October 1, 2002, Introduction to Anne Waldman’s “Battery”

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I’ve been watching Anne Waldman perform for over 22 years. More than any other poet I can name, even audio recordings cannot fully capture what is unique about her performances—the sensation that neither you nor the poet herself knows exactly where she’s headed—and that at any moment any poem can (and very often does) reverse itself or leap into space at the most unlikely moment (“Boo!”). I’ve seen her crawl underneath a piano to shout up through its soundbox in order to get the sound that she’s looking for. I’ve seen her pick up a metal colander and beat out the poem’s rhythm with a spoon. And here (in “You Are My Conversation”) you can hear her walk away from the microphone, as if she’s attempting to walk out of the poem entirely. And with her epic multi-volume still-evolving masterpiece, Iovis, she has created a poem that sometimes changes language beyond recognition or transcends it altogether.

This collection, which spans almost 30 years, is more than a collection of individual poems or even performances, but rather the arc of a life as it was lived in a single-minded—and almost obsessive—dedication to art. The poetry is no longer contained within the individual poems—either on the page or in the act of performance—but is embodied and lived (or sung) in the moment. This radical reworking of the concept of poetry begins with her early interest in the use of language not to describe, but to create (an interest she shares with Gertrude Stein and Maria Sabina), and something akin to John Cage’s wild Zen-inspired celebration of spontaneity and the present moment.

And, as Waldman’s confidence in the magic of the present moment has blossomed—as well as her use of the written text as a starting point rather than its limit—she has also moved further and further—in the terms of Zukofsky’s famous formula (“lower limit speech / upper limit song”)—into the lyric, often in collaboration with musicians, and often incorporating improvisation—where her voice mixes a tenor’s bravado with something of a soprano’s shrillness.

At this point in her work, the “I” has almost completed disappeared, and the music of her poems reaches back to a time when poetry was primarily chants, prayers, and spells. Her voice has become chthonic, as in the Tiresian voice of “Iovis.” And although Iovis is a Latinization of the Greek god Jove, if there is a god speaking in these poems it is usually Hera, or a Fury or a Sibyl, and more often Medea than Athena.

But the primary voice here is even older than the gods themselves—it is the voice of the earth or the elements, as if the stones and trees that Orpheus could only teach to weep have learned to sing. These are the voices the bones of the dead might possess. And the proliferating Greek references here are deliberate, for these poems are primarily the record of a tragedy—of a return to earth—and are often the laments, elegies, and (by the end) dirges of a modern Antigone, whose lone and echoing voice is hurled against the bloody (and still essentially male) State.

But there is no real lineage, no precedent for the poems collected here. Like those who first sailed past the ends of the Earth, Waldman has been drawn only to the unexplored. And in her work she has created an authentic map for those she has left behind, for the ones who will one day understand her best, those not yet born. And when she is gone she will have left behind not a record of her thoughts and observations, not even a record of her time, but a record of a sensibility as it moved through the essence of its own transformation into the fire of the alchemical process fully lived, captured for all time in the object you are holding in your hand.