so. Oh god Chicago. I had too much beer.” Her abrupt tonal shifts include moving from Ted’s “exhaustion” (quotations mine), to her assumption of his communicative burden, to the offhand confession of over-drinking, stage precisely the contingent, paroxysmal quality of the epistolary voice I argue for. Notley inhabits multiple subject positions at once: surrogate correspondent, partner managing domestic strain, poet registering urban fatigue, and friend maintaining the connective thread of community. The sentence performs a micro-drama of care, where writing becomes an act of relational maintenance rather than literary self-display. The humor (“Oh god Chicago”) is not incidental; rather, structurally integral to the poetics of survival, signaling how difficulty is metabolized through voice rather than buried beneath metaphor, “being constantly shell-shocked from teaching school” and her, “Well it’s about 4 days later and Ted has gone an done the unthinkable: quit job here as of January 1st, for reasons of health (he told the dept. chairman he was sick of the job)” invoking Sontag’s, “Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about a disease.” (54). This is the pragmatist mode in embryo: experience rendered in transitioning unevenness and its immediacy.
The concepts she forms of the world enable her as an author to transition from shock to observation, creating a space for action. Closing a conversation about action, agency, and renewal, Marie Louise Knott remarks that, “The ideas of a new moment in which the participants become different people than they were in the past is a recognition of doing and forgiving as acts of free will, which forgives the deed and thus grants freedom to both sides” (77). The result is an aesthetic produced because of the pressures of life. This is further explicitly brought up when she attempts to define her feeling and diagnosis from a 1974 letter:
When I feel love it’s so high and intense and narrow that I plunge deep in the depths. Help! I’m missing out on Anselm, who is very beautiful, because I only see him through this fog of horrible thoughts. We’re very isolated here no social life to get lost in. I’ve always hated housework as demeaning to women (though intrinsically not so) and find daily tasks spooky and empty. I want to kill! Why should I be a good girl instead of a bad girl? What do you say? What would you do? Please if you have the time respond. I don’t have religion or psychiatry I only have poetry and poets. Can you tell me about love.
The “seeing” beckons to mind present-day philosopher, Han, as the hermeneutic rejoinder of Dewey; in tandem, the two are primarily aimed at encouraging emphasis on an ideology exhibit in Notley’s letter. Where Dewey emphasizes continuity, Han helps name the historical conditions under which continuity itself becomes exhausting. Since Han understands eros as a mode of relational vulnerability and ethical exposure to the Other, his framework clarifies how Notley’s letters stage care, dependence, and desire. In particular, “Eros awakens only in view of the ‘countenance’ that gives and conceals the Other. The ‘countenance’ stands diametrically opposed to the ‘face’ that holds no secrets, [...] and hands itself over to total visibility and consumption.” (16). To understand the force of the moment after Notley’s depression diagnosis and her fear that motherhood was eroding the parts of herself she most valued, she turns to Whalen as a stabilizing presence, writing “Help!” which becomes an appeal shaped by vulnerability, relational dependence, and the need for another consciousness to meet hers in order to go on.
Furthermore, her “good girl/bad girl” polarity morphs the crisis of identity before the Other and the eros they share, rearranging ethical coordinates. This engagement with the disruptive powers of poetry becomes essential for the unlearning of concepts, “though intrinsically not so.” This statement gains power of expression when this point of view is put in perspective and makes room for a step towards an ethics of vision that illuminates how norms and values are the product of culture and thus, dependent upon point of view. What is more, the irreducible precedence of the Other includes, “True essence of love consists in giving up the consciousness of oneself, forgetting oneself in another self […] Eros manifests itself as the revolutionary yearning for an entirely different way of loving another kind of society,” (Han, 23, 46). Through choice appeals, Notley’s “I can take anything you say [...] Can you tell me about love” and in a later 1978 letter, “We jump for joy when we see some of your poems in a magazine” and “Do you have any ideas about how a 32-year old poet woman wife mother new-Beatnik named Alice Notley could get a long poem started? Last time I wrote one I traded on hysteria but I’m tired of that. Anyway this is just babble now” invokes what Dewey said about community as experience as being able to, “restore continuity between the refined and the intensified forms of experience.” (2). This is highly relevant in Notley’s opening to her 1974 letter, “Your poems are as if my psychiatrist, and I want to talk to you.” Addressing Whalen thus is an art that reorganizes experience and brings clarity; the letter does the work of healing through cognition-as-feeling. Textually, this would imply that the purity of the experience Notley recounts to Whalen needed muddling, time (four years), distance (opposite sides of the world), and perspective (male-female) for the depicted experience and letter alike to be appreciated and considered a work of literary art.
Notley’s reflections on gender are inseparable from her resistance to deferred artistic authority and inherited narratives about when a poet is “allowed” to speak. Rather than positioning herself within a gendered category, she exposes how such categories function to regulate time, legitimacy, and participation in poetic life. She recounts how her first husband, Ted Berrigan told her, “’It’s possible you might have to wait a little bit [to write poetry].’ He said it would be okay because Whitman didn’t write ‘Song of Myself’ until he was thirty-six – that was how we discussed everything, always in terms of poets and poetry. I was twenty-six. I said, ‘I don’t want to wait.’ I was clear about that.” (The Paris Review, 175). An additional tension I’d like to explore in Notley’s life of poetics is how Dewey emphasizes the shared, communal nature of artistic experience in Art as Experience, contrasting it with the intimate, often solitary experiences of Notley, who lived in France from 1992, with sporadic and periodic trips back to the United States of America, until her death in 2025. The interplay between the “self” and the “collective” becomes a central theme: “We met everybody in San Francisco and Bolinas. Everybody” (The Paris Review). Here, poetic identity emerges not from isolation or delay but from sustained participation in communal life, even when lived at a remove.
The importance of a voice in community and poetry can be said of a poet’s letters too. Poirier reminds readers that, “The poem’s achievement is to show how meaning is made, not to assert the stability of what is made” (Poetry and Pragmatism, 15). Regarding Notley’s “vision level” (The Paris Review), one of her tripartite systems of composition that she uses to “make[ing] everything in the poem come together,” she will sing a song. Dewey writes, “The function of art in relation to other modes of experience [...] suggests the conditions of which the office would be successfully performed.” This serves as another form of ritual needed for the voice’s multifaceted importance to be evoked within this community of correspondence. In the 2024 interview, Notley recalls a song she sang before undergoing a long-lasting routine of medical treatment in France. Indeed and parenthetically, letters transcend geographical and physical boundaries alike. Notley said, “I had to do the hepatitis C treatment. The song was about the fact that there was a fifty-fifty chance of curing the virus” (Paris Review, 191). Through singing in the threshold of indeterminacy regarding her prognosis, Notley as artist embodies in herself the attitude of the perceiver while she works. This interpretation invites Sontag’s estimation that, “[...] a disease regarded as a mysterious malevolency inevitably feels like a trespass; worse, like the violation of a taboo.” (6).
A feminist poetics of care articulated through letters becomes, for Notley, a mode of resistance. In her archive of letters, manuscripts, poems, care is structural: the sustained tending of the sick, drunk, or impoverished, figures survival as an ongoing ethical labor rather than an affective posture. bell hooks reminds us that feminism concerns “the transformation of social relations, not simply the advancement of women,” (Feminist Theory, 26)a framework that clarifies how Notley’s caregiving stance reshapes the epistle itself as a social site Within this frame, letters function as places where domestic labor, artistic production, and communal responsibility converge, revealing tensions that are both marginal and internal to her creative life. Accordingly, this analysis approaches gender not as identity alone but as a lived practice that mediates between the literary and the social, yielding a finer-grained understanding of how intimacy, labor, and creativity operate from within Notley’s poetics. Her domestic and emotional labor, though aligned with stereotypes of female self-abnegation, becomes an enduring stance: a refusal of annihilation under capitalist neglect and male-centric literary economies, and quite successfully throughout her career as a poet, she is able to eschew any identity (though she does accept role of mother, daughter, sister, wife, friend in a magnanimous sprit). Seen through Dewey’s stance against “dualistic separation,” it’s been my gut feeling that memory and the doer’s present state of mind work inextricably through nostalgia, loneliness, and various forms of loving, where epistemic dimensions of care are given occasion to surface.
This community of sending letters to Warsh and Whalen has served, in Michael Davidson‘s terms at large, as, “enabling fictions to establish a countercultural poetics that is not only a vehicle of personal expression, but a complicated interictal and dialogical field” (A. Dewey and Rufkin, 17-22). Notley’s correspondence documents this directly: we can see how Notley explores as a woman the structures to create support for and redefine experimentation with a feminist focus. In this sense, my analysis looks outside the coded order of male structures to identify new sites of women’s poetic production, as Notley shows about subject matter related to illness, drug use, poverty, and body. She produces letters, which offer a space for safety within disagreement, annoyance, desire, and love. These letters make way for new forms of conceptual space freedom lived in language and body.
There is an egoic component, certainly, to which the signifiers of deixis like “her” “there” “my” are keyed to the personal, the subject being herself and her body’s preoccupation in space and with the terms under which it does so. Diagnostic power is revealed: again, Notley’s self-worth is a relationally structured one that adds deep dimensions to the public image of Notley as wife-poet by exposing the cost of care as a poetic discipline, to hold others up, turns into material and psychic exhaustion. Letters could therefore be the truest form of gaining meaningful (albeit fraught) insights into a poet’s ways of living and creating.
“You might just freeze, but if you don’t, other worlds open to you”
If economic precarity governs one dimension of her early letters, bodily vulnerability and sexual danger govern another. In a letter to Warsh from the same season, she writes: “It is too cold for the peeper to come & jack off outside my window... I think he came last week for a couple of days & hooted like an owl” (Letter 2) enacts a poetics of danger and absurdity by literalizing how gendered threats saturate her everyday experience and filter into her own private syntax. But the crucial movement in the passage occurs when the letter swerves from snow to modeling to the voyeur, collapsing emotional, physical, and artistic registers into a single associative field: “so I don’t think about him now” captures in miniature the collision of before-named aspects that structure so much of her early correspondence. To understand the significance of this shift, it is necessary to note that Notley is writing from a home that is not hers, a condition that magnifies both her sensory estrangement and her self-surveillance. The line’s syntax performs a fracture and the conjunction “so” carries no affective weight, flattening the intrusion into a quotidian relation no more dramatic than snow requiring boots. His absence becomes weather-dependent, an oscillation in the environment, and thereby danger becomes rendered meteorological. Indeed, the letter transforms into a kind of perverse weather report.
The displacement she imbues in her letter enacts a poetics in which the intrusion of male surveillance is a recurring environmental condition. Notley’s knowing includes calculative and rational elements and these are tangentially entangled with the body and the emotions. In order to appear as truthful, it becomes crucial that the peeper is suddenly not there. Like perspective, they go unnoticed in order to achieve the effect. I am claiming that Notley is writing a hybrid retelling as if it were a performance for her reader, Lewis Warsh. As soon as the peeper became recognizable as an owl, his effect turns into theatricality, which Notley makes rich use of. The phrasing folds the threat into her daily syntax in that the “peeper” to simply become part of the everyday she negotiates. The moment expands in its absurdity: “I think he came last week... & hooted like an owl” is a sonic distortion that disarms threat into mimicry. The animal comparison is a symbol of nocturnal omnipresence, which intensifies the logic of watching and being watched, yet the humor dissipates any tragic or heroic framing. By refusing to elevate the jerk off into a symbol and instead recording him as an almost slapstick intrusion, Notley asserts autonomy over the scene: her tone does not cede narrative authority to the pervert. Her humor is arguably directed at her audience, Warsh, as a form of frivolity, yes, but also arguably as a survival mechanism, what I will gently name a “feminist” tactic that reframes danger through wit rather than fearful submission.
What becomes crucial for us to understand as readers, then, is that Notley’s perception takes in her environment as a field charged with instability and material for writing poetry and private correspondence. This changes the way we approach her domestic descriptions, revealing them as compositional strategies rather than background noise. The letter’s casual movement from “It snowed” to “I am modeling again” to “the peeper” performs an articulation to a specifically feminine rhythm of consciousness, one in which threat is already embedded in the mundane and visually oriented recounting. The juxtaposition intensifies the scene’s tonal motion: “snowed” / “peeper,” “beautiful” / “jack off,” “modeling” / “hooting” in that each pairing generates an image-circle of incompatible textures from the cold purity of snow, the gaze of modeling, the predatory nature that is the comic-grotesque of the voyeur. The reader’s eye moves from white field of snow to a female body posed for work to obscene owl-call in a sequencing that grounds an all-inclusive orientation. The modeling body is implicitly exposed and yet the voyeur’s intermittent presence pushes the body into an additional register of vulnerability. Instead of lyric insulation, Notley structures the moment as an ongoing interruption: weather, labor, and surveillance, each moving in rhythm into the other.
Notley’s associative logic demonstrates how sexual danger infiltrates the most banal registers of daily life, a condition that shapes perception itself. Read through Dewey, Notley’s associations operate as experiential shifts, registering threat and vulnerability at the levels of habit, feeling, and orientation. Dewey might describe this kind of transformation as an, “insensible melting,” a process “far more efficacious than the change effected by reasoning, because it enters directly into attitude” (334). This letter thus becomes a record of embodiment under patriarchy, in which even the act of looking out one’s own window involves negotiations of exposure and risk. Once the letter establishes a baseline of domestic monotony, Ovaltine, baths, the oversized house, then the emergence of psychic instability forces a different reading of her environment: the enclosure becomes atmospheric pressure rather than shelter.
The remainder of Notley’s letter, following the fragment about the voyeur, reveals the same associative, jump-cut logic but is now directed toward emotional volatility, artistic anxiety, and the pressures of institutional evaluation. “It’s pretty strange / to be taking an exam,” she writes, the line break interrupting her own thought and signaling a consciousness, I propose, that experiences life in discrete shocks rather than linear progression. What seems like a minor aside becomes, on closer inspection, a key to her compositional logic: the mundane is the vessel through which affect enters. The passage moves rapidly: “I’m calm & happy about every other day & the other ones I have mad paranoid fantasies... & I cry a lot. That’s all pretty entertaining.” Here Notley reframes psychic instability through a tone of wry detachment, converting fear and emotional overwhelm into material for observation. The oscillation from “calm”, “paranoia”, “tears”, “entertainment” is a sort of structural demonstration of how her mind refuses to isolate crisis from the mundane. This refusal intensifies when she articulates her hypothesis of knowledge: “you only have to know how to say a few simple sentences like I like it or I can use it.” The statement exposes a pragmatist epistemology rooted in use, affect, and immediacy rather than abstraction as academic-gesturing-as-performance.
Her anxiety about the exam: “If I failed would you still like me?” makes visible the relational dimension of her cognition that self-worth is secured by a community of peers-as-poets rather than the guilds. She uses the story of doubting to satirize a failure of faith in experience. She resolves the tension with a characteristically Notley inversion: if the institution finds her “dumb,” then “I guess I think they’re dumb,” a maneuver that both defends the self and critiques the evaluative structures surrounding her. This moment foregrounds an important tension between her desire for artistic self-definition and the immobilizing effects of solitude. These shifts in tone and topic mirror the fragment’s earlier movements from snow to modeling to the voyeur: experience arrives layered, contradictory, and without hierarchy. The final moments of the letter: “Why did the article / about Anne blow your mind?”, “I guess I have to go to / Anselm’s class now,” and “Tonight I will miss a reading by Marvin Bell” extend this associative field, positioning her within the living social network of poets whose presence structures her daily life. These references function as documentary traces of the every-expanding literary rhizome she inhabits, revealing an emerging poetics grounded in simultaneity.
To fully appreciate this portion of the letter as a multimodal correlative in Notley’s letters, the fragments realign themselves into a portrait of interior life shaped by existential freedom and inherent depletive effect. Sontag suggests that to view any scenery thus requires, “putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge and power,” (On Photography, 11). In other words, the spiral of progression provides a matrix of rhetorical tropes as the reader sees Notley responding in ekphrasis throughout her letters. The magic of the image emanates and illustrates in decreasing degrees of itself. The magic consists of rituals, in a nexus of time, which are brought into presentation. Notley evokes the dynamic relationship between visual culture in her letter and the role of objects, highlights a shared narrative of resilience and the preservation of identity through material culture. I argue the letter’s narrative adopts the perspective of a disembodied observer overlooking a world of materiality within a hyper-realistic setting. Cara Blue Adams describes such realistic settings as, “a place self-willed, a separate, self-sustaining narrative ecosystem with its own imperatives independent of ours,” (The New Yorker). Similarly, in the same moment, Notley revives the medieval scholastic concept of natura naturans, or, “the permanent genesis of things, nature as a process, as productivity” (Neyrat, 135) situating the nurturing effects of localized settings on characters within her materially grounded approach to correspondence. Notley’s letter’s last two sentences taken together form a paratactic pair (two adjacent, loosely connected declaratives) that foreground obligation and loss without explicit subordinating connectors: “I guess I have to go to / Anselm’s class now. Tonight I will miss a reading by Marvin Bell” contrasts the previous events with an emotional reaction that produces a change in the desires and determination of the character, an (in)action that reorganizes the emotional architecture of the letter. The stakes of this passage extend beyond the letter itself, offering insight into how Notley forges a poetics in which vulnerability is both a condition and a method. The cumulative effect is a portrait of a young poet navigating economic precarity, bodily vulnerability, emotional fluctuation, and academic demand with the same tonal equipoise she applies to weather, modeling work, potential danger. In this letter for Warsh, which complicates any assumption that Notley’s early letters would merely serve as personal artifacts; instead, she pursues a mode of writing that treats all registers of life as equally worthy of attention, shaping from these discontinuities a nascent poetics of daily experience in an enduring, blossoming language.
Illness as a metaphor arises from the need to express an experience that seems otherwise unspeakable, an eruption of the social and personal unconscious. The voids within Notley’s letters include abrupt transitions, missing context, emotional restraint: all operating as sites of readerly projection. Thus, literary criticism is beginning to take on new critical orientations and vacillating along a continuum that leans either a text-centered analysis (Wolfgang Iser’s The Implied Reader) or a community-centered analysis. Here, I’ve opted for a hybrid model in which attempts have been made for the letters’ content to dialogue with a later, 21st-century Notley. Fundamentally, this is consistent with Iser’s “gaps” that compel the reader to co-create meaning. These crevices of miscommunication mirror social alienation, especially when Notley is writing when she is alone, as she was in the before-mentioned letter, and thereby offers an instance of “gendered silence” of illness. As Sontag writes, “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. ... Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” (3). In shorthand, living in a state of poverty and loneliness becomes a kind of structural absence in language itself.
Contrariwise and for example, take the highly provocative and highly common occurrence to what Robert Duncan sheds light on. At Naropa Institute in 1976, the pragmatist sublime addresses his students, “Try being healthy for a moment. For most of us, we only tune into our bodies when they say, ‘ouch’ because when we begin to tune in on the health of the body, we find ourselves in peril.” Thus, in this antithetical lighting, the very spaces where language falters become the sites where the reader must supply the missing affective labor while Notley’s tuning in transforms illness, health, silence, into mutually constitutive elements of epistolary poetics.
The January 1970 to Warsh letter enacts a structure in which the scene becomes indistinguishable from the direction it conveys, which is a circular movement of collapse and reconstitution that mirrors Notley’s psychic and domestic oscillations. Like the staccato rhythm in which: “the truth is” registers a shift in tempo in another, later context of the same letter in declarative disclosures: “I’m alone at Bill’s mother’s,” “This house is too big for me,” “I can’t ever get the air to be right” punctuate with beats of depletion that accumulate into a portrait of suspension. I feel letter performs what Sontag calls, “night-side of life” (3) in Notley’s sensory distortion, flattened affect, and the domestically enclosed temporality of isolation. Notley situates this mood spatially: “this house is too big for me by myself & sort of gloomy” and physically: “Living on vitamins, Familia, & Ovaltine” as if her environment and her body form a single, albeit unsteady, system. The rhythm of the passage builds and collapses repeatedly from her ten-minute stretches of television watching, beckoning her compulsive channel-switching, then to baths with “bubbling bath oil & secret beauty preparations,” then to sleep. Initially, the remark about constant channel-changing appears incidental; only later does it disclose a restlessness that structures the entire letter’s rhythm of interruption. In effect, each gesture offers an opportunity at interpretation: that they are an attempt at self-regulation and indexes her restlessness. The schema operates like a loop: action is begun, abandoned, replaced, and begun again. Even man’s best friend, a number of dogs met, enter this mandala-like pattern, as recurring, unchosen companions whose presence registers both comfort and fatigue: “So far since June I’ve lived with a total of 5 dogs, unwittingly, & am now very dog-conscious. If unwittingly means unwillingly. Actually they were OK except for the 1st one, Rebecca Brown’s dog Mandrake. Ask Bill about him.”
What emerges is a scene governed by a circular economy of low-grade crisis in which her exhaustion and revival coexist. Her syntax exposes this repetition through the reuse of banal, almost formulaic phrasing (errands, illness, caretaking, eating habits), a linguistic weariness that resembles words worn smooth by overuse. Such language echoes Sontag’s general warning about the exhaustion of metaphor, yet insists on metaphor’s inevitability: loneliness becomes air that cannot be gotten “right,” emotional instability becomes channel-surfing in “punchy” (surfer lingo presents an interesting comparison) conditions, psychic heaviness becomes a house that’s “too big.” The letter becomes, in effect, a record of enclosure so total that the external world recedes, leaving an interior landscape governed by a quiet réassemblage of the self: “I will be my normal working self in a day or two.” Oriented towards time, it reads as a lack of focus, then it might respond to a held longing to exceed the limitation of her temporal spatial being. Therefore, I propose it becomes both the thematic core and the structural motor of the letter: a suspended state where collapse and reconstruction follow each other in circling motion.
“I started memorizing song lyrics, and my theory is that I’m heavily influenced by them”
The following excerpt from Notley’s November 4, 1969, letter shows the texture of her prose enacts what Dewey calls the, “union of sense, need, impulse, and action” (25), highlighting the importance that interest plays in a dynamic of a person’s impulses. Notley writes, “I took a pill about 8 hours ago + it’s still with me, can’t read + worried a lot about little things which I won’t name” (Letter 4). In the same letter, in embodied pragmatist’s hues: “Sometimes it means getting a lot done + sometimes it means very lonely [...] It’s just a question of learning to be easy about it + not make comparisons.” Notley shows she is aware of how her moods might have an effect, “comparison” on others in her community. She shows an extremely caring awareness of others’ moods. The perceived object, in this case, the “it” means poetry writing, and is emotionally pervaded through the passage and involves surrender in order to create one’s own experience. “Letters are so hard + also so nothing when you’re not a talking person. I want all my vibrations to be coming off the paper, like real me [...] It certainly is good to talk to you. [...] You should send out the vibes/wiles some night.”(Letter 4). Notley’s encounter has narrative weight in that she and her reader interact with events which surround the composition and is a moment we as readers will anticipate throughout all her correspondence. Notley repeatedly frames the letter itself as the medium of her lived subjectivity. This intimacy of address: “I see a lot of great people in my sleep though. Dreamt the other night about Ted + Arnold Schonberg + taking a walk with Ted on a field of giant poppies” demonstrates how her correspondence constructs relational presence across all kinds of separations. Affective responses are not to be discounted and are in fact part of our understanding and cultural tendency to discount our human feeling centers by exactly enacting the axis Dolar identifies, where voice becomes the texture of the social bond and subjectivity emerges in communication beyond introspection.
Each of her letters performs self-criticism as ritual: confession and correction intertwined, a continual negotiation between dependence and autonomy, which situates her within a postmodern feminist lineage that reimagines authorship as cohabitation with suffering. As Butler would have it, “The self is always in some sense dispossessed by its social relations,” (25). Poverty functions as both material condition and poetic method (the chicken house (The Paris Review); (Notley is either referring toBill Berkson’s mother’s house or W.S. Merwin’s, imitation poems to complete her MFA degree) all contributing to an aesthetic scarcity that mirrors economic precarity. Drug use, sleeping and night dreams, insomnia, and financial instability are rendered as shared symptoms that map illness as social, linguistic, and moral. We read in her correspondence a documentation of collapse and revival. Notley expresses an act that will depend on the reader’s empathetic reconstruction. Her letters perform an embodied pragmatism in which illness transforms writing into creative and survival practice: “A few fleas here + there. I sleep in tights to keep them from eating my legs + open the windows daytimes to try to freeze them to death. Dance around the room a lot to the Beatles album, which is warped.” (letter 4), which highlight lighthearted moments and are indeed fundamental to any creative practice. Here, music is part of the daily choreography through which the body endures illness through sound, movement, and material circumstance. Aristotle says that the two things that make people care for something is the conviction that it is all their own, the thought that it’s the only one they have, “so our most intense feelings of love and fear and grief are likely to be directed at objects [...] irreducibly particular in their relationship to us,” (Nussbaum, 83). Notley’s material acceptance, in conjunction with how she views the music album as an entry point into more-than-human storytelling, where objects, however outworn, participate in shaping identity and place as much as the people mentioned in the letters themselves.
“All these people were looking at me with complete astonishment, and I just kept walking.”
Taken together, the letters examined here reveal Alice Notley forging, almost inadvertently, a theory of literary life grounded in survival, improvisation, and a burgeoning ethics of relationality. What emerges from the archive is not an adjunct to the poems but a parallel system of composition in which illness, poverty, domestic enclosure, and friendship become generative pressures rather than biographical conditions. The letters allow us to see how Notley builds an epistemology from states usually dismissed as unremarkable moments of one’s life, however well-known and lauded that figure happens to be. Fatigue, fear, boredom, loneliness, restlessness are catalyzed into a disciplined, if fragile, method of perception. Against traditional genealogies of postwar experimental writing, Notley’s correspondence discloses a counter-tradition: an embodied pragmatics that links aesthetic action to the ongoing crises of living.
Reading her letters to Warsh and Whalen as a continuous practice of aesthetic attention allows us to recognize how Notley reframes the everyday as a volatile field of aesthetic possibility. The interruptions, the leaps, the tonal swerves, the humor, the associative pivots between illness and clarity all produce a textual environment where the body and the voice remain inseparable from cognition. This correspondence makes visible the infrastructural labor that underwrote much of the so-called experimental writing culture of the 1970s while simultaneously offering an alternative to the masculinist mythos of spontaneity and genius traditionally associated with the Beats and the New York Schools. The letters insist on community as its precondition, modeling Notley’s interdependence on the graces of friendship as fuel for production.
This selection of letters challenge the critical tendency to center Notley’s oeuvre solely around poetic innovation or her seminal works Mysteries of Small Houses as autobiographical lyric; more apt, the letters articulate an expanded field of contemporary literature in which the boundaries between genres blur and where the ordinary, in its depleted, humorous, and unadorned forms, becomes a building site of inventive ways of disseminating information in later novel works. If the poems represent the public face of Notley’s achievement, the letters show the face’s anatomy, revealing a writer composing herself again and again in the intervals where life threatens to overwhelm any productive, and by that I mean creative, thought. The letters document a process of continual reconstitution: the work of making meaning without certainty, of sustaining voices and of anchoring identity in the tenuous networks that hold and indeed beckon one into correspondent acts.
By returning to these letters, the archive extends our sense of what counts as literary labor and invites a reconsideration of the forms through which contemporary writers, especially women, construct lives adequate to their art. Notley’s correspondence is a foundational record of how a poet becomes, survives, and keeps faith with the imagination when the world’s pressures seem to stymie it. They are the rain which Notley’s later, more public works-as-seeds, will sprout.
Works Cited
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Alice Notley. “The Art of Poetry No. 116.” The Paris Review, issue 247, Spring 2024. Interview by Hannah Zeavin.
Notley, Alice. Alice Notley Papers. Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, New York, NY. Boxes 17 and 183, folders 1 and 6. 1969–2013.
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Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. Fordham University Press, 2005.
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Dewey, John. Art as Experience. Perigee Books, 1980.
Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. MIT Press, 2006.
Duncan, Robert. Lecture on the ‘Warp and Woof’. Naropa Institute, 1976. Internet Archive, https://ia600409.us.archive.org/20/items/naropa_robert_duncan_lecture_warp_and/narop a_robert_duncan_lecture_warp_and_64kb.mp3.
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