Alice Notley

Following its deliberations on Wednesday, April 9, the Hodler Prize Committee is pleased and proud to announce that the Hodler Prize 002 has been awarded in equal shares to Alice Notley for her poetry memoir “Being Reflected Upon” and to Jonathan Coryn for his video game “Player Non Player”. Two impressive texts in terms of narrative innovation, by two authors whose different means of expression embody creative correspondences across categories and generations. Two poems of rupture for the same emotion.

This ever-evolving prize would not be possible without the energy and intellectual input of our committee: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Alice Bucknell, Emanuele Coccia, Precious Okoyomon, Mark Alizart, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Hari Kunzru, Peter Harness, and Tolu Ogunlesi.

As every year, 1 Bitcoin will be shared equally between the winners and the Hodler Prize 002 Committee.

‘In a New York Times review of Alice Notley’s 2007 collection In the Pines, Joel Brouwer wrote that “the radical freshness of Notley’s poems stems not from what they talk about, but how they talk, in a stream-of-consciousness style that both describes and dramatizes the movement of the poet’s restless mind, leaping associatively from one idea or sound to the next.” Notley’s new collection is at once a window into the sources of her telepathic and visionary poetics, and a memoir through poems of her Paris-based life between 2000 and 2017, when she finished treatment for her first breast cancer. As Notley wrote these poems she realized that events during this period were connected to events in previous decades; the work moves from reminiscences of her mother and of growing up in California to meditations on illness and recovery to various poetic adventures in Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, and Edinburgh. It is also concerned with the mysteries of consciousness and the connection between the living and dead, “stream-of-consciousness” teasing out a lived physics or philosophy’ Penguin Books

Title: Being Reflected Upon
Author: Alice Notley
Medium: Book
Publisher: Penguin
Selected both by Hans Ulrich Obrist & Precious Okoyomon