Alice Notley was editor and publisher of CHICAGO Magazine from 1972-1974. She started CHICAGO as soon as she and her partner Ted moved to the city. Notley was “26 years old and pregnant” and “in danger of not becoming a poet”, as she says. The magazine was a way to connect to the literary community as well as a chance to study the poetry of her peers. Notley has been an influential part of the literary scene in New York’s Lower East Side 1970s onwards.
On Her Editing Work
It was hard for me to know what it was like at the time, I was so young and there was so much sexism in the atmosphere. I’ve participated in—edited and co-edited—three magazines now (four if one counts the scurrilous and anarchic mag Caveman), but you are the first person to ask me questions as if I had actually accomplished something in the field. There are other kinds of prejudices involved of course—esthetic, for example.
I finally got all the magazines out from under the bed. They are extraordinarily beautiful and wonderful, and I can’t believe what amazing poets I published. And why have I gotten no credit for this whatsoever? Why doesn’t anyone ever mention them? There were copies of the first six in that show at the New York Public Library—they didn’t even bother to find out there were nine! Is Europe that far away? Why wasn’t I invited to be in the Page Mothers conference, as if I had never edited anything?
On Prevalent Sexism
There were just so few women around, in fact. When I went to Iowa in ‘67—to the fiction workshop—I was the only woman admitted that year. A woman was also admitted into the 79 poetry workshop, and the two of us were a really exceptional event. The previous year a woman had been admitted into fiction and no women into poetry. The problem was, in New York, that the few women might be as bad as the men, I mean as sexist. Everyone was defending some abstract territory. I remember the whole thing as a perpetual gauntlet, except when I was writing. The men never let the women talk […] But if you want to imagine it, imagine everyone being the way the Language Poet men still are (or some of these newer, mostly male “movements”)—totally territorial, but imagine them without their concomitantly acknowledging that some women poets are important. […] At that time women poets were considered to be girls pretending to be poets. However, the magazine was a place where you could get a little power since men wanted to be in All the magazines. Anne Waldman, Maureen Owen, and I were all editing legal-sized magazines at around the same time, and there was a reason for that!
