Waldman, who is turning 72 in the next fortnight, encompasses everything from orality to performance to spirituality to feminism in her poet persona while remaining a case study in humility. She, along with Alan Ginsberg, was featured in Dylan’s film "Renaldo and Clara". Waldman toured and collaborated with many other poets during the making of this film and this experience left a lasting imprint on her. In her own words, “I romanticised the possibility of a similar, scaled-down poetry caravan for years.”

Her commitment to poetry has gone way beyond this caravan.

“I’ve been a listener and observer of poetry all my life. It is what opened my sensibilities, even if I could not speculate what the message was,” she casually flung my way while I sat next to her.

ORALITY AND PERFORMANCE

We begin the conversation from the point of origin of poetic form, the oral tradition.

“Most poetic forms, familiar and exotic, the sonnet, sistina from Italy, pantoum from Malay, troubadour poetry, etc, are all based in oral form. All my studies and investigations tell me that they were connected to some form of ritual. Take the villanelle, for example. It comes from villages celebrating the harvest created by farmers. It’s not an upper class aristocratic form. Then you have Dante and his circle developing the sistina which is a more complicated form but again a sung form,” she says.

“Sometimes oral poetry is a mnemonic device. Like the epic form which, of course, is long and complicated. It tells the story of a time and tribe and their wars, accomplishments, and cultures. I love that form because you can play with it. You can have story, you can have poetry, you can have performance, and you can have embedded forms, characters, and histories. The possibilities with poetry by bringing back the oral form and creating some new ones are immense,” says the tireless experimenter.

She adds, “I also write for the page. Some very dense texts which may not be performative but they are part of the web that allows for these moments of arising that turn into a performance. The job of poetry is to have some kind of transportive quality. Whether it’s the mantra or the repetition or intonation, it can create a vault of energy.”

Is this what the Beat generation was trying to do? Creating a vault of energy to be able to deal with the less than ideal world they inhabited? She responds by referring to her closest Beat associate.

THE BEAT GENERATION

“Alan Ginsberg’s works, which come out from Walt Whitman’s works, have a kind of longer breathline of poetry, trying to bring in the whole world and see humanity in all its facets and details. To also scribe one’s own experiences and emotions. I’m a generation younger but the point is that we grew up in the shadow of an atomic bomb and were raised with a sense of cognitive dissonance.”

She stops to catch her breath and continues, “You see your culture, your country involved in the world wars followed by the Vietnam: just always in a state of war. Ginsberg and others had to react to the time. They were coming into their power at a kind of conservative time in America. After WWII, you had this hope and promise of a new time after the war: Everybody could have a job, healthcare, education. A kind of false view because we had not analysed the bigger picture. The Beat generation understood that.”

As my thoughts wander off to "Make America Great Again", she perhaps reads my mind and takes a leap in time. “Look at the idea of European Union. Everyone is expected to get along as one continent but there are so many factions and divisions. Everyone hopes there’s never a war. But the WWII is not so long ago, the situation in the Middle East is so difficult. There was almost a prophetic quality of some of the Beat poets’ works.”

I bring her attention to what personally intrigued me about the Beat poets: The bridges they built between the outer and inner worlds.

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source: Nishtha Gautam for Wion