Looking for additional poets who belong here. Please add yours. Over the years, this image of the poet has evolved...beginning with the Romantic poets of Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, Thoreau...into a social and cultural outsider who sees and responds to the contemporary world. It's a position of power and insight that gives poetry a motive and works for results...nothing so small as changing the world. Anne Waldman's new book OUTRIDER (La Alameda Press, 2006) asks the question...what is the poet and the poem today? How are they tied to the world?
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8 comments:
How about Philip Whalen?
Yes, there is this issue of the Buddhist path and the politically engaged path...I had posted Leonard Cohen but then removed him as not truly issue oriented. Ironically, I am a Buddhist as well and a pacifist, but I'm not sure I'm politically activist in my writing. ?
I think I understand your point. There's something to be said for writers and artists, etc., who work outside or independent of the political scene, per se. Not "fence-sitters," as some would call them, but rather people who attempt to make some sense of or seek a bit of clarity in the midst of the basic confusion of the world. Political activism often doesn't allow for that kind of approach, yet effective and humane decision making seems impossible without a bit of detachment and clear thinking. I think both paths complement each other in a way.
It's an interesting list.
See Anne Waldman's new OUTRIDER book of essays, interviews, poems on the character of the rebel poet as a social and cultural Outrider.
It's from La Alameda Press and strong. Here's a review:
Anne Waldman. Outrider: Poems, Essays, Interviews. Albuquerque, NM: La Alameda Press, 2006 200 pgs. paper, $18.00
A Review by Larry Smith
Anne Waldman is what she is: a remarkable poet, performance artist, literary theorist, poet activist, feminist, and cultural organizer. Don’t expect her to also be a coherent essayist like E. B. White or Annie Dillard. Waldman’s stance as a writer, Buddhist, and rebel poet run counter to structured coherence, and bend toward construction by association, intuition, accumulation, and imaginative leaps toward inclusion. A child of Charles Olson’s open poetics, she discovers inner structure while mid-stream talking-consciousness, by circumambulating the subject: “Life and its forms are all moving in circles!” (67). And so her impressionistic prose-poems and essays on the mythic Outrider of alternative writing are inspired and often brilliant in segments yet incoherent in rational design:
“What the OUTRIDER desires is a return to urgency for the work
because we are trying to wake up the awareness of the world….
What we need, OUTRIDERS, is the modality of compassion.” (27-28)
“A stance is required that sets apart, yet co-exists with the notion of a
poetry of risk (sanity) and surprise (language)” (30)
These are whole paragraphs within her text of defining-describing the Outrider’s tribal role. Lacking development and logical connections, one finds here bursts of insight into the method of this engaged and engaging writing:
“The poet’s duty is to move the century forward a few inches towards Other. . . Colorful tattered bodhisattvas. With saddlebags, words at the center of mind, never banish thinking of Other.” (22-23)
One cannot help but connect this writing with that of other inside observers, Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Populist Manifestoes,” and Kenneth Patchen’s brilliant “The Artist’s Duty” statement within his Journal of Albion Moonlight. Like these open declarations addressed to the writer tribe, Waldman’s own fast-speaking manifesto capture the spirit of this new poetry of engagement (1970’s to present).
Though the prose-poems contain brilliant fragments, when Waldman is interviewed (by Matthew Cooperman and of Nicaraguan poet Ernest Cardenal here) she gains coherence and momentum and delivers comments that are astute, informed, and comprehensive. The dynamics of her hard-earned poetics of inclusion and revolt are laid out as mosaic stones to walk along. Topics include how her vow of compassion and her performance method embrace in the “wild mind,” how women writers of poetics struggle to be heard, how alternative writers have gone unappreciated, including the whole mimeograph revolution of the 1960’s: “The ‘alternative poetics’ had to do with economics, with urgency, with getting work-in-progress out as it was written. Which then would engender a response and perhaps guide the way the writing would go. It enhanced the conversation as writers.” (83) Culture and art are linked.
The second half of the book contains many valuable Waldman tributes to female writers of the tribe Lorine Neidecker, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, H.D. and others, and a developed and revealing study of Neidecker’s work through linking it with the poetics of silence in John Cage and Henry Thoreau. There are filmic memoirs of “Beat Roots” and another built around the HOWL landscape. The book is enhanced by poet photos from the 1970’s on. As insider and spokesperson Waldman witnesses, reveals, and demonstrates the vision and method of Outrider writing and traces its lineage for us as readers and writers in this illuminating collection.
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Larry Smith is the author of Kenneth Patchen: Rebel Poet in America (A Consortium of Small Presses 2000) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Poet-at-Large (Southern Ill. University Press 1982).
I have so enjoyed my trip through this site; as a poet and an avid reader, I found it both enlightening and enriching...Thank You!
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