One of the more curious aspects of Anne Waldman’s new In the Room of Never Grieve: New and Selected Poems, 1985-2003, is the starting point for this hefty 500-page tome. By 1985, Anne Waldman had already been a major presence in American poetry, dating back to her days as a Bennington student first meeting Lewis Warsh at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, an event that led to the founding of Angel Hair, a primary publication for the New York School’s second generation. Indeed, by 1985, Waldman had already played a major role in shaping the Poetry Project at St. Marks, had written Fast-Speaking Woman, the Mary Sabina-inspired poem that brought her to a wide readership, and had co-founded with Allen Ginsberg the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, one of the first writing programs in the world not embalmed in the aesthetics of the School o’ Quietude.

 

Anyone who has ever worked as a college administrator knows just how daunting that task is, in & of itself, but to create a program like the one at Naropa out of whole cloth & good will is an act of going against the forces of capital & institutional inertia in this society of almost unfathomable difficulty. Nobody ever taught at Naropa to get rich or have an easy, or even secure, life. In fact, just the opposite. It’s something you do for the love of poetry, of the people there, the place & the idea that something like this can exist at all. Somehow in the midst of all this, Waldman has found the time to write enough poetry that simply a 20-year selected slice comes to 479 pages of poetry, plus indices, notes, etc. Anne Waldman makes James Brown seem slothful & Charles Bernstein positively indolent. She’s not only paid her dues, but yours, mine & that of more than a few other people as well.

 

So perhaps unsurprisingly – given that she’s always done the work of least three superheroes – there would seem to be at least three Anne Waldman’s as well: Anne Waldman, the NY School Poet; Anne Waldman the Beat performance artist; & Anne Waldman the legendary arts administrator. If anything, Waldman’s public persona is so powerful that it may serve to get in the way of a thoughtful reading of the texts that emanate from the still center of this human whirligig.

 

Reading In the Room of Never Grieve in some ways doesn’t make this project any simpler. Waldman is not only an ample & very fast writer – you can feel the speed of her thinking & doing constantly in her work – but she’s thoroughly social as well, incorporating aspects & elements of almost every writer she has ever liked into her ongoing project. There is a lot of Phil Whalen here & more Michael McClure than I would have anticipated, and of course Ginsberg, but here’s Olson & there’s Joe Brainard, even William Carlos Williams – one senses at times a style that is almost that of a Whitmanesque band leader, bringing all these tones forward with her into the future.

 

It might be easier to read this as the Beat queen Waldman & it’s true that the aura of St. Marks Place feels pretty distant from these texts, but Waldman was, even in the mid-1960s, the NY School poet closest to Ted Berrigan’s version of that ever ongoing textuality we associate more readily with Ginsberg or Phil Whalen. Her relation to, say, the perfect post-Ashbery lyrics of a Bill Berkson or the tightly contained wit of a Ron Padgett is not unlike that of the other poet who seems to inhabit both the NY & Beat spaces, Ed Sanders, partly an accident of proximity & partly there to remind  us that all these divisions into schools is so much hoo-hah on the part of compulsive mapmakers.

 

But compulsion is an interesting term to raise here. It’s a dynamic that feels close to Waldman’s work to me. Thus I find it more than a little interesting that the title poem of this large book is both one of its quietest lyrics, but one also that offers a very clear-headed view of the poet:

 

register

& escape

      the traps

 

a last judgment

 

cheetah under her skin

 

one window on the sunny side

 

still life with stylus

w/ rancor

still life w/ daggers

size of a postcard

 

no harm will come to the dolls

of which I am queen

 

ghosts gather –

scald

seethe

 

This is a lyric, to call it that, of pent fury, of a will to omnipotence, which is – in the same moment – generous & even optimistic (“one window on the sunny side”). But “cheetah under her skin” feels very accurate to these poems, whether focused on the most intimate of moments as her chronicles of love & marriage, or the most public, as in the poems that spell out the murderous venality of our time.* “register / & escape / the traps” might indeed be a project for this poetry as well as an instinctive guide to survival.

 

If I have any problem with this book – beyond the too-short snippets of Iovis it includes – it’s that the book oversells itself. It’s not truly a selected poems, so much as it is a selected poems of what is hopefully only the middle period – I keep thinking of it as her Middle Kingdom – of a great life work.

 

 

* See the long list of “-cides” on p. 287.