Anne Waldman
BORDERLINE
In the cage; troubled presence
In the cage: the rhizome of evidence
What got you here: poverty, eccentricity
Cage: a sorrow, animal innocence
In the cage: modern detachment for innocence
A magician palms a coin; ”temporal opposition”
Then it might be called: pointing backward
Cage: the tableau. Life
Cage: collective slaughter
Choruses chime in now,
For the populace gives choices,
Song and plots and good behavior
There was some forgiveness
There were some good deeds
Neighborhoods were collectivized
A crazy scenario, this is, to
To smile at one another?
Cage: cut rate health and happiness?
So much water under the bridge
including countries, people, their origins
You want to let them all in the cage
Without punishment, author of the camps
Your grand American way becomes a shadow
Cage: a great gaping mouth
Cage: the child in here the chill in her
Cage: the word death not pronounced
Into the screaming
Clint, Texas 2019
LAST
hooks in the experiment
classroom gone empty
in the strange pandemic
I am waiting in the wings
do my lessons
inviting numbers and chance
it’s the wrong occasion
the storm knocked the power out
we bed down instead
with soft animals
they get frightened in the rain
and my texts are all wet
and the walls are minus one
and what is erased is almost comfortable
a child writes this between rounds
of ammunition in a dream
Anne Waldman is a poet, performer, professor, editor and cultural activist and was a founder and co-director with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and is currently director of its Summer Writing Program. She also directed The Poetry Project in NYC, which she helped found in 1966. She is the author of over fifty books of poetry, including the book-length hybrid narrative poem Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets 2009), and the feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House 2011) which is the winner of the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. Other books include Gossamurmur, (Penguin 2013), and Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics (Coffee House 2014), an anthology co-edited with Laura Wright. Her most recent books are Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born, (Coffee House 2016) Trickster Feminism (Penguin 2018) and Sanctuary (Spuyten Duyvil 2020). Forthcoming: BARD, KINETIC (Coffee House 2021), and New Weathers, an anthology of essays co-edited with Emma Gomis (Nightboat 2022). Waldman is the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She is a frequent collaborator with poets, dancers, musicians and visual artists and performs in festivals around the world, and has performed in recent years in Tangier, Marrakech, Madrid, London, Paris, Denmark, and Brussels. She is the founder which Ambrose Bye and Devin Brahja Waldman of Fast Speaking Music band and label and has issued more than 30 poetry and jazz albums. Her album SCIAMACHY was released in 2020 to much acclaim. She has received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for long-life achievement. She curated the Voz Alta poetry performance festival at Casa del Lago in Mexico City April of 2017 which included participants Raul Zurita of Chile, Guillermo Gomez Pena of Mexico/USA, and Thurston Moore of the US and UK. Over the years she has performed with Don Cherry, Steve Lacy, James Brandon Lewis, Melanie Dyer, Janice Lowe, Laurie Anderson, and Meredith Monk. The opera Artaud in the Black Lodge with libretto by Waldman and music by David T. Little will premiere at Opera Philadelphia in 2021.