Adam Cornford & Alice Notley Poetry Reading

Chax presents two of our authors in a reading first featured on Zoom, on February 26, 2023.

Alice Notley, throughout her career, has been one of America’s greatest living poets. She has long written in narrative and epic and genre-bending modes to discover new ways to explore the nature of the self and the social and cultural importance of disobedience. The artist Rudy Burckhardt once wrote that Notley may be “our present-day Homer.” Notley is the author of over 40 books of poetry, including Reason & Other Women, from Chax Press. Her newest & forthcoming books are Runes & Chords (Simon & Schuster), and from Fonograf Editions, Early Works and The Speak Angel Series.

Adam Francis Cornford was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the son of Christopher Cornford and a lineal descendant of naturalist Charles Darwin. Cornford moved to California in 1969. He attended the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he studied with (and was first published by) kayak editor George Hitch*; and San Francisco State University, where his mentor was the Greek surrealist Nanos Valaoritis. Among his books are four collections of poetry: Shooting Scripts (Black Stone Press, 1978); Animations (City Lights Books, 1988), Decision Forest (Pantograph Press, 1997), and Lalia (Chax Press, 2021). For 21 years, Cornford led the Poetics Program at New College of California in San Francisco.

(with apologies, that we did not switch settings to "speaker view" until a couple of minutes after the beginning of Adam Cornford's reading)