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Vow
to Poetry
Reviews
"On
the map from east to west and across the scale from
treble to bass, Anne Waldman is possessed with a passion
to witness, to understand, and to describe. . . . Vow
to Poetry is a vow to life - enlightening,
challenging, and crucial to the American tradition."
- Lisa Jarnot
"A
vow is the most radical form of the promise, and to
fulfill it demands the most rigorous form of commitment.
It constitutes a volunteering of services, and as such
it demands not courage but also enormous energy. Those
qualities permeate the life of thinking and writing
that is reflected (and reflected upon) in this book.
The vitality of Anne Waldman’s engagement with poetry
is manifest in every pieced collected here, and taken
together they demonstrate not only the depth but also
the scope and duration of that engagement. This is
a wonderful book, informative and also inspiring." - Lyn Heijinian
"A vatic, versatile display of Waldmania!" - Lawrence
Ferlinghetti
"From
St. Mark's in the early sixties, to her stewardship
of Naropa to her world-wide travels, Anne Waldman has
shown herself to be one of the key players on the U.
S. poetry scene. Her energy, her total commitment to
her art, and her cultural work are a wonder to behold.
Anyone who wants to understand how poetry and
poetics have evolved over the past four decades, must
read this new collection of essays, interviews, and
critical prose. Wherever it happened, Anne was there." - Marjorie Perloff
POETRY
AND PEACE: WALDMAN'S UTOPIANISM A GOOD ANTIDOTE
TO CURRENT MILITARISM
Anne
Waldman's Vow to Poetry: Essays, Interviews, and
Manifestos begins with etymology.
Vow
is from votum, to vote, poem from poien, to make. A
vote for verse and alchemy, Vow to Poetry is
an atlas of Waldman's lifework as activisit, writer,
Buddhist, teacher, and visionary. In this new volume,
her massive literary and political annals, international
in scope, are decanted in quick, delicious doses of
poetry, essays and hyperkinetic interviews.
The
autobiographical "Feminafesto" tracks her
androgynous en/gendering. Scion of bohemian lineage
and the sexual revolution, she asserts, "We are
not defined by our sexual positions in the bed or on
the page." Waldman is invested in getting the poem
off the page and "into a ritual invocation and
event." Further: "I enter into the field of
the poem with my voice and body." Those who have
heard her read know the ecstatic experience of her performative
"poemics." These pages transmit her arresting
voice as well, as the "tough tongue of the crone
free of vanity and conditioning" exhorts, chants
and passionately converses.
Included
in Vow to Poetry are excerpts from letters written
by Robin Blaser to the Naropa Summer Writing Program
(which Waldman founded and directs) regarding his boycott
of Colorado during the 1992 Amendment 2 controversy.
She preserves these erudite communiqués as archives
of poetic vigilance. Naropa University is host to 25
years of rare, important archives, a large percentage
of them generated by the Summer Writing Program, which,
pending funding, will be digitized.
Waldman
dates her metamorphosis into a committed writer to the
Berkeley Poetry Conference, circa 1965, where Charles
Olson rhapsodized on the poet-mind. She recalls a revelatory
moment in which he spoke of what it means, as a poet,
to be "in the presence of an event." He characterized
our social condition as one which requires "as
much wit and power as only poets have." Waldman's
own formidable armory of wit and power is deployed on
multiple fronts. She invokes millennia of poets and
cultural activists with a sister's intimacy and a scholar's
infectious passion. Citing Gertrude Stein, who called
neurosis a disease of the attention, Waldman praises
that which "shows you your mind in all its vividness."
Rhizome,
an underground stem bearing roots and flowers, and a
postructuralist metaphor for nomadic traits, is a trope
that Waldman exploits to describe hybrid, cross-genre
poetics and intuitive constellations: Allen Ginsberg,
Bob Dylan, Vaclav Havel and the Dalai Lama interfacing
on a tour she documents with great love and humor.
Vow
to Poetry is an enticement to vocalize, to make
ideological interventions with language. Deluged as
we are by the agenda-hiding, mendacious rhetoric of
repressive and profiteering militarism, it is a good
time to read Waldman. She has spent a lifetime artfully
hexing and arguing against violent territoriality. The
utopian imagination is embodied in this stellar poet
whose heart has an interstellar wingspan.
The
book even includes a fantastic index that begins with "A Certain Slant of Sunlight," acid and Kathy
Acker, and straddles Helen Cixous, the Gulf War and
Orson Welles, and ends with Zen, Zeus and Zukovsky.
Such an index alone should compel you to make, or at
least to snag yourself a copy of Vow to Poetry.
- Sunday Camera, November 18, 2001, Reviewed by Miranda
F. Mellis
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