Renée Olander | March/April 2013

Anne Waldman

EXCERPT

Elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2011, Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community for more than four decades as writer, Sprechstimme performer, professor, editor, magpie scholar, and cultural/political activist, and she has been associated with both the Beat movement and the second generation New York School. Her published work is prodigious, over forty books, and she has concentrated on the long poem with projects such as Manatee/Humanity (Penguin 2009), a book-length meditation on evolution and endangered species, Marriage: A Sentence (Penguin 2000), Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble (Penguin 2004), and a thousand-page epic, Iovis Trilogy: “Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment” (Coffee House, 2011), which won the USA PEN Center Sward for Poetry, 2012. Her chapbooks include Skin Meat Bones, In The Room of Never Grieve, and the legendary Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, 1974), now translated into Italian, Czech, French, and Spanish. Waldman is editor of The Beat Book (Shambhala Publications) and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books), Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (Coffee House), and Beats at Naropa (Coffee House, 2009). A longtime student of Buddhism, she co-translated Songs of the Sons & Daughters of Buddha (Shambhala Publications, 1996). Waldman is recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and has served as fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, as well as in residency at the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy. A co-founder of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University in 1974, Waldman continues to serve as Artistic Director of its Summer Writing programs. Waldman also performs with her son, musician and composer Ambrose Bye; their collaborative works include the CD Matching Half with Akilah Oliver (Farfalla Press and Fast Speaking Music 2008), and The Milk of Universal Kindness (2011). Her new book is Gossamurmur (Penguin Poets, 2013).

Renée Olander: Given your writing and publishing life spanning more than five decades, from the publication of Fast Speaking Woman by City Lights to Manatee/Humanity and The Iovis Trilogy: Colors In The Mechanism Of Concealment—what evolutions have occurred in your work, and what has been steady or constant?

Anne Waldman: What has been steady is a curiosity about the efficacies and power of language and making my own poetry that wants to stay kinetic, responding to a number of realities as I witness and experience them. There’s a sense of wanting to interject, interrupt, and intervene on the culture in some imaginative and progressive way. I always think of William Carlos Williams’s sense that poets and artists have to move the century forward a few inches. With that dictum in mind, in my case there’s a propulsion or invitation toward other, toward outside as a reciprocating possibility, as well as a response to what lights my own mind. I have boundless curiosity about gnosis, about magic, about other cultures’ poetic traditions, including the oral and performative traditions. I think my work reflects an engagement with the sound and layered sense of what is going on in my own psyche as well as what I discover in my field investigations. But beyond that there’s a sense of being linked up to other continuums of spirited poetry-making, strange as that may sound; that I’m part of a thrust that’s been going on for centuries. How many millennia of aspiration and longing have passed since we developed our larynx as human beings? The larynx propelled a way of using sound and imagination to reflect, articulate, intervene—you know we’re not just communicating. So I guess that would be the overall idea of an ongoing poetics. And that poetry can wake one up and wake up the world to its own richness.

“Evolution” would be the shifts and demands of various projects over the years. And the context one works within. So there’s myself as a child growing up in the extraordinary environment, Greenwich Village, and still astonished I can be here after all this time and feel a sense of continuity and thread and purpose. And adjacent to and part of an artistic milieu, which was quite exciting whether it’s Bob Dylan performing down the street, or Djuna Barnes coming out of her apartment on Patchin Place near where I took French lessons, or Gregory Corso, poète maudit, finding his way home in the dark. And hearing Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore read their poetry at NYU. All the music activity in the coffee shops, in the folk and political protest movements—my brother was a part of that, convening in Washington Square, and having parents who were bohemian and who had been part of this artistic milieu. So I am grateful for my environment, and the stimulation, and the desire to rise to its occasion, something like that—and that artistic endeavor was valued and of course the political thrust as well. It seemed odd to hide under our desks clutching our dog tags during nuclear “drills.” What could a child do to fight this horror of nuclear holocaust? I think becoming a poet relates to some of the above. It was a way of being within and attuned to a complex ever-changing reality. And a belief that there was power in language and in poetry.

But I’d say the work matured at certain points—especially when I became committed to longer texts—an organic process as well—as with Fast Speaking Woman, inspired by the oral tradition of Maria Sabina and others. Travels to South America and India in the early 1970s were important, and subsequent investigations into Indonesian oral and ritual practices and into Shamanism and Buddhism propelled the work forward. But I also felt the potential for a more engaged and exploratory female stance and took Hèléne Cixious’s sense of “writing the body” as permission.

So again, rising to the occasion, Journals And Dreams included these extended, more journalistic pieces, embedding dream and certain kinds of language exploration, stream-of-consciousness if you will, associative, longer-lined “clusters”—trying to capture the simultaneity of my experience, and the investigative/travel/dream/hypnogogic work, practices also continuing into the pieces in Kill Or Cure. And I was evolving also, in performance, my modal structures and practice of Sprechstimme.

The most ambitious cumulative project, however, is The Iovis Trilogy, finally, the complete epikos, twenty-five years in the making—which began in the mid-1980s, when I decided I wanted to explore this ancient form from the female perspective. The view was that only men write epics, and epics are about war and male heroism, the tales of the tribe, the deeds of the great warriors, et cetera. So I wanted to play against these dominant tropes. It was a challenge, a gauntlet thrown up to the masters of war—I would create this rhizome-collage of the traveling scribe field poet, investigating my time and these particular decades of war born when my father was still in Germany fighting Nazis and then going through Korea, Vietnam—the Cold War, which you know, didn’t solve anything, and Iraq, Afghanistan. So again, to rise to the occasion of the epic form and its particular demands and invert and subvert themes, and have the poem reflect other times as well and other interventions, other speakers, other histories, other cultures. It’s a meditation on gender, on impermanence, on being a mother, a lover, a wife, an orator, a seer. So playing with all that, and it’s a thousand pages of hybrid form, superimposition, cut-up, dialogues, film scripts, montage-like work, and a lot of documentation as well, and it’s structured in chapters or cantos.

And I feel participatory in these wars, karmic-ally—I’ve never been inside a war aside from the culture wars—I know people who have, so it’s kind of this bystander/witness “negative capability” stance. But it is the subtext in all our lives. I’ve been in troubled zones, passing through Beirut in the ’60s, in India during various strikes and bans, in Nicaragua during the Contra war. When I went to Vietnam first in 2000, it was a pilgrimage, because I was part of this history, and I wanted to see the fruition of, as they call it over there, the American War. I was primarily in the North, and one of the shocking realities was that there were no people my own age, no one of my own generation, so many had perished. There were people born after the war who were wonderfully warm and open and welcoming, and I kept saying to these friends, “How can you be so kind and generous?” They desperately want to move forward, get on with it, and of course like any country that’s survived that kind of loss, the hopes and fears of the survivors and those coming after are complicated, and they’re caught in a master narrative that even with hindsight can’t be undone. I mean, the whole misunderstanding on the American side was Viet Nam’s relationship with China. That was completely misread or not misread, but suppressed for our own ends. And now we have the resonance with Iraq and Afghanistan. The deceit and lies and genocide that can’t be undone. The irreparable loss. And I saw very old people, elderly people who are damaged, psychologically out of their minds, or wounded, crippled, beggars—people twenty years older than myself, and then very young people. So that was a very powerful experience. I try to explore some of this in the section of Iovis, “Dark Arcana: Afterimage or Glow.”

Olander: Could you talk more about what has spurred your “investigations” that have resulted in the book-length poems?

Waldman: Structure Of The World Compared To A Bubble, another investigative piece, was inspired by a pilgrimage to the Buddhist Stupa in Java—the Borobudur Stupa. It’s a Buddhist reliquary that’s also a mandala you circle, maybe five kilometers, and you circumambulate around it on an upward trajectory, “reading” the carvings along the walls that are Buddhist sutras—various tales of spiritual journeys—until you arrive at the top. It’s a little bit like hell at the lower realms, you’re ascending toward a kind of liberation; I thought of Dante’s Comedia naturally. The poem includes explications of Mudras, with illustrations, and a sense of a gong continually striking, so when I verbalize this it’s a penetrating ripple-effect sound: “Gong—ong -ong -ong -ong -ong -ong -ong.” It has a glossary of Buddhist terms. Thus, it’s a didactic more “logopoeia” (Ezra Pound’s “dance of the intellect” category) piece, tracking what is called the Mahayana or Bodhisattva path. Again, it was a project I felt “called” to do—like Iovis and Manatee/Humanity, which was sparked by meeting a Manatee in a Florida aquarium. Structure of the World began as a pilgrimage, but the site of reclamation was also a psychology, a cosmology, a way of thinking, a philosophical language journey.

And Marriage: A Sentence is also a long serial poem moving between prose and poetry in a duet mode. I started it in a Naropa class as an assignment to work with the Haibun, the Japanese prose poem form—and it began “Marriage marriage is like you say everything everything in stereo stereo fall fall on the bed bed at dawn dawn because you work work all night night,” and my class said, “It’s funny, you should keep going.” So the longer poems—that’s the evolution. It’s probably more of a challenge currently for me to write short, individual, discrete poems. They seem so lonely by themselves. The trajectory has been towards these long, investigative, circuitous narrative poems, all within the context of continuing the Iovis project, the great mothership, for quite some time. I think of them as narrative, because they include narrations of my own psyche and interests and obsessions, and sense of ritual which involves procedure and layerings until you arrive at the inner sanctum!

Olander: So you’ve worked on Iovis for twenty-five years and meanwhile published other books, including book-length poems, but there are also shorter poems, for instance the Emma Goldman poem “Corset”—could you talk about process there? Can you say more about how many writing projects you conduct concurrently?

Waldman: “Corset” is a Gertrude Stein-like tribute to Emma Goldman where I demonize J. Edgar Hoover. Goldman worked in a corset factory as a teenager.

Concurrently, in addition to proofing Iovis, I was working on a CD with my own texts, writing a script for a small opera, and editing a new anthology based on transcripts from The Jack Kerouac School Archive at Naropa. Yes, all the projects overlap in some ways, but they’re also discrete, and I think I get lost in their distinct worlds. Iovis might have taken less time, but then it wouldn’t have had the expanse of the epic. It’s dedicated to my son, Ambrose, who was probably four or five when I started, and I wanted it to be a history lesson for him and track his life as well. He’s the guide, or Virgil, the child’s voice that interrupts the poem periodically. And there’s the wonderful Coleridge quote where, talking about the epic poem, he says it takes ten years to study and gather information, and ten years to write it. Manatee/Humanity came as a kind of Satori, if you will, a kind of flash, and I became very committed to that project, three years in the making, moving in and out of it. I felt such a deep connection to this nonhuman elemental, this highly evolved order of being that was being removed from the endangered species list. There was an urgency to the task. Sometimes I have periods of retreat where I just focus on my own work, often too short, but I’m able to put other demands aside. But ultimately you have to rely on that initial impulse, your passion toward the poem, wherever you are, to keep you going, and to recreate that propulsion toward the vision, and then let it play out—there’s no master plan here. My principal writing places are New York and Boulder, Colorado, but I’m also taking notes on airplanes and the like.

Olander: How do you know when a project’s done?

Waldman: Well, that was hard with Manatee/Humanity—I kept wanting more codas, and then I found a document of a manatee encounter in the water. I didn’t have my own personal encounter swimming with manatee; I had swum with dolphins in Indonesia, yet I wanted someone confirming that experience, a genuine account, and so that helped ground and end the poem which had also been off in dream-conversation worlds with a continuing morphing “deity,” and a three-day ritual structure. Codas are like afterthoughts, like the gong fading into a larger spatial sphere. The dreams helped because the conversation I was having with a friend in the poem, that voice started to morph and become more like the animal’s sounds. So there was the sense of blending and moving forward to a meeting of human mind with manatee mind. The three-day Buddhist ritual, where you’re also getting into levels you don’t even understand—there’s the outer/inner secret, so the secret is almost beyond words in a way—driving the narrative and perhaps getting too abstract. So the coda/appendix brought the dynamic back into focus. Marriage: A Sentence, could be read multiple ways and perhaps end where it begins. Iovis ends with an encounter with a rattlesnake and a vision, yet each chapter (I think there are seventy-five in all) has its own logic and inherent form. I think I have been working lately with my ecological vow to “include the animal.”

Olander: In an interview with Randy Roark (1991), he asks about whether your poems are “circling around” an idea rather than “progressing forward,” and you say you usually feel you’re “propelling forward.”

Waldman: I feel it physically. Maybe that impulse toward performance—projecting outward. The language thrust out of the larynx. But the inherent structures and ideas are actually quite circular; I have invoked the circularity of, for example, Balinese Hindu art and ritual which recognizes that time is more of a spiral and not a strict linear narrative. Ritual is of course something—an act, a gesture, a song—re-done. I also appreciate postmodern ways of working, as with film—cutting, splicing, superimposition, montage, and you can play back and repeat, and speed up, and you can go to the last place and make it the first place and so on. And there’s indeterminancy, chance operation and the example of John Cage. There’s also the fragment, the shard, the particulars, small phones and phonemes that can be moved around. And also a nonattachment to the so-called message of the work. The poem has to operate on its own terms once it’s liberated from your clutches. I think it’s a combination, there’s a sense of playing out, of movement and development. I start somewhere—the first gesture. But as I tell students, you can let go of where you begin. The Iovis project, for example, you can enter at almost any point, because, as I’ve said, there are almost self-contained chapters or cantos. But because of the narrative of the life, starting in the ‘80s and going up to the present, there’s a timeframe there that you can call relative reality, not absolute reality, which is nonlinear, but there are pieces that arc, that can be read in different ways and interrupted and played with and recombined, and I enjoy that. That’s the way I read myself—often from the middle out backwards and forwards.

But concerning the notion of the more circular forms—the term I like to use is “consociational”; which comes from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz—he speaks of consociational time. For example, you and I are in consociational time—you’re younger than I am, we’re intersecting now, we intersected in Mérida, we intersected in Norfolk, and we have this relationship that intersects at these continuing points; and I’m on a different point in my body’s timeframe; we’re living in different time zones or places; and yet we have connected, and we are also intersecting with every other life form, whether it’s a plant or animal you live with, encounter on the street, in a park. There are all the intersections with the people in your neighborhood when you go shopping, the public spaces, the people in your job—we’re all on these little wheels, birth through death, operating at different speeds yet related through our intended or chance encounters. I’m going this way, and you’re going faster, and we’re bumping up against the trajectory of one’s whole life going around and around. And it dissolves, at some point, or maybe goes into some other form. But we’ve had a spark of some kind. So it’s like Indra’s Net—and the web of the Internet, although in that case it might be purely virtual. The Buddhist term is pratiya samutpada which translates as co-arising and the interconnectedness of everything. So I’d like to think that the work also has that kind of vast reality; it’s got its own timeframe, it’s reflecting me, but isn’t me as such, and the me there is a construct, even the field poet, the woman you would encounter, the psyche that you’re traveling with; The Iovis Trilogy is a conglomeration of tendencies, which is sort of the Buddhist definition of what we are—we’re individually these conglomeration of tendencies.

Olander: There’s wide-ranging diction in your work, and you reference all kinds of world literature as well as science, Buddhism, and multiple languages, for instance in both Iovis and Manatee/Humanity—have you studied many languages? And do you worry about accessibility for readers?

Waldman: Well, I’ve come to other languages primarily through reading—the only language I’ve really studied is French. It came in handy on a trip to Egypt in the 1960s. It was more of the lingua franca for study and travel in my generation. I can read some Spanish but not speak or write; I’ve gotten some Tibetan and Sanskrit very minimally through studies in Buddhism at Naropa. I worked as a co-translator—and as a poet one talks of “versions” and can work with others who have the language—on the Songs of the Sons and Daughters of Buddha, based on oral poems from the Pali Canon. Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble provides a glossary as does the book Trobaritz. Sanskrit is a whole world, an entire cosmology I draw on quite a bit. I try to embed the subtext or a translation of the various phrases in IOVIS, whether it’s Latin, Greek, Tibetan, German, or Mayan. But it’s also interesting as a reader to hunt down some of the meanings. One has had to do that with Pound or Charles Olson. Or consider Marianne Moore’s animal vocabulary.

“Iovis,” Latin, is the generative form of Jove, of Zeus. I wanted the patriarch in there, and wanted to use the Roman form, as I was using Rome as a trope for empire in the poem, and there’s a line from Frank O’Hara, “I adore the Roman copies,” referring to the statues. I got the title out of Virgil from doing one of those “Sortes Virgilinae,” chance operations. You open a copy of Virgil at random and put your finger down, and see what word or phrase you land on, and that becomes a marker for further exploration. The phrase I got was “Iovis Omnia Plena,” “all is full of Jove,” and that seemed funny to me—as I was embarking on it, because it’s really Jove’s/Zeus’s sperm that’s the problem with the Patriarchy. The Patriarch is constantly making love to these morphing creatures that are swans and trees, and also impregnating the entire planet with the seeds of war. Huge amounts of weaponry to Saudi Arabia is just one example, and it goes on and on, the war machine, the making of the weapons, the money deals, the fix being in, and constantly selling this stuff to our enemies, who we’ve created in the first place to perpetuate this dynamic, which you can get very powerful and wealthy upon. That’s what the warring god realm does—it creates enemies, so it can juice up its own power and wealth. And it psychologically needs to have an enemy—so this mindset is totally juiced up, Zeused-out, juiced with all that, power—that needs to keep propagating and promoting itself.

Olander: In Andrei Codrescu’s piece, “Who’s Afraid of Anne Waldman,” which he delivered in Ann Arbor, and you were present when he read it…

Waldman: Yes—he delivered that as a Keynote at this symposium in my honor at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor, which holds my literary Archive. It was kind of astonishing and stunning, and embarrassing—all those things.

Olander: In the poem, Codrescu calls you, “Anne the Founding Father”—and that remark—the difference between being a “founding father” and a “founding mother”—it seems a way of both elevating you and reducing the feminine. Could you talk about your sense of feminism in this context?

Waldman: My view would be: “Both/Both.” I embrace the Negative Capability of being able to live within contradictions, multiple directions, the ten or eleven directions of space, acting simultaneously, also the sense that male and female energy takes forms beyond gender. I don’t think Andrei meant it in a belittling way. He was probably thinking of the old outdated heroic sense of the male poets—leaders, founders—from the last century. We know that gender is a construct. One might have a dose of upaya—or so-called masculine energy or the skillful means to make things happen, to have leadership or whatever it is, to be an organizer, an infra-structure poet, and so on. And if you look at so-called feminine energy, prajna which is about nurturing and environment, that’s part of it too and perhaps the more transcendent and radical in these times. But actual people are more complex than these dichotomies. The history and political and social record is dismal toward women, however, and the struggle for rights and equality continues all over the world. And women and children are still the most vulnerable in places of war. I consider Iovis a feminist tract.

I am connected to other women writers in spirit, for the larger instance of having to carry all the genders and offspring, too—into the world. Because they have had the burden of neglect or struggle to be heard. But I extend this to the gay, bi, transgendered realms too. Gertrude Stein and H.D. both had a modicum of masculine traits. But it was our predecessors and the women of my generation—the “founding mothers,” who opened the floodgates for investigative writing. And more experimental and aural structures. Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukyser, Barbara Guest, Joanne Kyger, Diane di Prima, Susan Howe, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, and many more. Great “vocal” elders such as Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, and Jayne Cortez. Such a contrast to the guys.

Olander: What about the guys—for instance, William Burroughs, widely considered to be a misogynist?

Waldman: I do remember being not inhibited exactly, but wary on first meeting William Burroughs, having known his disdain for women, his accidental killing of his own wife [Joan Vollmer Burroughs], and The Job Interviews promoting this idea of children being created and born out of men’s assholes, that you really don’t need women. But I admired the cut-up techniques in his work and his almost scientific investigation of language as a “killer virus,” and we became friends, and he taught at Naropa. And I appreciated his paranoid and witty almost Dickensian view in work and in life. I had to dissuade my former schoolmate, the feminist Andrea Dworkin, from protesting and boycotting William’s first reading at St Mark’s Poetry Project. But I’ll take it as something I can investigate, being a “founding father.” I’m also referred to in one of Burroughs’s dreams in his Dreambook—published after he died—as “Mother Naropa”—“take your problems to Mother Naropa”—in his dream, the “mother” will fix it all, the sense of the mother, which has this kind, amusing overtone as well. So for Burroughs I’m a “Mother.” But I’ve learned from all my elders and also served my male elders from Edwin Denby to Ted Berrigan, to Allen Ginsberg, to Philip Whalen, and Amiri Baraka…

Olander: “Served” them?

Waldman: I included them in my world-view; I included their writing in my own alchemical laboratory in my work building poetry communities at St Mark’s Poetry Project and at Naropa and at the Schule fur Dichtung in Vienna, and in my anthologies. I felt it was important to keep the so-called New American Poetry moving forward—this was for me the more radical, adventuresome, experimental path. And so many of those initial figures—Creeley, Duncan, and so on, were guys and helped articulate a new poetics. But as Robert Duncan shows us in The H.D. Book, women were at the epicenter. The women coming after had a lot to build on. Also, we serve the people we love…

I roomed with Allen Ginsberg as we were founding the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University, which was supposed to be a hundred-year project at least—we spent years on this together. He could be quite domestic and motherly. We were arrested together protesting Rocky Flats and spent three months at a Buddhist seminary together. And traveled together giving readings in France, Italy, Holland, Canada, and the UK. We traveled together in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue and taught workshops together. He called me his spiritual wife… I was with him at Beth Israel Hospital right before he died as he was giving his generous final wishes about how we should save our Naropa audio archive and take care of our poet-friends. Strong bonds. I’m just relieved the communities I’ve been close to have been on a creative path and not killing one another. I’m not into the poetry wars, the factionalism of various coteries or schools. The imagination can do better than this.

Olander: I’ve read that once when Ginsberg was asked about why few women were known among the so-called Beats, he responded that essentially there were just no women doing serious work then…

Waldman: Well, that’s shortsighted and ridiculous. I think he changed his mind about diPrima and Joanne Kyger later on. I think his gaze toward men, the male body, male sexuality, and what he perhaps saw as male intellect, his obsession, clouded his view. But it’s also not categorical, not one situation. I think he wasn’t aware of some of the work that was going on by women in the ’50s, certainly the open form, diaristic accounts of Bonnie Bremser, of Diane di Prima, Hettie Jones, and Joyce Johnson until later, and when I went out to the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, the only woman participant was Lenore Kandell, who’s Love’s Body is, you know, an energetic push on the culture about the female body, and so it’s very sexually open—but it’s not major consistent work. I think that’s what Allen expected he wanted to see women being: confessional, showing their stuff—a counterpart to himself.

Olander: Howl away…

Waldman: But this was ages ago. I would scold: “Allen, you don’t say ‘girls,’ you say ‘women,’” in the early days—but he was also so extraordinarily supportive, generous, respectful of the work; he would critique—he liked this, or he’d find something too obscure. When I first read, very early on, “Crack in the World”: “I see the crack in the world, my body sees it, sees the gaping crack in the world, body send your rivers to the moon,” and so on, or, “you men you came out of me, back off,” I called it a dementia menses piece—it was so electric, and people would come up afterward, young guys, and he would say, “I’m so jealous of that poem.” And I said, “Allen, in your next life you’re coming back as a woman, you’ll have your big chance.” But he evolved in his attitudes….

Olander: What’s the influence of performing your poems on your writing—does the anticipation of reading or giving readings influence how your work appears on the page?

Waldman: Sometimes. I couldn’t work in just the left-hand margin or more Germanic capitalization. I had an impulse to play on the page, and play in the space of orality, and I still search for the ultimate form that can do everything I want it to be doing in public space—perhaps IOVIS comes closest, but this is also why I think I work collaboratively with musicians and filmmakers and am working on a libretto now for many voices.             

But I would say, yes, some of the writing is intended for performance or arises out of, and some other pieces are quite dense in a way. There are hundreds of pages of Iovis I’d never think to read aloud—I mean, they can be extracted from, and that’s been done, for instance with Ambrose’s music and with some other composers. Trying them out publically will influence how they are on the page, and because I tend to read quickly, I will run things together that weren’t necessarily meant to be run together; there’s a section of Iovis: “If You Had Three Husbands,” which is a line borrowed from Gertrude Stein, that seemed to want to be in prose, and I tried to read it publicly, and I couldn’t get through it. And then there are these more prosaic, more didactic sections; there’s quoted material from family letters, tracts from other writers, a letter from a neuroscientist on the nature of memory. There’s a constant “Dear Anne” motif that comes into the text, and sometimes those seem relevant to read, and take part of my voice, the voice of the character in the poem. It varies—some of the ideas for modal structures come orally—I hear them before I see them as words. I like the notion of dynamic shifts of attention or mood—one example would be in the story-telling narrative, it gets to a point where the emotion is so strong, whoever it is in the “I,” the character, the voice, the psyche in the text needs to break into song. The emotion, or the reality, or the combination of these energies coming together has to explode into a wilder form, an interjection; it seems to be a requirement to articulate the energy through sound, and then you can come back to the narration. You see that in story-telling traditions, someone will shift the frequency; it’s as if the energy has to go in this other direction momentarily, and that direction is also more impacted, more loaded. Then there’s also the simple anaphora, repetition, litany, the chant form, which is a ritual form, which builds improvisation-ally. There’s a section in Manatee/Humanity where I jump back and forth between two columns to create a disjuncture of simultaneity.

The Borobudur book, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, was written and shaped for the page—I have not read much from this text. But there’s one section called “Warring God Realm,” that actually uses the vocabulary of—not the Star Wars movie—but the Reagan Star Wars plan for outer space, and the terminology sounds like comic book “speak”: “destructo robot”—they actually have these terms, and I play this section out in “my destructo robot voice” in my “metal detector voice,” and so I want that crazed megalomaniacal voice to enter into this text because I am trying to vocalize and expose the psychology of the warring god realm.

And with Manatee/Humanity—I like the idea of reading the whole book aloud so you get the sense of the journey and moving into watery realms of another kind of consciousness. Ambrose has created music for some of the more oral sections as well. He integrates the voice of the manatee in one litany section, which is similar in sound to the humpback whale.

Olander: As a poet who really gives a performance, I mean, it’s an event—do you ever have concerns that a strong performance by a writer can backfire, or somehow fuel the idea that the work is weak on the page, or needs some dramatic presentation?

Waldman: Not really. Because what I do is organic to the imagination of the writing. I’m always getting this—again, I invoke the “Both/Both,” you know—what is this strange dichotomy, this necessity to choose or limit oneself? I don’t worry about it; I don’t rehearse as such. Ambrose and I discuss what we’re doing, the order—we work that out, and Ambrose is particular, he wants me in on time, and the pieces have a certain duration. But they’re not memorized, so it’s not theatrical in that sense; or I think they leave room for a variety ways of doing them, it’s not always the same. He doesn’t like me to get too histrionic or raging. When I performed for you at Old Dominion University, I felt the energy and nuance in the room, the atmosphere there was very open, I could go with it freely, although I was sweating, and then a little concerned about the, you know…

Olander: “Stupid fuckers” passage from Manatee/Humanity since there were public school students there?

Waldman: Yes, but that section is addressing the future of these kids who are inheriting a world destroyed by fun-hogs! But I was also appreciating that it was such a wide span of generations on the whole. I was inside the work as I was doing it not in a trance exactly, but to have the vision of this poem re-enacted, so it’s a combination of things, the environment, the situation, just wanting the sound to be the best it can be. And also that you’re standing in a place that makes sense, that there’s attention and that the public space is synchronized, and that Ambrose’s computer isn’t breaking down.

Olander: What’s the impact of collaboration, especially with your son, on your work?

Waldman: Collaboration is something I’ve been involved with for years—it arises out of friendship, really—with other poets, visual artists, musicians, dancers. I see Naropa as a collaboration with Allen Ginsberg, until he died, and with all the other writers who struggle to keep the poetics program going, and I always enjoyed working with Steve Lacy, extraordinary jazz player and composer. Steven Taylor, who was also Allen’s accompanist and a colleague at Naropa for many years, we’re now working on a little opera I call a “Poundatorio.” But Ambrose, who grew up in the environment of the Kerouac School, heard poetry from the womb, and is so sensitive to its nuance, not that he’s some scholar of poetry—but he heard so much of it in this oral way that he is a rare collaborator for me. There’s a sensibility, a level we can really get to in this work together, that’s supportive, I mean, it’s not always smooth, we negotiate and there are different ways that we work, but there’s a kind of parallel reality that indicates we can come together. So it’s a matter of listening; I think we do really well as mother and son in terms of how we listen to each other in the work, often better than we do in our heated conversations. So just trusting, and I’m also interested in his—this is not necessarily familiar music to me; I grew up with very classical music, and a lot of folk music, a lot of my own generation’s music, but I am interested in his ambitious soundscapes, a continuum that supports poetry and language and imagination. And so I see it as a kind of ongoing experiment.

Olander: Is collaborating with Ambrose different from working with others?

Waldman: I’d say there’s a more emotional texture, especially with the Manatee project, that chant of the mother with her “just one manatee offspring” and there are points where he’ll sing—and it just sends these shivers through me, that sense of the continuity of connection that you can’t verbalize exactly—it’s on a level of creativity and pure sound, right? From the heart and gut. They say after you die, you can still hear, that hearing is the last sense to go—that’s the Buddhist view, that’s why you read from the Tibetan Book of the Dead to a corpse—in terms of the different sense perceptions working their way out of the body, there’s a sense of the senses dying down, closing down; you don’t immediately “die,” your perceptions don’t all just turn off at once. So sound is the last to be heard. So it’s a relationship that’s kind of magical, mystical, deep, that my son and I can sound together.

Olander: In an earlier interview, you said that coming into your power as a writer is related to your experience as a mother.

Waldman: My lower tones developed after my child was born. I grew into my voice—I started reading fairly young, in my twenties, yet my sound felt completely unrealized in some way, and there was an aspiration that I was going to meet myself at some later day. Motherhood triggers the unconditional, and that is how I feel about my work—an unconditional quality about my relationship to work and to writing. A sense of it being part of a thrust, that we’re wired as human beings, we’re wired to create, to take language and make these things with it—it behooves some of us to do this; it’s part of why we have a larynx, why we have an imagination, why we can make stuff with our hands. So that view of nurturing whatever the gifts are, your various poeias, and actually there’s a resonance with the gift of the child, and the child is not just your artwork, or this project either—he has his own reality but if there can be real sympathy there, you can also make something together. There’s also the view that you come into the world with twenty-five percent of your genetic stuff, and your mind is free, which is why people can be miles away from where they seem to have come from. So Ambrose is also a mystery. That’s always been very interesting to me, that your consciousness is free, you can “wake up” despite your very difficult beginnings. So a kind of respect for that, our individuality of mind. But for your child to be giving you back support of his art is really interesting. Often I thought I was my mother’s mother, so I do feel that way sometimes—and Ambrose can be very bossy. I’m sure there’s more to say—but essentially there’s mutual respect, he’s always seemed proud of me, but also he does a very good parodic imitation of Skin Meat Bones.

Olander: In Vow To Poetry, you said that poetry eases suffering, and also when we were talking recently, you observed that poetry is not therapy—could you talk more about these aspects of poetry?

Waldman: I think making art can be therapeutic, but to think that art is therapy, and you can just express yourself and not be a reader or disciplined writer is a simplistic view. I can’t live without poetry; I lived for it, you know, I’ve lived inside it, I’ve wanted it to be in our world, in a way that is healing, that acknowledges its sacredness—and when you think of all this work you can turn to for understanding your own consciousness, we still don’t know very much, that it can help be this mirror, of the vastness of our world, the complexities, the layers and levels, not always—but it can be, when it’s really working.

Olander: Given centuries of wars and the marginalization of the arts in general and poetry in particular, how do you keep yourself juiced up?

Waldman: I’m perpetually curious. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it’s a kind of exercise, I have to keep looking at the bigger picture, what it is, trying to realize what it has been to me—the great antidote of poetry so many years. The excitement of reading Blake, and Rimbaud, going through English poetry, feeling akin to the romantic spirit, and first hearing my teacher reading a Wallace Stevens poem aloud in eighth grade or seventh grade, reading Gertrude Stein aloud—that original frission in the combination of the ideas, the sound, and the challenge, in a way, what is this? To be more awake, that’s always the challenge. And discovering Li Ching Chao, or Mirabai. I want to get closer to the mystery of life that’s so caught in the language of poetry—some of this seems to be in some other kind of world, not a mundane world exactly—not that the poems are not made up of the so-called mundane things, of ordinary mind and ordinary matter, but you know what it is—what are the delicate mechanisms that work? That’s the inquiry. I’m not saying that everybody’s concerned with this or needs to be—people are very different; they adhere to different things, but just speaking again personally—if you live with a library, if you are investigating something, what’s triggered here, what’s the thought, what’s the next thought, what’s the next reflection—responding to, being part of a community—being a kind of example to younger folk, as my generation ages and people keep dying. The death of a poet is always hard it seems to me, it’s a black hole, you go into some void, and then you want to keep the work alive, you keep going back to it—this amazing residue and mark that people have left—and it’s not always that accessible. So a job to do in preserving what we have accomplished in the post-post Mod Poetry realm—I’ve been involved in the Naropa archive for nearly forty years—we have taped everything, all these talks, lectures, conversations, classes, performances, panels and so on, so there’s a vast array of discourse that would be important to somebody coming upon a hundred years hence, if we’re still able to access this, and if there’s still a world that’s at all curious.

Olander: Is there anything you particularly want to say to aspiring writers, here?

Waldman: It’s a very exciting time to be a writer because many of the contemporary moves and gestures and experiments and collaborations and performances are creating a kind of paradigm shift of attention. Come join the circus! And minds are moving into the multi-verse and into the molecular mystery worlds, slime mold poetics! And into the nonhuman elemental worlds… whole new languages and worlds to adhere to…. There are impressive projects out there. For community there’s a lot of Internet activity and correspondence and publishing activity—with poets in other cultures as well. It’s a demanding path, however, there’s all this bittersweet reality to cycle through—it’s a dark time from many points of view, a lot of suffering, physical suffering, psychological suffering, the disparities between the wealth of some and the poverty of so many, the dire state of our education, the ongoing culture wars, global warming, the wars abroad, the brokenness of our political system. What can you take on as a poet and a citizen of the planet? You have to be strong. You have to write from the perspective of a broken heart, and then you can lighten up. No one asks you to write; you need to be lit from within somehow. But there are other like-minded beings wanting to shape language as well and explore their own consciousness. You need to seek those people out and create autonomous zones for your creativity. And never take your artistic freedom for granted. There are people actually dying for democracy.

It was important for the jailed dissident Lui Xiaobo to win the Nobel Peace Prize, bringing attention to his plight and that of so many others around the world. The PEN club does a holiday card signing you can volunteer for sending messages to dissidents around the world—to Iraq, Tibet, Burma… and so on. It’s important to remember that many creative people are in jail for their beliefs and their poems. We’re in this post-Holocaust world, still figuring it out, how can humans still be torturers? Poets need to be guardians of the culture and of one another. Travel, learn languages, don’t get stodgy or too careerist. Think of creative ways to survive. Keep reading the poetry of all centuries, keep taking notes. Stay empathetic.

Olander: Perhaps we could draw, considering Iovis and some fragments we have of Sappho, a relatively straight line between her and you—in terms of taking on the patriarchy in writing, being a “founding mother.”

Waldman: Yes, she’s present in Iovis. And there are a lot of fragments, tesserae, in the poem. There’s a Sappho section, but conjecture is she may have founded a school, for women, a Moisopholon Domos, House of Muses. It’s not an actual fact; we’re not sure, but I always found it a wonderful fantasy of Sappho. A poet who could sing and create a school, a zone for a wild mind—erotic and complex.

Olander: Congratulations on your appointment to Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. How does that make you feel? What do you hope to accomplish in that role?

Waldman: I am very honored to be called on to “serve”—there’s that word again—and I think I bring another perspective into the mix, being involved with counter-cultural poetics and activities for so many years and being in close proximity with, and a reader of, many new and emerging poets, many of them women. And yet the title “chancellor” brings with it some interesting history—you are a secretary of a nobleman, a kind of knight, an officer in a fraternal or sororal “order,” secretary of an embassy, one who keeps records of proceeding. I would hope to transmute these more patriarchal-sounding roles into guardianship and the safekeeping of an art that continually needs our care and attention.                                

Renée Olander’s poems, essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in publications including 5am, Verse and Universe: Poems About Science and Mathematics, the Café Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education Poetry Month Blog, and many others; her chapbook, A Few Spells, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2010.

Excerpt

from The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment

Coda: Beirut

She didn’t want to close it down, resistant to pressure of “finish book, finish book” maintenance of identity. Extra-judicial. Eye on the Swat Valley. On Khawazakhela. Was she a woman outstanding in her piety? Sum pius Anna. Mindful of her duties. To carry the family out of a burning city. To take her armor off, finally, to thrust the sword into the heart of her own ego. Morph to many-eyed Argus re-scoping the patriarch. His continuing betrayal and lies. What next? Of Somalia, of Yemen sing… And then she observed women too, ugly in their machinations coming to power in an imposter wrath. Do you know them by their gender? Do you know them by their troubled racist wrath? This is a regressive time. And the child-spirit is older now. Better to unplug, like they say. Fly to foreign lands like a bird or stay home rubbing myself with oil, feathers stuck in sympathy, in death throe. Creatures caught writhing in oil. Quick images of many years swarm back, all protest, all effort, a shuffle of cards, illusion’s tricks, blink of an eye in a forest of Old River, Old Time, on a mountain with the archaic personages of mythopoesis, those who helped you, stayed guardian. Travels of the nocturnae. Old shamans and bonpo tantrikas, keepers of the calendar, the left-hand path ones. Magicians inside kept psyche free of thrum, distraction, unrequited desire, projects she most loves shifting to an unnatural theism as people go ballistic, get greedier, drink blood, need to parlay their requisite fear all over town. Traumas of war and money and power, contested sites, of those you don’t recognize push and threaten to crush your poet-spirit, abscond with your language. Merchants of death who taint you with “Hagazussa, Hagazussa! You fall on deaf ears here!” Fight for magic now; that is the only passion, magic of consociational time, of tendrel, the dharma’ “auspicious coincidence”, strike of the gong, set the psyche aspin once more in this or any other galaxy. And here a crystal mirror in which you see your own pupils upsidedown, or recede back down the spiral from now this instant, back, body back semen, back ovum many millennia back, what forms in poet language pulled to consciousness make power here…and take a leap in time. Up the spiral again, again…

   & other consciousness, a continuum

ogni pensiero vo…

 

      all thoughts

go flying

                 to another side

of my person

 

Avalalokitesvara

 

          I live because I never forget I will die

 

Anne sweeping the clouds more gently now.

Avalokitesvara, teach me to sweep the clouds more gently again now

I’ll arise from your tears and sweep, sweep….

Reprinted by permission from The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press, 2011).  Copyright © 2011 by Anne Waldman.