Telling the Truth As It Comes Up : Selected Talks Essays 1991-2018

“Once again, we encounter Notley as one the great interlocutors of the world, a dedicated advocate for what is between and beyond definition.” —Tess Michaelson, Full Stop

Alice Notley, the author of more than 40 books of poetry, has delivered an expert array of discussions over the last three decades. Telling the Truth as It Comes Up: Selected Talks & Essays 1991-2018 offers a significant contribution to literature, reimagining the possibilities of writing in our time and the complicated business of how and why writers devote their lives to their craft. Whether she is writing about other poets—Ed Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Homer, bpNichol, Douglas Oliver or William Carlos Williams—noir fiction, the First Gulf War, dreams or giving us insight into her own work, Notley''s observations are original, sobering and always memorable. This collection often eschews the typical style of essay or lecture, resisting any categorization, and is consciously disobedient to academic structures in form. The results are thrilling new modes of thinking that may change the ways we read and write.
Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona, in 1945, and grew up in Needles, California. During the late ‘60s and early ‘70s she lived a traveling poet’s life before settling on New York’s Lower East Side. For 16 years there, she was an important force in the eclectic second generation of the so-called New York School. Notley is the author of more than 40 books of poetry, including At Night the States, the double volume Close to Me and Closer . . . (The Language of Heaven) and Désamère and How Spring Comes, which was a co-winner of the San Francisco Poetry Award. In 1998, Penguin published Mysteries of Small Houses, which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. In 2015 she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement in poetry.