Anselm Berrigan Reflects On His Mother Alice Notley’s Life and Legacy

Last month, Alice Notley, one of the foremost poets of her generation, died at the age of 79 in a hospital in Paris. According to her son, Anselm Berrigan, she wrote up until the very end. Like many poets of the Second Generation of the New York School, Notley rejected both poetic convention and institutional hierarchies. She and her husband, the poet Ted Berrigan, were instrumental in founding The Poetry Project in 1966, which still operates out of St. Mark’s on the Bowery. For both of them, poetry was never a means of material comfort within academia but rather a devotional relationship. From their unofficial salons held in their East Village apartment, they helped usher in a new wave of avant-garde poets, including Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Joe Brainard, and Eileen Myles. According to Notley’s son, who was raised in in and around the bustling creative community he parents helped facilitate, this resurgence of voice-driven, New York-centric poetry was less of a “school” that it was a bunch of friends hanging out. Following in their footsteps, Berrigan would go on to direct the current iteration of the Poetry Project from 2003 to 2007 and currently serves as the poetry editor of The Brooklyn Rail.

Conversations about poetry between Notley and her son continued up until the day she died, he says. These exchanges, like Notley’s body of work, demonstrated a “non-didactic” honesty. “Her work changes so much over the years and also, in fundamental ways, doesn’t change,” Berrigan told me shortly after his mother’s passing. “There’s something very insistent about where she is in the poem while she’s writing.” As a poet, Notley was known for having an intimate relationship with the dead. In fact, one of her most beloved incantations—shared widely after her death—appears in her book Margaret & Dusty and speaks to her relationship with her late husband: “All my life,/since I was ten,/I’ve been waiting/to be in/this hell here/with you;/all I’ve ever/wanted, and/still do.” Below, Anselm Berrigan reflects on his mother’s personal and literary legacy, and final yet-to-be-published works.

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JULIETTE JEFFERS: I thought we could pick up where we left off the last time we spoke. We were discussing this idea of the New York School, and how “school” feels like an after-the-fact grift imposed by academia. And what is now called “The Second Wave of the New York School” was really just a group of friends hanging out at St. Mark’s Church and writing. 

ANSELM BERRIGAN: Right. What somebody might call the “Second Wave” has a lot to do with younger folks reading the writings of Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and then going into their own kind of organizational mode. It was part of the general air that you might start a magazine and publish the people that you’re interested in. You’re also getting readings taking place in New York City starting in the early 1960s at Cafe Le Metro on the Lower East Side. And when that series shut down, it led to the Poetry Project being funded in 1996. One of the funny things about the whole idea of the New York School was that there was really no syllabus—it was about living in New York, not being born in New York. It’s about being there and being affected by being one of nine million people in the city. In the Second Wave, you are getting a lot more work that’s influenced by collage and disjunction.

JEFFERS: So what was it like as a child growing up in the midst of all of that? Did you always see a future for yourself as a poet or within that world of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s? 

BERRIGAN: No.

JEFFERS: Not at all?

BERRIGAN: I didn’t think about it at all growing up. It never occurred to me that I would start writing poems until I did at 19. I was aware that being a poet was something that anybody might do because my parents were poets and many of their friends too. So it seemed about as ordinary as any other job that somebody might have. But I didn’t start reading poetry on my own until maybe I was 15 or 16, and I started looking at some of my father’s poems. But really, it was just a way to get to know him a little better because I was 10 when he died, and our neighborhood was rough. My sister was killed when she was 15, and another couple of other close people died when I was a teenager. So I was just trying to make it up the street and get to school. By 15 or 16, I felt shell-shocked and I needed to get out of New York.

JEFFERS: It makes a lot of sense that you came to it when you had distance from that trauma. Was there a moment when you started reading your parents’ poetry and found that context for them within the larger world of poetry? 

BERRIGAN: Well, I had started writing for the student newspaper at SUNY Buffalo. I was writing record reviews actually, and that started to loosen up some writing muscles that I didn’t know I had. That led to keeping a notebook and writing short story-like things. Then one day, I broke a line instead of writing it across the page, and I literally got a full-body high. It was the middle of the day and I was dead sober, so I couldn’t believe it. Around the same time, I got two books in the mail from my mother. One was a book called Nice to See You, which is an homage to my father that included writings and poems by a whole bunch of people who knew him during his life. The other was a book called Talking in Tranquility, which is a collection of interviews done with my father. But I told my mother on the phone that I was writing poems, and I think she was a little shocked, to be honest. My brother had already been doing it since he was eight or nine. But I went back down to New York at some point and showed her and my stepfather, the poet Douglas Oliver, some of the poems. 

JEFFERS: And what was her response? 

BERRIGAN: She started reading them and asking me questions, mostly where I thought the words were coming from, what kinds of things I was determining and putting them next to each other. I’d never been in a writing class, so I’d never been asked any questions about anything like that. Then at a certain point, she turned to Doug and said, “Can there be a whole family of poets?” I said, “All right, I guess this is working.”

JEFFERS: Do you feel like she was a mentor?

BERRIGAN: I never thought of her as a mentor, but we talked about poetry a lot. Suddenly, I could ask questions. I would want to get her thoughts on different people’s writing and histories and situations, and our family’s. We began this poetry-based line of conversation that continued up until the day she died, to be honest. It might sound like a mentorship to somebody else, but that wasn’t how it felt to me. She gave me and my brother certain works of hers to read and give her feedback on. I would send her things to read too, but not everything. 

JEFFERS: When I read Songs for the Unborn Second Baby, I found that there’s a way in which she writes about motherhood as this full-spectrum thing. She had this very non-didactic approach, and this idea of birth as this full expression of femininity and selfhood. And then she’s often just chronicling people’s reactions to that and her own frustrations as they arise. 

BERRIGAN: She was definitely not didactic in her writing. She was very fierce in her opinions and things, but she was not reactive. Some of that influence had to do with talking constantly with my father, who was interested in this funny combination of Socratic questioning and Jesuit questioning, but mixed with some Providence-Irish bullshit. When it comes to poetry, there is no separation in her mind of its parts. So if you start talking about form as if it’s somehow separate from all the other elements of poetry: sound, what’s being said, prosody, the arrangement, then you’re making a mistake. You’re abstracting something. So her work changes so much over the years and also in fundamental ways doesn’t change. There’s something very insistent about where she is in the poem while she’s writing. The consciousness develops. But her work is always moving, and she’s trying different things, especially in the ’70s with line and voice and page space. At that point, she’s a mother, she’s got these babies in the room with her, and she wants to keep writing. 

JEFFERS: Yeah, exactly.

BERRIGAN: And she doesn’t feel like a victim. She’s going through things, but it’s not about telling the world what’s wrong with the situation she’s in necessarily. That comes later in a different way.

JEFFERS: Did her poetry allow you to get to know her as an adult in ways that you didn’t know her as her child?

BERRIGAN: Well, like I said, I was 10 when my father died. So having all of that work to read was a way for me to get to know him better. There’s a lot of first-person in his work, and he writes from his life, but he also thought of his use of “I” as a character, and the work as a record of that character. And the characters that he populated the work with were generally his friends and neighbors. Also, my brother and I are characters in some of those poems my mother wrote when we were really young. We also worked together on my father’s Collected Poems and Selected Poems in this book of prose that came out about two years ago now. So we worked editorially on that work and got to know it even further. Working together was really interesting.

JEFFERS: That’s an incredible project to go about as a family. It’s pretty unusual, actually.

BERRIGAN: Probably. I once met the Kenyan writer, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, just coincidentally at a hotel in Seattle. And we were sitting next to each other late at night, eating, and we got to talking. He asked me how I got into writing and I told him about my parents without naming names. And then he said, “Oh, I have five or six kids. They all swore they would never write, and now they’re all writers.” And then I found one of his son’s books, a detective novel, and bought it and read it.

JEFFERS: Was it good?

BERRIGAN: It was good. And it was set in Nairobi, and I was about to go to Kenya, so it was a bit of a primer. Settings in a lot of detective novels actually tell you a lot about what certain places are like or could be like. My mother was addicted to reading detective novels.

JEFFERS: I feel like I’ve heard about this. Where do you think that obsession came from?

BERRIGAN: I think once you get into it, you just keep reading them. 

JEFFERS: They’re addictive.

BERRIGAN: They’re page-turners, and there are writers who are really good at them, and then they keep turning out books. And also, my namesake, the poet Anselm Hollo, who was a close friend of hers, was also a big detective novel reader. She’d visit him and then he’d say, “Here, take these six books. Two of them are good, but you should read all of them anyway.” Because he knew that she would. 

JEFFERS: I think a good detective novel is like you’re seeing someone do this incredible intellectual trick, and the fact that they’re able to do it over and over again while still being engaging feels very connected to the core of the writing process or something.

BERRIGAN: I think she related it to grieving, also. She wrote a talk that’s in one of her books about using the books as a way to process grief after my stepfather died. And then also, while she was dealing with this long treatment she had to go through after discovering that she had hepatitis C a couple years after he died. I think she relates some of that in that talk also. There’s a lot of death and darkness in most of those novels, and there are these points of relation that get created. So there’s a little bit of sinking yourself into it and it passes time, but it was also something deeper than that.

JEFFERS: That makes sense. People die over and over again, and that’s how grief works in many ways. On that note, your family has experienced a lot of loss and tragedy, and your mother is often quoted as saying she spoke to dead people. Did you ever feel like you knew what exactly she meant by that?

BERRIGAN: I think so. One of the places that you can get to with poetry is this understanding that you’re participating in an endeavor that goes back to the beginning of the species. And at certain points, things start to get written down, but poetry predates writing. There’s this whole fabric that you bind yourself to. It’s one of the things that can keep you going. You’re taking permission, and then you’re creating permission. But for her, it’s talking to and listening to and communing with the dead as much as the living. The living are not ever out of the picture in the work, but maybe the dead are underrepresented. There’s more of them than there are of us. And it just became this deep source, as she would move into newer bodies of work. She was working on something called The Old Language, which she discussed with our friend Nick Sturm, who worked closely with her on her archive in recent years. She told him that is what she thought she’d be writing for the rest of her life. She wrote every day. She wrote as much as she could in the hospital.

JEFFERS: That’s incredible. That seems connected to something one might read in every biography of Alice Notley, which is along the lines of, “She’s never tried to be anything besides a poet.” I think this idea for a lot of young poets is now incredibly hard to imagine. The endeavor of trying to be a poet one’s whole life feels like something of a bygone era. How do you feel about that?

BERRIGAN: Well, this is maybe where it’s useful to come back to the fact that she wasn’t didactic. She wasn’t trying to tell anybody how to live their lives, and it wasn’t a program. There were circumstances, many of them difficult, that put her in a position to be able to live the way she lived, which was with very little overhead. When she found herself alone in Paris after Doug died, people assumed that she would come back to New York. But I knew that wouldn’t happen. As a French resident, she was inside the French healthcare system. It just made no sense for her to come back here and have to get some kind of job that she didn’t want. I always thought of the situation as: poetry is the center of my life, my mind, my consciousness, but I have to get a job because I have to support myself. But having her and my father as examples, I understood that this is a devotional art. Not everybody’s going to keep making it for different reasons, but everybody that I knew in New York who was a poet had a job.

JEFFERS: True.

BERRIGAN: And they mostly weren’t teachers. They were cab drivers or lawyers, or they waited tables or they dealt drugs. A lot of these folks also were living in Manhattan when rents were affordable. It’s a totally different ethos than getting hooked into a situation where you want to write, you go to school for it, you end up with a lot of debt, and then you look around. If you want to be a teacher, you can try to do that. But teaching is actually really competitive as a job market and a shrinking one. It can start to feel like you’re inside of this system that’s producing poet-teachers who aren’t going to end up teaching. It can work for people here and there, but if you’re counting on things like book deals, and my mother never had an agent.

JEFFERS: I think a lot of poets still don’t.

BERRIGAN: I know a few who do. She was her own agent. I’ve talked to people about it, and that it’s also just a different way of relating to the economic forces that we’re all just swirling inside of. I also have to say, I understand it is a controversial point, but I don’t care. If somebody decides that they can’t be a poet anymore because of money, then I don’t need to take that on. It’s like, “Okay, goodbye.” 

JEFFERS: I agree.

BERRIGAN: It’s not that controversial. I know people who get really hung up on the problems of MFA poets, and my mom would sometimes rant about it or MFA programs, and I just thought, “Well, it’s just another way of not actually getting what’s going on in the work.” Sorry. 

JEFFERS: I agree. And I think, if anything, looking at your parents’ lives and all of the pain and hardship that existed there, it’s just this unusual example of how you can very much be a poet without that kind of economic and institutional support if you have that drive to keep doing this very strange thing. 

BERRIGAN: But there are other paths. Some people also just have different metabolisms, different paces that they have to go at. Not everybody who’s a writer is going to, or has to write every single day. That’s just how she did it.