Anne Waldman: Rhizomic Poetics

Anne Waldman in Conversation with Matthew Cooperman

Matthew Cooperman: What is wild mind, wild form? Could you define it in the history and context of an investigative poetics?

Anne Waldman:There's Gary Snyder's definition of the wild mind being "elegantlyself-disciplined, self-regulating." And by extension he says that'swhat "wilderness" is. Without a management plan. The practice of thewild inspires an "etiquette of freedom." You take care of thingsbecause it's beautiful to do so, not out of obligation. I also invokethe rhizome model in Deleuze and Guatari's sense.The Indra's Net of atuber system, moving horizontally through imagination, space, time andthe Buddhist notion of "all 10 directions of space." Awareness isjolted by multiple forces setting additional forces into action. Noevent is isolated, no force is ever spent. This is wild thinking. It isthe basis for a particular poetics that allows for improvisation aswell, and the "kinetics of the things." Investigative thinking setsyou off to investigating red luminescence under the sea. There's theecological sense here, the link to other sentient beings and theinter- and co-dependence thereof.

It's a compassionate view, ultimately. And I also use Belgianphysicist Ilya Prigogine's term "dissipative structures," which atorigin were the first cell-like systems. With an influx of energy,these structures become more instead of less ordered. There's a senseof “autopoetic”— to be alive an entity must actively maintain itselfagainst the mischief of the world. So what do we do with the assaultand destruction of Empire?

MC:Your propensity for manifestoes, for declaration, distinguishes yourcareer, and at the same time maintains a central tenet of modernism. Doyou see your role in poetry, or one of poetry's at its greatestextension, as necessarily revolutionary? Do you see that qualityreviving in the latest generation of poets? How to reconcile modernistproclamation with postmodernism's suspicion of totalizing statements?

AW:The declaiming seems to come naturally. Probably an extension of asense of Aria, where you need to communicate what's going on in yourpsyche, in the spotlight. And where the rage is so extreme against theState and its arrogance and deception that it needs to find acomparable heightened form. The times have required strong expressiveantics in my own work. One needs to cut through discursive mind. Thisis Diva poetics. Soap Box poetics. You need to shake the walls of thecity. You need the "divine terror" Artaud speaks of. These strategiesseem universal and timeless and not necessarily locked in anaestheticized sphere or time frame. And the recent Poetry is Newsevents and Poets Against The War activism on the streets of Manhattanand D.C. demand a strain of performance where I might vocalize astrangulation of Donald Rumsfeld — or whoever the demon of the momentmight be who seems to have so much control over the lives of others andseems, cruelly, to perpetuate suffering for a pathological ideology —or shriek "I'm in a rogue state" turning into the Rangda witch figurefrom Balinese ritual theater with trembling fingernails, lolling tongueand sagging tits. I visualize myself on a charnel ground as Durga,Kali, the consummate hag.

It's also the work of Infrastructure Poetics, where one isworking and building communities (Many of us have been literally livinginside community for decades) and feeling the need to represent alarger Voice than my own as an ambassador for poetry and its etiquetteand usefulness. It's this irritating messianic thing about how poetrycan help save the world. And poetry is the rival government. Revolutionis a word that turns many ways, as poet Jack Collom has noted. So themanifestations in the writing and performance are numerous.

And I find the recent writing of Claudia Rankine, Juliana Spahr,Akilah Oliver politically interesting and not either modernist orpost-mod. Feminafestos are the preferred mode, but certainly there's anhomage there to the polemics of the Surrealists, of Marinetti, LauraRiding. And I've been taken up of late with Syrian-born Arab poetAdonis' excellent "An Introduction to Arab Poetics" which posits —after eloquently guiding the reader through pre-Islamic poetics andconcerns, the complication of modernity, and the like — the notionthat there is no human dimension in any given period of historywithout poetry. Poetry is not a stage, but a constituent of humanconsciousness. Of course there's the post-modern trope of not wantingto use the language and syntax of the oppressors and decentralizingthe confessional "I," and seeing the text as reflexive and more opaque,and interrupting narrative. "Both, both" is the stance on the charnelground.You trust your sensibility, and you develop your gifts, whichyou see as upaya (skillful means) as everything churns in the maw ofthe Hag. And you play with it all in the flickering light and shadow.

MC: That's such a sense of performance. You said once, "I think of myselfas a speech-singer, a word singer-speaker when I perform" (JoyceJenkins interview, Vow to Poetry) From your World Heavyweight PoetryChampionships to your interest in chant and collaboration, you'vecertainly made performance your touchstone. What are the origins ofthis style? How much of it is indebted to improvisation and jazz? Or,perhaps conversely, does this speech-singer manifest as a persona, oreven a channel? How conscious is it on stage?

AW:The origins go back to childhood performance at home on Mac-dougalStreet (writing, making plays and dressing up) and with the GreenwichHouse Children's Theater in New York (playing Alice in Al¬ice inWonderland, among other roles). I also worked backstage with theStratford Connecticut Shakespeare Theater by the time I was sixteen,and there again when I was eighteen with understudy roles and bitparts. Also at Bennington College as Phaedra, and the lead in Lorca'sBlood Wedding. Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare (I can still hear MorrisCarnofsky's Lear in my ear), Greek drama — they can set one on a path.

I was never good at memorization, however, and enjoy being incharge, directing myself and others. I was charged by collaboration,the excitement and urgency of getting ready for performance, themysterious bifurcation of stage life/real life. But the "style"developed on its own, no models, is not rehearsed. I let the text guideme — how does it want to sound? And trust how my body and voice respondas well. Low rumbles, shrieks of rage, operatic sprechstimme. I wasexposed to a lot of jazz as a child — Steve Lacy was in the extendedfamily — and I trust improvisation within certain frames. The Cage andStein performances (with others) I've organized over the years reflecta number of strategies. But I trust being on the spot. Poets are verylow-tech and prepared for any occasion. I'd like to think there aremany personae and yes, assuredly a sense of channeling energy. Iusually have a loose plan and the texts might be patched together atthe last minute to some kind of random cohesion.

The many pages of lovis lend themselves to intervention andcannibal-ization. I donned my surgical mask and Vietnamese hat at thelast minute at Naropa last summer and was inspired to dance around theroom to a tape of my son Ambrose Bye's music with my own voice singingverses of the old Tom O' Bedlam (roots in the century shamanicballad-poem).This year I wore a black hood a la Abu Ghraib and playedanother composition by Ambrose to my text, "'Thy' of No Dire GreenhouseEffect," which includes the voice of Eleni Sikelianos and the cries ofmy infant goddaughter Eva Sikelianos Hunt. I'd been feeling that welive in an insane asylum in this country and wanted that to be theunderlying eidolon for these performances.

MC: This is also importantly performance as a female poet. Could youreflect upon your career as such? You've been a lightning rod of femaleidentity in an at times overwhelmingly male world of poetry. How haveyou dealt with that? How have the circumstances of women writerschanged over the course of your career? What is available now as afeminist project and a poetic?

AW:   I'm grateful forall the opportunities I've had in the frequent ways I was able tocreate zones for poetry, especially through editing, curation of poetryevents, directing the Poetry project, co-founding the Kerouac Schooland so on. Women have to push on claiming infrastructure roles in arange of creative zones. We also don't want poetry to be stuck insidethe academy with its master narratives either. There are exceptions, ofcourse, but the struggle continues for equality. Susan Howe, I'veheard, was less appreciated and paid less at Buffalo than her malecounterparts. Things have changed, however, as we see an unprecedentedplethora of publishing of women, terrific small presses likeBelladonna, the Chain magazine editorship, and women in importantteaching roles.

The feminist poetic I see as being a matter of independence —from the constraints of the Language project on the one hand, a facileBeat-trope confessionalism, or identity politics on the other. And apowerful stance that is not so dependent on male forebears orstrategies. That has taken off from the New American Poetry and beeninspired by female forbears Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, H.D., LorineNiedecker, Barbara Guest; later contemporaries Susan Howe, HannahWeiner, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Norma Cole, Bernadette Mayer,Alice Notley, Kathleen Fras-er, Maureen Owen, Eileen Myles, CeciliaVicuna, Rachel Blau duPlessis. That the shape feels and sounds new,refreshed and has been informed by investigative poetics, performance,race, gender, politics. Not that these are necessary subjects or themesof the work. Translation is important here, as well.

MC: As another kind of witness, you've seemed to find an unusually fertilewellspring in collaboration. Could you talk about your earlyexperiences of collaboration, say with Lewis Warsh or Ted Berrigan?What has the role of collaboration been in your work, and how has itevolved over the years?

AW:  I am currently gathering up the hundreds of pages of collaborationswith the help of Daron Mueller for an eventual book, acknowledging thejoys of the "third mind," the give and take towards some kind ofunified object, or book, or sound. So yes, central to my life in manyways, if you include all the collaboration on projects such as thefounding of the Kerouac School with Allen Ginsberg, Poetry Is Newsproject with Ammiel Alcalay and so on. And there are collaborationswith artists such as Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, Donna Dennis,Elizabeth Murray, with dancer Douglas Dunn, with musicians such asSteven Taylor and Bethany Spiers, my son Ambrose, and now video workwith Ed Bowes. We made a movie honoring Carl Rakosi for his 100thbirthday before he died, based on his poem, "The Menage," and morerecently "Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment," which is a responseto the torture at Guantanamo.

Ted Berrigan and I worked on "Memorial Day" through the mail, inanticipation of our reading together at St Mark's on Memorial Day in1974.The date determined the "subject" I collaged together the finalversion spreading the pages over the floor. We published it as apamphlet with a cover by Donna Dennis that was handed out at thereading. Lewis Warsh and I primarily worked as editors together, mostrecently on the Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Press 2003), which wasbased on a magazine and press we started in 1966.

MC:  I'm curious aboutcollaboration and gender. Does it tend to manifest as an androgynouspoetics? I realize that's a very general question to specific contextsand personalities, but I'm curious if, in your experience,collaboration effaces gender, or more largely questions of identity?

AW:  I think thecollaboration with painter Elizabeth Murray, "Her Story," has adecidedly playful and energetic ring of the feminine principle. Thewit is coming from the women in this series. Her gestures are gorgeous,plastic, comedic. Shapes resembling domestic utensils on a spree,kinetically expand the language. Eileen Myles and I worked on acollaboration entitled "Polar Ode" which has an erotic subtext towardone another that's not heterosexual. The work on stage is usuallydominated by my voice and lyrics. I've recently been working with theman¬dolin playing of poet Bethany Spiers who has herself an androgynoussound. Very delicate, and then fierce at times. But in working withothers gender is not the primary modus. And I would say that theoutcomes of a number of different kinds of collaborations are various,polyvalent.

MC:   Given that youwere interviewed, you've obviously seen Daniel Kane's book All PoetsWelcome:The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 60’s. He suggests afundamental shift toward the communal in American poetry during thattumultuous time, at least as exhibited by the scene at Les Deux Magot,Le Metro, and later the St. Mark's Poetry Project. Would you agree that"all poets were welcome," or that the familial ethos of that timemarked a real shift in not only acceptance, but collective practicesand procedures?

AW: I would say, generally, yes, all poets were welcome. Not "all poets"were drawn to the exigencies of the Lower East Side scene, however. Wetook matters into our own hands, created alternatives to the uptownliterary mafias, and essentially created our own "little universe,"our own economics of publishing and so on. We empowered ourselves. Yes,it certainly changed things, it radicalized the sense of "scene" ofcommunity. We had a base of operation, also, to protest the war inVietnam, to work side by side with other communities such as the YoungLords, the Theater Genesis folk, the filmmakers. There were precedentssurely, but having that particular site — of St. Mark's, whichcontinues now after forty years with "lineage holder" Anselm Berrigancurrently at the helm — made a tremendous difference.

MC:  Kane's book reallyemphasizes and details the material practices of the poets of the EastVillage — how mimeo magazines, and the resulting underground statusmany of the rags had, developed the quickening of an alternativepoetics. So too, it might be the obscenity trials of GrovePress, orYugen, or FuckYou: A Magazine of the Arts. Was there a sense ofcollective resistance? And was that similar to the inception of theslightly later The World?

AW: Yes, there was asense of collective enterprise. The "alternative poetics" had to dowith economics, with urgency, with getting work-in-progress out as itwas written. Which then would engender a response and perhaps guide theway the writing would go. It enhanced the conversation as tenters.Wewere developing as writers.Why wait around to get published by anuptown publisher? There's an isolation in that process, constant hopeand fear.We would also work collaboratively late at night, invite thecommunity to "collation parties." Do these one-shot items for occasionslike birthdays, marriages.There's a wonderful collection of those in myarchive at The Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor.

A lot of other poets were also using the mimeo presses—Telephone, Adventures In Poetry, Angel Hair, Dodgems. I remember JoelOppenheimer's wife Helen reading my palm once forty years ago andsaying (she was joking no doubt),"You will always be loyal to thepoetry underground," and although I publish some of my work withPenguin, I still do small press editions with Erudite Fangs, a modestrandom imprint.

MC: The scene at St. Mark's in the mid to late 60’s was an extraordinaryartistic florescence —Theater Genesis and Sam Shepard, the Rev. MichaelAllen's Vietnam protests, the Millennium Film Project, the publicationof The World, but also, as you've mentioned, Adventures in Poetry,Angel Hair, Lines, O to 9, Caterpillar, etc., various jazz concerts.All that free love and hippie rebellion ... what a remarkable time andplace! Could you talk about that moment, that flowering of creativityas a model for artistic rebellion? I mean, we live in such a cynicalage now, and it seems hard to imagine such momentum.

AW:  "First thought bestthought." Not so beholding to self-censorship or fear of being exposed,embarrassed because of one's naivete or lack of the proper educationand pedigree. The elitist barriers were down. Some kind of wonderfulcandor, openness, compassion, tolerance. In hindsight I have to see the"flowering" as a spiritual movement that had art and poetry and so manyother kinds of manifestations as its upaya. It wasn't caught up withthe academies, institutions and their karma, which rests so heavily oninvestments that usually feed on the suffering of others.

There was a kind of invention and intervention going on youdon't see enough of these days. And bravado. People were not afraid togo to jail, or resist paying taxes. Not to say that interesting writingor thinking isn't happening now, but it's so contained withincomparatively safe zones. Although I really see that as an illusion,ultimately. With censorship on the rise and the right-wing CampusWatch on the move targeting activist writers, who knows?

I mean back then, there was so much less inhibition, less codinggoing on. There was an exuberance of language and experience that couldbe explored, and because we were "below the radar" there was the senseof operating out of an alchemical lab oratory. There was also a growingdemocratization of the sexes, less old-boy than the Beats, say, orBlack Mountain. It was the work also of O'Hara, Ginsberg, Diane diPrima, McClure, John Wieners and others. We had them as precedents.