By Anne Waldman
Coffee House Press (2011) www.coffeehousepress.org
$40.00; 720 pp.; ISBN 9781566892551
(Reviewed by Jennifer-Crystal Johnson, phati’tude Literary Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 2)

SAYS ANNE WALDMAN IN THE OPENING of her book, Anew: “So poem is the song in spite of the will of Zeus. Blast him, and that willpower played out as it is doing now, twenty-first-century fix. I’ll be the gray-eyed Athena, clear-sighted through his fog of war.”

To set the tone for this epic poem, Waldman unveils a sense of feminine power and investigative curiosity intrinsically present in inquisitive minds and determined people. To research, dig deep, and uncover the truth — this is the mission and accomplishment of the few. But more than that, in order to convey the intricacies of intertwined generations and how each affected the other,this poetic and imaginative piece weaves history and fantasy together in a scarf of silk and curiosity.

“She, the muse, puts an invisible protection cord around my neck to protect me from ego. She exceeds my aspiration to disappear.”

[. . .]

“I want to don armor of words as they do and fight with liberated tongue and punctured heart. But unlike the men’s, my history and myths are personal ones. I want and need the long poem.”

Passionate and with a hidden depth, Waldman states her vision for her personal epic in the introduction, “Both, Both. We are coaxed into a world where passion and fact melt together to form a beautiful message that cannot be seen through ordinary perception.”

When you pick up The Iovis Trilogy, enter into the journey with an open mind and heart, a willingness to understand and accept beyond the popular scope of those ideas.

“I am excited but worried about this exotic girlfriend who is brewing Vietnamese coffee in the next room. “What don’t move!” He says as we’re about to kiss. “Hold that stance!” He pours a bag of cement in the robin’s egg blue porcelain sink, mixing it with hot water the way you do henna. Then he picks up a little shovel in front of the fireplace and proceeds to dump the mixture over my head. It feels good and quells desire.”

This type of imagery is sprinkled amidst glimpses of blatant truth and personal experience like stars in a blackened sky. Use your imagination: the ordinary and extraordinary, the history and myth, meld with the cacophony that is present day mediocrity.

Delightfully human yet still enchanted with the world, Waldman paints worlds with her words that make you laugh, cry, question, and reconsider. The state of mind that only emerges in dreams and imagination is suddenly awoken and ignited . . .

“Brenda carries a nightstick. Kaitlyn wears a long black leather trenchcoat. Judy is blasé, administrative, & sits back. Types. Brenda will be on edge. Kaitlyn will strut & pace back & forth like a streetwalker. Anne steers this vocal constellation, shifts gears to interject surprise, moves at irregular intervals. We hold text in hand. Use it in gestures, as obstacle, as point of reference that we carry tangible words with us. Voices will come in on top of one another. Now purify the ground of ritual theater. This is to be heard as a four-part Sprechstimme conversation in the head of an insomniac.”

At once an interpretation of the historical and mythical as well as of her own self and life, this creation, destruction, observation of worlds is a refreshingly colorful collection of thoughts — as one, combined, linear, but standing tall alone. Equal parts politics, insomnia, and emotional highs.

“What is the lore
of love?
deals & false erections
missile deployments
trigger happy”

When reading and perusing this manifestation of Anne Waldman’s imagination and experience, I found myself swept up and swept away, swept sideways and upside down, to a level of confusion and then, the “Aha!” that is immeasurably hard to come by. The humor and irony in this book amazed me, while the comparisons and imagery left me in awe. We can learn a great deal from this poet.

“I have a case of a very simple woman’s
mind going in more than a few directions”
Queue the epiphany.

ANNE WALDMAN has published more than forty books of poetry, and her work has been widely anthologized, A co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado (now Naropa University), she is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics and the Director of Naropa’s famous Summer Writing Program.

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