Allen Ginsberg will never raise this body up, go out board a shiny airplane travel
a thousand miles - Denver? - thousands - Milano?
to pump the harmonium -- how ecstatically he does this! - chant OM NAMO SHIVAYA
"all ashes, all ashes again"
Allen Ginsberg will never sit across the street hunched over Chinese noodle bowl,
the old professor stayed up late reading the young poet's poems
Allen Ginsberg will never meditate this body, spine straight to heaven, holding up the roof
of the world on the bright orange cushion
Allen Ginsberg's eyes will never water again -- of tear gas, Bell's palsy, or flow on the
death of a guru, read Blake Shelley lines to freeze your soul & you weep you weep
& the whole Naropa Disembodied Kerouac tent is weeping
Allen Ginsberg will never tell awkward teen boy he's known since birth he's sexy again
from hospital bead, the boy stood at the window while his mother sobbed
because Allen Ginsberg said he's dying today
Allen Ginsberg will never brush this corpse's thin hair, get groomed, oil feet, brush teeth
(he's so conscientious!) mix mushroom leeks & winter squash breakfast again
The telephone rings, Allen Ginsberg will never answer it again
Allen Ginsberg will never embarass China, Russia, the White House, dead corrupt
presidents, Cuba, the C.I.A. Universe again
But Allen Ginsberg will ever ease the pain of living with human song & story again
that's borne on wing's of perpetual prophecy -- life & death's a spiral!
He's mounting the stairs now with Vajra Yogini
Full Century's brilliant Allen's gone, in other myriad forms live on
See through this palpable skull's tender eye, kind mind kind mind don't die!
................................
Written by the poet's bed, at home in his own loft,
his body in repose after
death, Gelek Rinpoche & monks chanting
Chakrasamvara sadhana
April 5, 1997, New York City.
.....................................
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."
....................
Claudia Ricci is an Assistant Director in the School of Public Health and a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department.
http://www.txt.de/spress/author/waldman/
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."
Anne Waldman is a poet & teacher, and with Allen Ginsberg co-founded of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado in 1974. She was born April 2, 1945 in Millville, New Jersey. During the late Sixties she ran the St. Mark's Church Poetry Project, and gave exuberant, highly physical readings of her own work. She was featured along with Ginsberg in Bob Dylan's experimental film 'Renaldo and Clara.'
Waldman is one of the most interesting, vibrant and unpredictable members of the post-Beat poetry community. Her confluence of Buddhist concerns and thought-paths with sources of physicality and anger is particularly impressive. Over the years,she 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 also worked and performed with a number of well-known musicians, composers and dancers. More recently, she has collaborated with many visual artists.
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 III of Iovis.Throughout the poem, Waldman is trying to come to terms with her own male energy and impulses.
Waldman has been acknowledged as a major--and a mature--voice in American poetry. She 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'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.