Below is a piece I wrote for the briefly stratospheric and now sadly folded Brixton Review of Books back in 2018.

I am posting it because the wonderful poet Alice Notley died the day before yesterday, and I was lucky enough to meet her and draw her portrait. She was and continues to be an unparalleled communicator with ghosts and the inhabitants of other worlds, which brings a crumb of comfort.

ARTICLE FROM 2018

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I’m currently in the middle of a commission to depict a round of twenty-six important poets for the Poetry Foundation in Chicago for their web series/education resource, poetry101.

A portrait of each poet is accompanied by a critical essay and a good sampling of poems, with some analysis of them.

Drawing the poets is a dream job for me. It requires intensive reading combined with observational drawing, which forces my own creative responses to the poets and the poetry. The list so far is largely American. It includes giants such as Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman, but also many names less familiar to me, whose work it’s been a revelation and delight to discover:

Muriel Rukeyser, Juan Felipe Herrera and Martin Espada. This last poet, who lives and works in Massachusetts, has just been awarded this year’s Ruth Lilly Prize for Lifetime Achievement by the Poetry Foundation.  

In 2015 the same honour went to Alice Notley, another poet not as well known in the UK as she deserves to be. When I saw her name on the list I jumped at the opportunity to meet her and draw her from life, especially as I’d also been asked to draw her for the magazine Poetry London, for the cover of their summer issue. It wasn’t too far-fetched an idea as Notley spends most of her time in Paris. (She is also reading in London at Kings Place on June 21, to celebrate the launch of the summer edition of Poetry London; and contributing to a symposium about the New York School of poetry, in Birmingham on July 6.)

Reading her latest collection, Certain Magical Acts (2016), both before I set off and on the Eurostar, I was struck by the power and accessibility of her language, put at the service of what turn out to be far from straightforward poems. There’s a deadpan laconic humour that slices through the emotional and political richness of the poems, rendering experience and a commentary on it simultaneously, and coming through like the whiff of motorway mingled with jasmine, and other unpindownables.

Alice Notley writes living verse and sustains this through book after book, giving voice to our human paradoxes, adding her own layers of invention and mythology.

I walked through Paris and found her apartment building on the day we’d arranged.

As I walked up to her floor, light was spilling through the dark turquoise bannisters all the way up the spiral ; it was as if I’d just walked unexpectedly into a scene from one of the classic French films that formed me, perhaps, Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating. Anyway a chance to draw breath and allow atmosphere to furnish anticipation.

Where do you like to sit when you draw? asked Alice. I mean I don’t really know you, what are you going to do?  

I laughed; how nice she was immediately, how direct.

I got out my big box of dusty pastels, sheaves of paper, ink and brushes, a hastily grabbed old sheet I’d packed from home in case of spills or smart carpet (luckily there were neither), and, settling into chairs opposite each other, we began an afternoon of staring, drawing, talking and listening.

Alice lives in the same studio apartment she moved into twenty-five years ago with her late husband, the poet Douglas Oliver. On the walls are many treasures, and one immediately caught my eye. Is that by Joe Brainard? I asked. How do you know know Joe? She sounded surprised and a bit pleased. The pictures and the mountains of books that make an artist feel at home made an easy bridge for us to connect over.  

I explained that I was drawing each poet’s likeness in pastels, but that I was creating collage backgrounds to go behind each portrait head, trying to find the right colours, rhythms and textures to reflect their poetry and preoccupations.

I make collages too. said Alice. She showed me a few. Marvellous objects, starting with a black lace Spanish-looking fan, embellished with a picture of an owl with glowing yellow eyes, a small silver key, silk roses, a playing card, small drawings of birds . . . The fan had a whiff of nocturnal magic and, like a poem, made a surprising whole from its disparate elements. There were other fans, and also collages inside boxes and on card. They were all crowded, but not cluttered, with myth invoking images, like secular votive objects containing spells and poetic energy. Great, I said, I’ll let your collages guide the collage background I make for you.

My real reason for being there, of course, was to draw. While I set to my task, which necessitated this complicity of staring, Alice told me about times when she’d sat for artists in New York in the 1970s, and stories of art and friendships past and present began swirling around the room. I told her about my collaboration-in-progress with Chris McCabe and the ghost of William Blake, and she sang me Blake’s poem “The Tyger”, in the manner of her old mate Allen Ginsberg. Palms held outward, she arrived with a kind of shaboom at the poem’s final word, “symmetry”, arriving at it with dramatic emphasis – that’s the kind of feeling I'm looking for at the end of my own poems, she said, laughing. We talked and paused and talked some more, invoking the dead and the living, exchanging accounts of particular moments in recent times that we’d shared without knowing it, at the gateways between our different worlds.

I loved hearing about her childhood in the Mojave Desert, her mother, who she described as rather relaxed: oh it was way too hot to finish a sentence in the desert! Her sisters and cousins (they came up when my drawings began to resemble them instead of my actual sitter!) her poet sons in New York. .. . In return, I told her about my own family (my own city mother, for one, who, far from relaxed, often started sentences halfway through and expected us to jump in at the lights) and how I come to be doing the things I find myself doing.

The stories we exchanged were surprising: funny sometimes, big, and like all stories connected to reality and memory both true and untrue, completely subjective, as Alice pointed out... poetry’s the only thing that comes close, she said. I found myself crying as well as drawing. Alice! You've made me cry! I said. Well you've made me cry, she said.

Reaching into poetry through drawing, and then having it reach so far into me, this feels like what I went knocking at its inconspicuous door looking for. When I emerged back into the street, still painted spring afternoon blue, though I had come there to make a portrait of her, I had been redrawn as a different person: one that had been AliceNotleyfied.

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