Nick Sturm

Out today: a must-read for anyone interested in po-co literature, law, including environmental law: AESTHETIC IMPROPRIETY: Property Law and Postcolonial Style, by @rosecasey.bsky.social. I loved this book and cannot recommend it enough. Get it!

Larry Fagin's Monteverdi vinyl really goes

New blog post at cupblog.org. Q&A: Daniel Kane on Love, Joe. It includes the cover of Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard. Joe Brainard. Edited by Daniel Kane, and a quote by Daniel Kane.

Joe Brainard was one of the most distinctive figures on New York City’s vibrant cultural scene in the 1960s and 1970s. In this Q&A, Daniel Kane examines how Brainard's letters speak to his artistic life and queer identity. buff.ly/E432Unz #JoeBrainard #PrideReads #PrideMonth

Lindsay Turner on Alice Notley (Waltzing Matilda: "Dec. 12, 1980") Close Readings · Episode

The third and final conversation in a series on the late Alice Notley. I talked with my friend, the poet, translator, and scholar Lindsay Turner, about what it means to be a mother and a poet in Notley’s “Waltzing Matilda.” open.spotify.com/episode/3vyW...

Joyelle McSweeney on Alice Notley (The Descent of Alette) Podcast Episode · Close Readings · 06/11/2025 · 1h 41m

Today, a second conversation about the late Alice Notley. The brilliant poet and critic Joyelle McSweeney joined me to talk about grief and life in the underworld in Notley’s extraordinary epic The Descent of Alette. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

Idk if this is going to reach the right folks, but I’ll be at the SHARP conference in July (Rochester) and happy to chat about our Studies in Print Culture & the History of the Book and/or our Page & Screen series here at @umasspress.bsky.social! Be in touch.

A real privilege to hear @nicksturm.bsky.social open Notley's poetry up the way he does, with all his characteristic devotion & unpretentious brilliance, & to think (and feel) with Nick about the languages of public & private grief, grief owned and grief shared. I'm so glad this podcast is back.

very much looking forward to listening

Nick Sturm on Alice Notley ( Podcast Episode · Close Readings · 09/06/2025 · 2h 3m

so good to see @kjavadizadeh.bsky.social’s Close Readings finally back, & with a beautiful ep on beloved Alice Notley w/ @nicksturm.bsky.social

I was very grateful & very sad during this conversation with @kjavadizadeh.bsky.social about Alice Notley’s “At Night the States.”

Alice Notley, acclaimed voice in American poetry, dies at 79 Widely regarded as one of the finest living American poets, she was a finalist for a 1999 Pulitzer Prize.

www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2...

A really fun type of search! I’ve found the NYPL online finding aids to be sometimes mysterious, so I’d say there’s a chance there’s something there that’s not immediately findable.

@benlibman.bsky.social might have a good lead!

How the far right seeks to spread its ideology through the publishing world Efforts raise questions about the far right’s place in the broader culture wars waged by the Trump administration

Was not expecting this article to reach into the small press poetry world, but of course it does

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Alice Notley, Poet Celebrated for ‘Restless Reinvention,’ Dies at 79

“Alice’s main influence was herself…”

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/b...

TRIBUTE: What have you learned from Alice Notley? In Memory of an Icon. 1945-2025. With Carrie Lorig, Sebastian Castillo, Niina Pollari, Alina Pleskova, Nick Sturm & more.

A few years ago, Alice asked me if I was still writing poems. I responded, no, only critical work. She said, "You're changing your destiny."

Now I've written this poem for Alice.

Thanks to Lucy & Zona Motel for organizing this tribute.

zonamotel.substack.com/p/tribute-wh...

"It's not the way you're taught": from an Interview with Alice Notley — Nick Sturm My interview with Alice Notley, published on the occasion of the release of the vinyl LP Live in Seattle  (Fonograf Editions), was recently published by the Poetry Society of America and can b...

Nick: I wonder what it would look like to collect all of your works together. It would be this 2000-page collected poems. It’d be a suitcase-size book.

Alice: It’d be like a nineteenth century person, like Hugo or Charles Dickens or somebody.

www.nicksturm.com/crystalset/2...

Alice Notley's Magazines — Nick Sturm This digital publishing project seeks to make available fully searchable facsimile PDF editions of the magazines edited by poet Alice Notley. The project currently includes the complete runs of Scarl...

Thanks to the scholarship of @nicksturm.bsky.social, I've spent the morning reading through the various magazines Notley edited between 1972 - 1999. It's our cultural inheritance and reminds me of why I can't help but write the way I do.

www.nicksturm.com/digital-publ...

After you've read it, reply with what your gravestone will say.

Mine: THE PONIES WERE JUST HERE.

Here's an open link to a PDF of the original "Memorial Day" booklet, by Ted Berrigan & Anne Waldman with covers by Donna Dennis, published at The Poetry Project in 1971.

"The sky is dark / The dark is closed"

drive.google.com/file/d/0By56...

so many parts of her work are shared here and I want to bring attention to one I knew about but never quite find time for, the project by @nicksturm.bsky.social of getting all Notley's magazine projects publicly available in pdfs:

“out to lunch” was another one she’d use to great effect

pleased to remember that I can be insane

from my first interview with Alice in 2017 at the Poetry Society

poetrysociety.org/poems-essays...

Alice Notley (1945-2025) - The Allen Ginsberg Project Alice Notley in Allen Ginsberg’s kitchen, New York City, September 1 1986 – photo by Allen Ginsberg (c) The Estate of Allen Ginsberg – Bob Rosenthal notes : “Allen took this picture of Alice who worke...

allenginsberg.org/2025/05/t-m-...

#273 – Summer 2023 > Destined to tear this building down: an interview with Alice Notley, Nick Sturm Conducted over email from June 5 to June 10, 2023

"Nothing disappears, and everything comes back. So I will continue working on my knowledge, my poetry, my stories.... I will be here, or somewhere, the next time anyone comes through."

www.poetryproject.org/publications...

Close Reading Is For Everyone | Defector In Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel The Friend, a famous writer kills himself. Not long before, he complains to the narrator about readers: “People talking about a book as if it were just another thing, like...

Hell yeah. Here's my manifesto: close reading for all.

On Sigrid Nunez, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Erich Auerbach, and why close reading is an answer to AI.

Thanks to @brandyjensen.bsky.social, rockstar editor, who rules. For @defector.com defector.com/close-readin...

Alice Notley passed away Monday night in Paris, where I'm writing from. This will come as a shock to many, but she was battling a number of maladies in recent months, and things had gotten difficult rapidly. Her work is out there. Please feel free to spread the word.

I told Alice about playing a recording of her reading "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower." "Did I cry?" she asked. "You did." She said, "I always cry reading that."