2008 Woodie Awards
Poet Alice Notely entertains Boise State
CHARITY VARNER
Culture Writer
Issue date: 3/1/07 Section: Culture
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Notley was born in Arizona in 1945. She received a B.A. from Barnard College in 1967 and went on to earn her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1969.
She is an artist with an array of talents ranging from sketches and watercolors to collages and poetry. Her most profound and recognizable work is her verse, which she shared with a room overly crowded with eager ears in the Bishop Barnwell room Monday night.
The poetry of Alice Notley explores the complexities of American Culture and often uses her words as a springboard for social reform. Her main intent is to captivate the reader with the beauty of her words while at the same time instilling a hint
of social awareness. She describes her voice as, “the new wife, and the new mother.”
A main theme running throughout her works is her fascination with deserts where she grew up.
Her talent has gained her recognition around the world.
A collection of her poems entitled, “Mysteries of Small Houses” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Another collection, “How Spring Comes,” received the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award in 1982. In spring of 2001, she was presented with an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the Poetry Society of America’s Shelly Memorial Award.
She began her reading from her book, “Grave of Light.”
The poetry inscribed in this book can best be described as songs resembling intimate journal entries. One such ‘song’ was called a “Eulogy for my Brother, Robert,” which expressed a difficult descent into the grief and frustration of losing a life dear to you. The story of a lost soul was woven deeper into the bigger issue of war and the grief of losing many. She spoke of the war that raged in Vietnam.
“No one cared that he went there/No one cared what was lost.”
The words are haunting and real, with the current parallel of the war in Iraq.
The mood of melancholy and political contemplation was replaced by lighthearted humor with a selection of poems entitled, “Postcards.” The audience was at one moment silent and serious and the next laughing with no restraint.
Only a truly talented speaker can induce an audience in such a manner. The second set of readings came from another book of her works, “Alma, or the Dead Women.” Alma is considered the true God.
She is a woman and a junkie shooting up heroin through a hole in her forehead. She “dreams and suffers our nightmares with us.”
Notley tries to bring storytelling back to sound and rhythm, back to poetry. “Her use of language is amazing which makes you see ordinary things in a new light,” noted Kendra L., a sophomore majoring in English at BSU.
After all, language is the foundation of much of the American Culture.
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