ANNE WALDMAN
"PUSH, PUSH AGAINST THE DARKNESS"
INTERVIEW WITH JIM COHN
Internationally
acclaimed poet Anne Waldman is well known as a force in poetry. She was one of
the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Marks’s Church
In-the-Bowery, working there for over a decade; she also co-founded with Allen
Ginsberg the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where as Distinguished Professor of
Poetics she continues to work to preserve the school’s substantial
literary/oral archive. A recipient of the Poetry Society of
America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and a Chancellor of The Academy of American
Poets, Waldman is the author
of more than 40 books, including Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, 1975), Vow
to Poetry: Essays, Interviews, and Manifestos (Coffee House Press, 2001), and
several volumes of selected poems. She has concentrated on the long poem as a
cultural intervention with such works as Marriage: A Sentence (Penguin, 2000),
Structure of The World Compared to a Bubble (Penguin, 2004), Manatee/Humanity (Penguin,
2009), and the monumental anti-war feminist epic The Iovis
Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press, $40), a project that
took 25 years to complete. We discussed the book on
April 2, 2012, the poet’s birthday.
Jim Cohn: You began work on Iovis
Book 1 in the late 1980s. Book I appeared
in 1993. What were the circumstances that gave birth to your writing The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press, 2011)? Did you
conceive it as a trilogy all along?
Anne Waldman:
The plan was always a trilogy, the classical triad. Outer,
inner, secret. Heaven, Earth, Man principle (which is the triad of the
haiku), Nirmanakya,
Sambhogakaya.
Dharmakaya (realms of form, light and emptiness––a Buddhist triad) and so on.
Aeschuylus’s Oresteia,
Dante’s Commedia. Endless complicated
triads. H.D.’s War Trilogy as well, a deep bow
of gratitude in my project to the power of her epic, written against a backdrop
of war. I was also thinking in terms of a feminist plan of explicating the male, usurping
with the female and the hermaphrodite, and then resolving in something transcendent beyond gender perhaps. And
personally there is first: imagination, second: the act of writing, and third:
the act/act of vocalizing. The subtitle “Colors in the Mechanism of
Concealment” came with “Book III: Eternal War” but seemed to serve the entire
project with its implication of unmasking layers of “concealment”. I wanted an
expansive form that would make a demand on my time- tithe my time- at least a
quarter century. That would be a record––a slice of history––for my son and his
generation. It was interesting to publish IOVIS
gradually, as it un-wound and progressed. Iovis is the generative of Jove, Zeus, and I was seeing how everything
is of the Patriarch. The actual title
is “The Of-Jove Trilogy”, and came from a line of Virgil’s “Iovis
omnia plena,” all is full of Jove. You need a trilogy
to cover the subject.
JC: The physical production of your one
thousand-plus page epic poem, as an object, a relic, is no small achievement.
With it’s highly visual formal arrangement of words and image on the page, the
sheer duration of the technical ink-based performance pushes the envelope of
printing. How involved were you in actual book’s layout and design?
AW: I like the idea of the object, the
relic. And I see it as a time machine too or a device you plug into a socket that
activates a sound and light show. I was completely involved with the design and
production. I wanted the Balinese figure dancing on the front cover. It’s as I
envisioned it, actually, once I knew they would not be able to do afford a
three-volume book-set. I was both amused and horrified by the sheer size and
heft at over 1,000 pages and decided to embrace it, rather than feel
embarrassed. The tome feels like––and carries the burden––of 25 years, the years
spent on writing it and the actual documentary time-frame of the poem, which is
very different, say from Manatee/Humanity
(Penguin Poets 2009), an ecological narrative, which is meant to take place over
three days, although it took three years to write. I was extremely fortunate to
have, in my editors at Coffee House, a very supportive base and editing team. I
was pleased they supported the image of the “plutonium pit” from Rocky Flats. And the drawings. And the skewed spelling. And all the rest:
circles, triangles, stars, musical notation.
JC: What is the relationship between the
“abstracts” or “narratives” that begin each section of Iovis
and the “poem” that follows? How did you come upon that format? What models, if
any, did you follow in doing that?
AW: Essentially it was meant as a guide for
the reader through the twists and turns of the poem, to locate place, site, event,
state of mind. I always appreciate the prose abstracts or summaries to Dante’s
Cantos, not his I believe, but preparatory maps, and then wanting to include
other events and details important to the poem but in a different mode or
genre, somewhat like the alap
in an Indian raga, where all the themes are laid out, was useful. Victorian and
other period novels carry heady explanations in their chapter headings. Perhaps
a didactic thrust but essential to guide the reader though this long
montage-trajectory (as one reviewer said, Iovis is “not for the faint of
heart”!) and have a kind of documentary “voice” as it were which is another
path of the rhizome. As in the Commedia,
I used the first person with all its avatars and split personalities and
doppelgangers and the abstracts helped ground whoever the consciousness of the
poem is. Clearly an amalgam.
JC: In the opening prose section at the
beginning of “I Am The Guard” (269), you write of your founding of the Kerouac
School with Allen Ginsberg and note your Jovian intention regarding the male
poets you admired: “The challenge of the elder poet-men is their emotional
pitch she wants to set her own higher than.” Do you think Iovis achieves the
“emotional pitch” that you measured your life & work against theirs?
AW: I would hope
so. I think it goes higher in pitch because of the advantage of distance, and
of a feminist outrage. And my vocal chords reach the high notes. Of “coming
after,” so to speak, in the multiple guises that foreground the female, rather
than have her being “re-ified” as with Charles Olson
and William Carlos Williams. There was a way “she” gets lost in their epics.
That clear-sighted seer, prophet is sidelined, she’s
not enough real flesh and blood with her own throbbing poet-consciousness. The feminist
consciousness in Iovis wants you to see where she has
travelled––to the complicated tin and cardboard slums of India, to a survived
yet struggling land where a whole generation (my own) is decimated (in Viet Nam).
In his extraordinary The H.D. Book,
which importantly explores the role women played in the creation of Modernism,
Robert Duncan sites the discordant note––“the rant of Pound, the male bravado
of Williams, the bitter anger of Lawrence” and calls them “purposeful
overcharges” and speaks of theirs as a therapeutic art. I would agree. And we
would share that. But the feminine principle of putting makeup on empty space seemed
absent, and I was also driven to create also (albeit with my male comrade Allen
Ginsberg, as well initially with the very strong poet Diane di
Prima) a zone such as the Kerouac School that would embed what I call the
architecture of the feminine, that is the “environment,” the space that allows
gestation and generation. There’s reference in the Tao Te Ching (6th century B.C.E) to the
“dark female-enigma” which is called the “root of heaven and earth,” and this
text says this spirit is like “gossamer so unceasing it seems real. Use it:
it’s effortless.” The environment is always there, waiting.
JC: I’m also thinking of the letter from “B.B.”
(294-5) in which the suggestion is you rely more on
personal history rather than political or geologic history in the making of the
poem and in doing so, create a different kind of poetry than the “masters.” Although
you obviously included this letter to argue the point that you had achieved a
greater degree of accessibility to the reader, do you believe that Iovis is actually any
less dense or complex or intellectual or made of arcana
any less than those modernist poets such as Pound, Olson, Williams, etc?
AW: No I would
say it is as dense in a comparable way but also invokes “’istorin”
to find out for oneself (the root of the word “history”) as a mode to explore
the political history of this slice of war/lifetime. How infuriating it is to
be continually born to war that continues one’s whole lifetime, even as one
protests it––what futility. It is perhaps a more public epic in this regard, and carries a ritual vocalization. And I was concerned with certain modalities
of sound and enactment, as in the tribute section “Pieces of an Hour” to John Cage.
And influenced, as well, by Buddhist and Balinese rites and
practices.
JC: The multipersonae
of a traveler of the physical dimension, as well as others, suggests a central concern
of the poem. Travel grounds the traveler in the poem’s
wired global scale, its worldwide interplanetary scope. It’s epic nature. Can
you share a few of your itineraries while you were writing Iovis in terms of those
specific locales that drove you to write sections based upon what you learned
being there?
AW: I referred
to India and Viet Nam above, because I have felt a strong link to those places
and their cultures and their role in my own life and poetics. I first travelled
to India in the early 1970s as a curious spiritual pilgrim and “took refuge”
and began a Buddhist practice with Tibetan teachers, but I was also enamored of
India culture––Vedic chanting, the Bauls of Bengal,
the raga as an expansive form inspired
aspects of Iovis
as well. But the reality of being offered an infant to take back to the U.S.
with me by a family in Bubaneshwar was a startling
and poignant “luminous detail” that conjured an extreme and hard reality. I
couldn’t comply but I could tell the story. That area along the Bay of Bengal
also suffered terrible floods after I left. In Viet Nam––travelling primarily in
the North––there were few people of my generation left, they had died in what
they call “The American War.” I felt a strong karmic link to my own generation,
how much blood on our hands, protest as we may? My father had served in WW2 and
that was still palpable as I explore in the book, Korea was more distant, Viet
Nam was virtually in the living room and in the streets. There’s an earlier
“History lesson for my son” on Viet Nam and then the later pilgrimage, “Dark Arcana: Afterimage or Glow.” The trip up the Yangtze (“Tears
Streak The Reddest Rouge” from Book III) was a revelation. This section comes
out of notes from that trip. The gates of the three Gorges Dam were like the
gates of hell, the river itself the Styx. This monolithic dam misplaced whole
villages and cultures, drowned important sites and historical artifacts, an
ecological disaster as well.
JC: The mechanism of disconcealment
that I notice best is the invention of a multidimensional “both, both” “I”
based upon the 7th century B.C. Greek poet Archilochus
who wrote of being a poet and a warrior, which became a model for Homer. You
seem to have taken that as your own investigation into concealment of women
when you wrote: “I am both therapon” (75). Can you discuss how you came upon
this multi-alternative “I” and how you placed it within the book’s heroine?
AW: Yes, the
negative capability of “both, both.” And the warrior and poet, indeed––cutting
though the underbrush and detritus of civilizations and layers of psyche with
her stylus-weapon-scythe. The lunatic, the lover and the poet might join in
here as well. But interesting you pick up on “therapon”––Greek
for an “attendant” and related to the word “therapy” also a wonderful double
entendre: there upon. “I am there upon.” I
am upon this work, I am upon my subject, so to speak. I
think of Robert Duncan’s title “Before the War” not as relative to temporality
but as standing, facing, in front of the
war.
JC: I’d like to ask you more about your views on
male energy because it is so central to the work. On page 61 of Book I, you
write:
Don’t
mock me as I avenge the death of my sisters
in this or any other dream
In
order to make the crops grow
you men must change into women
On page 62 you write:
The
poet...tries to write in anti-forms without success. But the boy, her son,
guides her through her confusion...
On page 111, you argue:
I
wanted you in agreement that women invented the alphabet...
and on page 122, you explicate
the epic journey
to the underworld & steal the secrets of the male energies
that rule there.
On page 154, you posit a distinct male
position where
The
‘male’ here is more dormant deity, integrated into a transcendent yet powerful
hermaphrodite...a ‘double’.
Can you elaborate on the mechanism of
male energy you hacked into in Iovis and how that may or may
not of evolved over the 25 years you spent writing the poem.
AW: The psychological
mechanism was there to be exposed in a way, and there was also the need to
transcend to the hermaphrodite, help the male “get” there––explore the “both both” of sexuality and eros and
how eros moves, ascends beyond gender construct. I think Iovis
explores identity in this way, instructing––correcting––the male on how to
behave so he too can get free of the habitual patterns of the warring god
realm, the need to always hallucinate an enemy and thereby justify his
bellicose existence and lust for blood. Which also goes to the greed of plunder
and loot and empire. So I watched that over 25 years, and the only power I had was in my poetry, tracking the deeds of the patriarch. But I
was also tracking the life of my child, my world, my lives, my elders, the
school I had helped create––a temporary autonomous zone of sanity. But the dark
trajectories forced the poem into being in a sense––maybe I would go mad if I
didn’t track Rocky Flats, from demonstrating in the ‘70s to the present with
the nuclear plant decommissioned and yet the soil still toxic with plutonium,
visiting Bhopal to see the residues of the Union Carbide genocide in 1986. We
see how “the fix is in, the fix is in” continues to
manifest in the ugly scenarios playing out in Iraq and Afghanistan. Criminal wars.
A million Iraqis dead? You have to wonder and weep and
rage over this horrific pathology. And the new human-less
weaponry––drones, and weather weaponry and surveillance––more mechanisms of
concealment. All those horrors, and how they are inter-connected
and how we are “before them,” and can’t ignore them. And expose the
agendas of Halliburton (Xi) and so on. Quite exhausting.
I hope people of
the future will go to this poem for some of the history, as well as for the
imagination and beauty that counters and chides and is still in a wild place. I
experience Iovis as––ultimately––a generative project. The boy guiding through confusion is key
here as well. Who inherits this larynx? Who comes after us to clean up the mess? Who might sing of
the darker times?
JC: You mention the Occupy Movement of 2011 in
Book III. Iovis has a kind of 3-D political activism––its interconnected themes of
war, feminism, and language. The poem has been described in a Publishers Weekly
review (http://www.publishersweekly.com/ 978-1-56689-255-1) as your attempt at
a “new world history, a radical re-creation myth, an homage to Blake's epics
and Pound's cantos, and a mystic or matriarchal answer to the male-dominated
civilization (Jove or Iovis, the male god).” Do you
agree with that?
AW: Yes, I would
agree. There is that tri-partite braid you mention. And it might be the language the poem finds is the answer.
That our need to reimagine our world through the vibratory
larynx, that’s what matters. Re-awaken the world to itself.
Through ideas,
pictures, sounds. Hold the mirror up to “nature.”
JC: Your own Vajrayana
Buddhist practice was front and center in Book II, “Rooms” (423), and is woven
throughout the trilogy. You wrote of your own fear of “passion toward others,
toward anything” and how the room of mind you lived in “was a prison.” As a
liberation epic, were there particular moments over the 25 years of the writing
of the poem that informed you as to your personal goal of attaining
liberation––“this poem is the occasion of my complete LIBERATION” (688)––in
this lifetime?
AW: O dear, I
sound arrogant. If you speak of your own liberation or enlightenment, clearly
it hasn’t happened! Still too much ego. But certainly
writing this work over a long period of time was liberating. I got all that mental
projection and montage and history and sense perception OUT in front of myself
where I could shape it. There’s an aspiration to keep working free of “small
mind” in the Iovis project which also reflects an
allegiance to reflection, contemplation and following the breath of yourself
and others including the “plants and trees and so on…” and seeing poetry is also
a means of liberation, in that I am awakened to this life and its beauty and
mystery and complexity through the graces of a “making” of language. And there
are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme.
And we can
release them. And it can be grand and vast and you can create a realm you can
dwell in for a while. Where things are perfect symbols of themselves, no
manipulation. And that connects to me to the Buddhist view. From that perspective
we can wake up on the spot, be conscious of our world, think of others. Not push ahead on the line, hog the road, and so on. Most of us
have glimmers of that. Little gaps in our “me me” monkey
mind consciousness.
JC: You include numerous personal letters throughout
Iovis, but
none speaks as potentially critical of the poem as your longtime Kerouac School
poet/colleague Anselm Hollo’s letter (473-475). Hollo argues that “the poem needs to be more than just raw
material to present to an ... audience, in ways
intentionally or unintentionally designed to cover up weaknesses in the
writing” (474). How would you respond to post-publication criticisms of the
work that in fact there are vast numbers of pages in which a radical syntactic
linguistics is at play and meaning is at-one with no-meaning?
AW: I took Anselm
Hollo’s ars poetica to do with a critique of reading the telephone
book, or some such performance strategy, more conceptual in purpose. I suppose
the best response is to let Iovis find its readers and place in the spectrum, which it
seems to be doing. I have great confidence in its many surprises, delights and
strategies, to use that male word. Even humor. There are intentional spaces
for “raw” material, but so much of
it has been worked through the “poem machine.” I see endless permutations are
possible as well with how one might read it.
JC: You discuss sexism and the Beats in a letter
to Jane Dancey (475-478). In that long letter, you
state that the biggest problem with the Beats was “the inattention to women and
often sexist attitudes about women that undermine some of the early writing.”
You follow that with an interview with poet Joanne Kyger
in which she states something very real for any experimental writer working
under the radar: “No one’s going to tell you you’ve got it” (478). What would
you say is the heart of long-term personal power that fueled Iovis?
AW: Yes,
exactly, no one asks you to do this. And the male-poet compadres are not
always helpful. It took Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg too long to see what a great poet
Joanne Kyger is! But indeed, no one begs you to be a poet or write a 1,000 page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction––a
need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but
through you. That doesn’t mean that you are unconscious or in trance, but there
can be moments like that. You are deliberately making this work for yourself––to
see your own mind, to learn something, to wake up, to observe the work can be
arranged, shaped, held, transmitted.
JC: You are a poet “enamored of syllabaries, alphabets, the phonemes of old tongue &
groove” (“Glyphs” 480). You also mention how the reference point of your
writing of the epic was the mantra “War, gender, language” (“Lacrimare, Lacrimatus: ‘Dux Femina Facti’,” 529). Can you
discuss your appreciation of Gertrude Stein and her “include it all” poetics in
the making of Iovis?
AW:
Yes, as much that could be included. I did have to cut about 100 pages at
Coffee House’s insistence. They would not have been able to bind the book. It
was also unfinished pages in draft that weren’t as strong. The epic is a story
of your time, your wars, your heroes. For her it was Susan
B. Anthony, Picasso. Stein is a champion of her own continuous present mind-grammar.
The world is constantly reflected in her patterns and associations, and she is miraculously
liberated by a lack of restraints. She could use the intimate things in her
life, and also simple objects, names as well––where they are “reduced” to
language in relationship to itself and flattened out quite democratically––so that
in an interesting way they become neutralized. She wrote freely and yes maybe things
are coded, but she wrote a great many works, dense and demanding. You feel her
liberation when you hold and read her notebooks in the Beieneke
Library at Yale. The assertive child-genius.
JC:
One of my favorite shorter sections of Iovis occurs in Book
II. The “Spin or Lace It In Story” piece exemplifies the poet’s role in
retelling “traditional myth”––its relationship to “phenomenal obstacles the
imagination conjures & vivifies...” (608). It seems to call attention to
the centrality of imagination. Can you discuss the roots of this story? Is it
from a film?
AW: It’s the spider woman myth, from Navajo/Diné, Keresan and Hopi Native
peoples. A kind of creation myth, a survival myth. In
this version she’s a “spinster” with “no man to touch her,” as I say. She’s
probably Grandmother Spider Woman. I wanted to invoke the sense of her
“spinning,” and spinning a tale, this tale––this epic––as well. The artist as
solipsistic, complete-unto-her-self, letting “the centrality of imagination” as
you say it all come and unravel. Myths, by their definition, involve
transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of
obscuration. Other characters such as Copper Man appear, and all the natural (including
cobweb and gossamer) elements. I think I retold this story while being in a
retreat. I was indebted to Paula Gunn Allen and her book The Scared Hoop. She was raised on the Laguna Pueblo and was an
important thinker (anthropologically),
wanting to restore a sense of the gynocratic to
Native Amerian history, and myth. The
centrality of the feminine.
JC:
You begin Book III “Eternal War” with an
introduction (655-657) in which you write, “The sending and receiving practice
of tonglen I recommend again as it is the crux of
this project: take negatively (sic) upon oneself, call it out, breathe out the
efficacy: Practice empathy in all things. Pick a cause and tithe your time
relative to the half-life of plutonium” (656). What is the place of tonglen in your
conjectures of “future...radical poetries”?
AW: Tonglen is
taking it all in, including it all, as Gertrude Stein recommends, but for the
scope of Iovis it’s all the toxicities of our
world as well––the ugliness, violence, disparities, the suffering of all kinds and degrees, of
others near and far. Your compassion travels beyond your own inner circle. And
then you breathe out an alternative version where you mentally and emotionally
and psychologically purify the poisons. So indeed, the generative idea is in
the crux of this practice and of my propensity toward poetry which
is a practice of the imagination. We humans need to do better with our vast
minds and alchemical powers. Future radial poetries might be more symbiotic with the rest
of consciousness.
JC:
There are exquisite sections of Book III,
such as “G-Spot” and “Matriot Acts,” that would be
the apex of most poets’ careers. And then there is “Problem-Not-Solving”
(946-975), which really was the highlight of the entire poem for me. Can you
talk about how your activist work at Rocky Flats in 1978-1979 as well as all your
tireless antiwar, antinuke, rallying over the years came
to be seen in/by this formulation of “problem-not-solving”?
As
for the activist work it just goes on, and it seems to be more and more about
how to preserve Archive, how to preserve culture, how to hide the treasures so
that they can be found at a later date and re-activated. For me poems are acts
re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future. So Iovis has that potential. And it was written for my son Ambrose Bye so that he could see where I had been, and he
could see something of the world that he would inherit. This is the Kali Yuga,
remember, according to many traditions a dark age, and we will need some paths
and trajectories through it. “Problem-not-solving” keeps the potential to
actually solve. Solve is close to salve. A balm, a
healing ointment, and also to salvare to save. That little “not” (knot) could be
eliminated. And there’s that active “ing” in
“solving.” The situation in Israel/Palestine is the most crazy making,
suffering-inducing “knot”, perhaps the greatest conundrum of our time. We need
a Peace Tzaress in the cabinet. We need a world-wide Department of Peace. The will is just not there
yet, the other way is still so darkly lucrative. Poets have to keep pushing,
pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.
Jim Cohn is director of the online Museum of American
Poetics (poetspath.com), which he founded in 1998. His most recent books are Mantra Winds (2010) and Sutras and Bardos: Essays and Interviews on Allen Ginsberg, The Kerouac School, Anne Waldman, Postbeat Poets and The
New Demotics (2011).
He lives in Boulder, Colorado.
[This interview was originally published under
the title “Push Push Against the Darkness” by Rain
Taxi: Review of Books (Online Edition: Spring 2012, http://www.raintaxi.com/ online/2012spring/waldman.php).
Used by permission of both the author and Rain Taxi.]