Review by New York Times Review
IN FOLKLORE, the trickster figure is a cunning rulebreaker, positioned disruptively outside conventional mores. With her new book's title, Anne Waldman, whose writing, performing, teaching and activist career defies political and poetic convention, appears to promise feminist mischief and playfulness. And there are such moments: when, for instance, the names of woman poets are embedded as homonyms ("Mean alloy" for Mina Loy, "Burn a debt" for Bernadette - Mayer, presumably). But these operate more as a homage to fun than as fun itself. The pervading mood in "Trickster Feminism" is of a piece with our national mood: gloom-filled, sorrowing, yet occasionally threaded with hope. "And the day would be proud of itself going on as if it hadn't already collapsed, had not been destroyed, riven, all the people mad and metabolically downcast," begins the prose sequence "denouement," which responds to Donald Trump's election. "People were coming out to the street. In the way they wanted to see where the big guy lived and boasted so as to mock the event. ... How ugly would it go?" Later, Waldman tells of a woman "mumbling mantras... as she circles the tower.... ?? Man Be Gone ... Om Con Con Be Gone," and laments "a lack of power to move ethical clocks forward." Waldman is associated with 20th-century experimental writers who have energetically defined themselves against what she calls "the official verse literati culture academic mainstream." A longtime leftwing political activist, she has written dozens of works of poetry and given hundreds of performances. She co-founded, with Allen Ginsberg and Diane di Prima, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. A devotee of Tibetan Buddhism, she seems to have centered her life and work on the idea that poetry and language are a "tribal responsibility," summoning a powerful kind of political magic. Over the decades, Waldman has written many long poems. Her urge is epic. In sequences of prose and verse, she gives voice to vatic, rhythmic, litany-shaped utterances, with an intensity that can mute her playfulness (though in performance her ability to play gets more play). Waldman combines political, mythical, literary, artistic and historic references in poems that tend to blend and blur rather than yield imagistic clarity. The shortest poems in "Trickster Feminism" are one or two pages long; most are much longer. The metaphor that comes to mind is of a river, its great volume washing by. My undergraduate students would love to talk about Waldman's "flow." The opening poem, "trick o' death," takes place "when you are sitting / with the corpse of your friend." But the act and ritual of remembrance, rather than its object, are what become important: "make a binding of your mind / surface the body / breathe in quick breaths / huff! huff!" Physical description is general and, at first, female ("a cut, a scar the beautiful slit / of feminine aperture") until "ungendered now ... / she's getting out of this / into another maelstrom." In the same poem, Waldman connects "patriarchal poetry" to political aggression: fend off patriarchal poetry and your own struggle in cultural anachronism bombing unilaterally nothing about socially constituted witch trials women restrain or manipulate desire Here Waldman's abstractions, with their rhythmic thrust and variation, might be best read out loud. It's pleasant, for example, to move the third and fourth lines around in your mouth. "Fend off patriarchal poetry" is a vague, if admirable, directive, delivered without apparent irony or a sense of complicity. (Waldman approves of and/or quotes Brecht, Rimbaud, Duncan, Césaire and "my William my difficult Burroughs," as well as a number of female and trans writers.) The point is that Waldman sees oppression, marginalization, injustice and violence as male and patriarchal, in poetry as in politics. The 19-page "melpomene," named after the muse of tragedy (and, more archaically, of song), proceeds with drive-by speed. Waldman's references are ancient and contemporary, local and global: "mammoth ivory," "hipster planets," "fascist salute," "Kurdish, riot grrrl / hijab as act of resistance," "stateless Rohinga," "cyborgian," "mutilated Aphrodite," "fear in Jeff Sessions's eyes." And that's just for starters. It's a messed-up world, she reminds us in her referential shorthand. You can see, for example, the conversion of St. Paul and the current destruction in Syria in a mere three lines: serpentine roads to Damascus odd how holiest of places turned hells Does subsuming massive topics into this long performance diminish or trivialize them? Reading Waldman is like being in the world today, neither inured to the news nor lacerated by our own empathy. A list isn't necessarily dispassionate. Sacrificing detail and dramatization for an expansive catalog may mean that one's emotions are less engaged, but also that one's sense of self becomes usefully smaller. I couldn't help, however, loving best the moment in "melpomene" when Waldman leaves her prophet voice and segues into an updated spiritual tone, both tragic and delivered with desperate lightness: I looked over Jordan and what did I see Drones over Jordan coming after me Singing the crimes of man I've got those Anthropocene Anthropocene blues. Set toward the end of this long poem, the song envisions "Cadres of humans talking to the streets... / Changing the frequency" and "Ghosts of the extincted ones coming after me." The lyric takes on the force of collective making, collective expression, in the poem's claustrophobic swirl. That's part of what Waldman is after: collective responsibility. Readers who are heavily invested in (productive) irony may resist when Waldman, a longtime New Yorker, calls out, with apparent sincerity, "Hecate! Hecate!" in the book's final poem, "coda: time to gambol withal?" But we postmoderns get to choose our idols. All generations need not employ the same tonalities. And I'm wholeheartedly on board with Waldman at the poem's end: don't be dazed around criminals take the wheel of office again boycott, stomp out, plead, hold peace And I can share her understanding of the basic problem in the book's final lines: how get supper to homeless shivering at crossroads with keening imagination however jinxed! It's easy to feel drawn to this poet's idealism and generosity of spirit; hard, as well, not to be grateful for moments when she indulges in a little self-puncturing. Hints of the trickster, indeed, that most intelligent subversive. DAISY FRIED is the author of three books of poems, most recently "Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice." She is poetry editor of the literary resistance journal Scoundrel Time.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 9, 2018]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Acclaimed poet Waldman (Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born) plumbs the variations and nuances of female subjectivity and paths to liberation through the performance of words and rituals. In her opener, "trick o' death," she lambastes capitalism as "the titular rape mode of quest & scheme," directing readers to meet her "on the other edge of town" in order to hatch a plot to "take down the big horrible men." Waldman references such mythical female figures as the Lady of the Lake, Callisto, and the Gorgons while crafting legends of her own, including one involving a coven of women living underground, plotting revolution: "maybe we could have a parable about craving soil under avenues, hope & fear. Times of the chthonic." She suggests that readers "secede from the vocabulary they give you" and provides her own view of what this might look like through poems that tend to be long meditations on a theme, but which vary widely in form. Waldman's erudite and experimental language is notable in such poems as "entanglement," where she riffs on the names of famous women writers, i.e., "Wall stone craft" and "Auld tray lured." The collection is fragmentary and obtuse, even for Waldman, and requires some decoding, but the subtext is a rich and stirring commentary on feminine empowerment. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Countercultural Naropa poet Waldman (The Iovis Trilogy) bases her new book on the trickster archetype, a character who through the use of deception is able to disrupt the normal order and replace it with a new way of doing something. If there's a narrative line to these difficult-to-read language poems, it's that 70-year-old Waldman has tricked death through art. As she says, "I had to write/ my assassin's dream/ I had to conjure with my last breath/ to disappear/ within/ animation of drum and larynx/ I offer crystalline chants/ just scribble out poems; Waldman's open-form, projective verse style is replete with puns, irony, alliteration, and parallel texts, as well as sidebars, footnotes, photographs, and illustrations (based on the cover painting of a rabbit-goddess figure by performance artist Laurie Anderson). The volume begins with the poem "trick o' death," about death, and ends with "trick o' life," a poem about life. In between, the collage-like poems refer to everything from Buddhist teachings to characters from Greek mythology. -VERDICT Waldman defies death with new poems, which at their best, push against her own demise and celebrate life. Recommended for serious poetry collections.- C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
