Bard, Kinetic by Anne Waldman

Author:Anne Waldman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Coffee House Press

This image of being on the lip . . . similar to the liminal quality of Agamben’s notion of the state of being contemporary and gazing into darkness, of being caught between two realities, felt useful to a poem of cosmic investigation. But the message is don’t get paralyzed. Not to be stuck but rather awake to the “already happened” and also “not yet”—the mystery of our condition in human-time-space dimension. Poetry can lift you out for a moment to track and experience the journey.

The poet standing by her word, which is in a sense all we have in this liminal space of “already” and “not yet”—standing by the word, the utterance, the poet’s role as in “vocalizing”—relates to the notion of “projective verse,” emerging in the last century through the poetics of Olson and others. Olson speaks of the “kinetics of the thing” and “one thought following instanter on the other.” Thus a kind of mind grammar or intervention that reflects the rhythm and often interrupted thinking, disjunctive and staccato (the dérèglement des sens perhaps), of the imagination. Wanting poems as “cultural interventions” to come into public space vocally, on a trajectory of associations, as well as intentionality. There are ideas in this dance of the intellect that come to form precisely through a particular mode of vocalization.

We do not think in complete sentences, and I would say our minds are often at ten various points simultaneously, borrowing from Buddhism the notion of the ten directions of space, which also relates to the necessary measure of our compassion toward others. There’s spontaneity in performance involving mantra, blues, and ritual rant—as in Ginsberg’s “Pentagon Exorcism,” meant to bring the Pentagon “down” metaphorically—and that spontaneous form becomes a fierce example of the need to manifest vocally the urgency for “changing the frequency” of our various solidified realities, in order to reinvent and claim them for public “good.”

The notion of “state of mind” coming to be as powerful as a “nation state.” In playing with this phrase in an agitprop performance on Wall Street during a demonstration in the beginning years of the war in Iraq, I was able to invoke the witchery of the wrathful female Rangda figure of Balinese origin, who often ends the night by leading the participants into the charnel ground, or cemetery, on the edge of town. Rangda has enormous bulging eyes, pendulous breasts, and long fingernails that claw at the fabric of the “state.”

Much of my practice, operating in the temporary autonomous zone of the Outrider tradition, goes back to the sense of the word worker, the minstrel, the bard, the shaman. The poems are “modal structures.” Working within the soundings of Sprechstimme, invokes tone poems of Alban Berg, opera libretti, and the like. “Pieces of an Hour,” for John Cage, in its entirety would run an hour, with some gap for silence and drawn-out phrases. I embody “voice” over a kind of fixed “identity.” Its look on the page is one of shape-shifting matrixes.

Translation, of course, is a first ingredient of how a poem will work outside.

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