Poems -- & musings on the Albany (NY) poetry scene.
"It's not the Truth, but it's pretty darn close."
October 22, 2019
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.
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