Alice Notley’s Inhabited Spaces

Though Berrigan and Notley were married, this chapter moves away from addressing coterie (as it has received thorough attention) to instead consider the way that the intimacy enforced by living in small spaces shaped the school’s tone and form. This chapter treats the school’s domestic poetry, focusing exclusively on Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses, a collection of poems devoted to remembering the spaces Notley inhabited, while locating the tendency to address lived-in space as one promoted by Frank O’Hara. Integrating urban and spatial theory to offer a psycho-geographic reading of this poetry, this chapter utilizes material from an original interview personally conducted with Notley devoted to spatial discussions. In this way, this chapter pays homage to previous studies of the school by offering a space for the living poets of The New York School to speak for themselves, while testing the validity of this study, within the study.