Anne Waldman, October 16

at Bennington College. Anne Waldman is an alumna of Bennington College & was here for a few days of classes, talks & this reading in the echoing space of Tishman Lecture Hall. She was introduced by Michael Dumanis, Director of Poetry @ Bennington & editor of the Bennington Review. Her reading was primarily from Trickster Feminism (Penguin Poets, 2018), with other work added for spice.

Anne Waldman’s readings/performances are always a mix of sounds (even without musical accompaniment) of words torn apart & put back together, chants, invocations, history, mythology & a righteous pissed-off attitude towards injustice, greed & violence. My way into her work is to let it wash over me, which Charlie Rossiter described as a poetry word-bath, & make the connections I can, but try not to “figure it out.” It is always a trip.

She began with the opening page of quotes from sources including an Okanagan creation story, & Hank Williams “Howlin’ at the Moon.” “denouement” is built on a series of prose poems celebrating women & resistance (which might be said of the entire book), & “clytemnestra’s body polis ticks” she described as a result from sitting in front of the news too long. Playing with other texts (“mash butler”) & the sounds of the names of poets in “entanglement” is what she does, as well as ranting against the age-old power structure with curses to take it down (“patriarchus”).

On to other texts, some in manuscript still, she read a poem for the late John Ashbery, another which was a series of questions like notebook entries for a string of projects for citizen poets was inspired by the archival work of Ammiel Alcalay, then a section from her book-length eco-poem Mantee/Humanity (Penguin Poets, 2009). She ended with a chant for the Tibetan Bohdisattva Chenresi “The Anthropocene Blues,” which can be found at the poets.org website.

Bennington College has a regular program of visiting poets but few are as engaged & dynamic/dramatic as Anne Waldman.