Anne Waldman: A Profile by Claudia Ricci

Anne Waldman: A Profile by Claudia Ricci

In the history of modern performance poetry, Anne Waldman's
contributions would fill the introduction and at least the first three
chapters.

Thirty years ago, Waldman began arranging poetry readings in Manhattan
at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. Over the next dozen years, she
brought hundreds and hundreds of poets from all over the world to New
York to read and perform at the church.

"Ms. Waldman... presided over the St. Mark's scene as some combination
of oracle, siren and den mother," The New York Times noted in 1993.
Besides feeding and promoting the public's growing appetite for
poetry, the St. Mark's program also served as an important historical
bridge between the New York beat poetry scene of the 1950s and
movements that followed. Among Waldman's regular early readers at St.
Mark's were beat poets Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gregory
Corso. But 70's punk poets Patti Smith and Lou Reed have also read, as
have members of the new generation of poets writing in what the Times
calls "punk-intensive, form-splattering verbal styles."

The St. Mark's program went far to help revive the notion that poetry
is an oral--and a public--art. To be fully appreciated, a poem must
lift off the page and enter the public arena as theatrical event
and/or public ritual.

"Of all the poets of my generation, none has done more than Anne
Waldman to bring poetry before the public at large," concluded poet
Aram Saroyan, writing of Waldman and her poetry in The New York Times
in 1976.

At the same time she was promoting the work of other poets, Waldman
herself emerged in the 1970s as a reader-performer of her own poetry.
She quickly gained a reputation for wildly spirited readings.

"Waldman's poems are a kind of high-energy shorthand, elliptical
brain-movies of her life and times," Saroyan noted. Speaking of her
performance piece "Fast-Speaking Woman," Saroyan said that Waldman's
hypnotically repetitive chants "bring to mind tribal shaman
ceremonies."

Over the years, Waldman has worked her magic on audiences throughout
the United States and around the world, giving poetry readings in
Germany, England, Italy, Scotland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, The
Netherlands, Bali, India, Nicaragua and Canada. She has frequently
appeared with Allen Ginsberg and has read with Gary Snyder, Diane di
Prima, William Burroughs, Kenneth Koch and Clark Coolidge, among other
poets. Waldman has also worked and performed with a number of
well-known musicians, composers and dancers. More recently, she has
collaborated with many visual artists.

In 1978, when Waldman left her position as director of the Poetry
Project at St. Mark's, she joined forces with Allen Ginsberg to found
the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute
in Boulder, Colorado. She now directs the MFA writing and poetics
program there.

Her list of publications is voluminous. She has written more than 42
books, most recently Kill or Cure (Penguin Poets) and her book-length
poem, Iovis (Coffee House Press). She is now working on Book II of
Iovis.

With the publication of Iovis, Waldman has been acknowledged as a
major--and a mature--voice in American poetry. In the 336-page epic,
Waldman delves deeply into the masculine soul and its sources of
energy. Her goal: to speak against, about, around and through the
all-pervasive forces of Western patriarchy and its many
manifestations. Waldman invokes a myriad of male voices in the poem,
including those of her grandfather, her son, and male deities from
other cultures. Throughout the poem, Waldman is trying to come to
terms with her own male energy and impulses.

"There are many references to war and weaponry in the poem's weave,"
Waldman noted in an interview last year. "The act of the poem helped
me make sense of--or clarify--my own outrage at aggression or my own
aggression. Everything happening seemed to be grist for the poem."

In part to demonstrate the all-pervasive force of patriarchy
worldwide, Waldman includes numerous languages in the poem. Besides
English, she writes in Greek, Spanish, French, Italian, German,
Balinese, Indonesian, Mayan, Czech, Sanskrit and Gaelic.

"I wish there were even more languages in it," Waldman says. "I have
them in my ear when I'm traveling... when I travel in Germany, there
are these sounds that I don't understand, but there's a deep male
gruffness and intellectual superiority that I want to capture, and
maybe in the next book I'll play with that a little more, have longer
text in some other languages. I'm working on a section in Iovis II
called 'Lacrimare, Lacrimatus' with Latin phrases."

In the end, Waldman takes an antagonistic position toward the male
energy she explores in Iovis. But that antagonism is complex, noted a
Gary Allen in The Bloomsbury Review. Waldman's take on feminism avoids
a simple "good girl/bad guy" point of view. Hers, instead, is a
many-layered "tantric approach derived from the poet's Buddhist
perspectives," said Allen. "Rather than reject the [male] energy out
of hand, one invites it in and experiences it in as undiluted a
fashion as possible, desiring thereby to liberate it from the
artificial constructs placed on it by egotism.

"Her strategy, instead of seeking to empower the female side by
dwelling on women or calling down goddesses, is to explore the
masculine in every conceivable manifestation, piling up innumerable
correspondences and oblique angles into a large, male energy mandala
which the poet then inhabits, struggles with, surrenders to, etc."

She has, in Iovis, managed to produce, according to The New York
Times, "an engrossing poem in which ideological axes do not grind in
the background. She's the fastest, wisest woman to run with the wolves
in some time."

In earlier work, Waldman explores the joys of motherhood. Her "First
Baby Poems" include a brisk "Number Song," a play on the numbers game
that generates and accompanies the procreative act:

I've multiplied, I'm 2.
He was part of me
he came out of me,
he took a part of me
He took me apart.
I'm 2, he's my art,
no, he's separate.
He art one. I'm not
done & I'm still one.
I sing of my son. I've
multiplied. My heart's
in 2, half to him & half
to you,
who are also a part
of him, & you & he
& I make trio of
kind congruity.

Reaching into the voice of an infant, Waldman attempts to record in
"Baby's Pantoum" the kind of moment-by-moment, "always changing"
consciousness that closely observes the small detail of life:

I lie in my crib midday this is
unusual I don't sleep really
Mamma's sweeping or else boiling water for tea
Other Sounds are creak of chair & floor, water
dripping on heater from laundry, cat licking itself

In her newest long poem, Iovis II, Waldman says she is continuing the
exploration she began in Iovis. Now, however, she has shifted gears;
that is, she is writing to explore not male, but female energy. In so
doing, the widest possible set of themes has opened up for her, all of
which center on the confusion of roles that confront a woman poet in
the final years of the twentieth century.

"The opening section is entitled 'So Help Me Sappho,"' Waldman says.
"[It is] an invocation of sorts. There's absolute chaos in my own
mind, much of the time, and I continue to write this poem to make
sense of the chaos, without achieving any particular goal. The chaos
of patriarchy, of being daughter, mother, lover, rainbow-skinned
Tantric deity, of being passionately in love with the dazzling violent
phones and phonemes of, speech, of mind into language, which is why
the poem is in the shape of a spiral."

Waldman's goal for her poetry is simple, and yet anything but simple
to achieve. She says, in effect, that what she is attempting to do on
the page is to give readers not "a refined gist" or "an extrapolation"
of feeling, thought and emotion, but an actual "experience" of "a high
moment." In effect, Waldman is attempting to bring to poetry on the
page the same kind of immediacy and sense of immersion that she brings
to her poetry, in public performance.

"I want [my poetry] to be the experience... a sustained experience, a
voyage, a magnificent dream, something that would take you in myriad
directions simultaneously, and you could draw on all of these other
voices and you could pay homage to ancestors and other languages--a
poem that would include everything and yet dwell in the interstices of
imagination and action."

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Claudia Ricci is an Assistant Director in the School of Public Health
and a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department.*