Anne Waldman Fever Is Upon Us

A Dying Empire - metal band from Lafayette.

Anne Waldman fever is upon us. One friend told me of Waldman's recent performance at her induction into  American Academy of Poets. Bold, dramatic, and singularly nonacademic. Further, a small press, great weather for media, will lead with Anne Waldman's work in their next anthology. I'm in it, too. And the latest issue of Posit features Waldman alongside artist Pamela Lawton.

Attenuate the Loss and Find

For Adrienne Rich

[Our burden to carry as she did

shift the weight of song, heft and gnosis

“body poetics”

as a total event

her fullness rare in the amnesiac Kulchur

awake, awareness & urgency when poetry serves]

name appears 

everywhere and in dream

body armor removed

what now, legacy, archivum

we female archons preserve of

intensity a durance a hand you recognize

(sounds sound)

assurance as lives on

drank of that

drank of this

almost suffocated, then drowned

downed but never

what only she could only know

as herself living in the brute time

speak of a syntax of rendition?

the politics of Empire chip away

as poetry attests, give it up

curve of a water-starved globe

to follow and be following?

racism, sexism, struggle

everything in intense grasp of

consciousness — cut in crystal observation

for her rapid and perched intellectus

privacy opens to vibrant light

this is stuff of Eros, of empathy

passionate edge of Adrienne

the American Skeptic

I feel you consociational in this light

a term of anthropology, to study

intersections in the annals we share

intergenerational, interspecies, interlanguage

move in parallelograms

getting it right as she did

Solstice, Boulder, Colorado 2012

High Park fires distress

Source: Poetry (March 2014)._____________

c/o http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/247336