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Anne Waldman has been a major force in American poetry for decades. She is author of epics, including The Iovis Trilogy; world traveler; spiritual and poetic seeker; feminist; political and cultural activist; co-founder and head of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado; friend to Allen Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, William S. Burroughs, Joe Brainard, Ted Berrigan, Lorenzo Thomas, and many more. Raised in New York City, spiritually awakened in India, a wanderer, minstrel, agitator — these words all fold into “Bard,” are then rendered “kinetic.” The one time I heard and saw her perform, her voice gave me chills, as it (and she) traveled from the back of the room to the front, heard before seen.

But when I took on the task of reviewing Waldman’s new memoir, Bard Kinetic, I kept thinking about the Pacific poet, Selina Tusitala Marsh. I couldn’t get Marsh out of my mind. I wondered why that was so, settling finally on the accident of my own geography. Having lived in Hawai`i for over 30 years, I’m more familiar with Marsh’s “Fast Talking PI” (Pacific Islander) than I am with Waldman’s signature poem, “Fast Speaking Woman.” Marsh titles an essay on these poems, “Toward a Tradition of Fast Moving Poems,” which is of course part of it. But hardly all. Marsh enumerates a female tradition of poets, beginning with Maria Sabina, a Mazatec poet and shaman, whose line includes Waldman and Marsh. These poets employ litanies of “I” statements, but their “I’s” are not simply pronouns used in the service of autobiography. These “I’s” represent communities whose neglected histories come alive in the poet’s use of mythical time. They do not honor silence; they break it, as they erupt into anaphoric chants. Out of the cradle of this I, Waldman and Marsh demand the attention of their audiences, both resistant (patriarchal, racist) and welcoming (women, islanders).

Here is an excerpt from Waldman’s “Fast Speaking Woman” (1975), quoted by Marsh in her essay “I Come Going from Place to Place to the Origin.” I encourage you to watch and listen — just click here:

I’m a book woman
I’m a devilish clown woman
I’m a holy clown woman
I’m a whirling dervish woman
I’m a whirling foam woman
I’m a playful light woman
I’m a tidal pool woman
I’m a fast speaking woman

And here is Marsh, quoted by herself, a “tidal pool woman” (2009) from the Pacific (“PI” = Pacific islander”) — click here to watch ….

I ’m a fast talking PI
I’m a power walking PI
I’m a demographic, hieroglyphic, fact-sheetin’ PI …

I’m a fale PI
I’m a marae PI
I’m a living breathing dwelling of my ancestors PI …

I’m a movin’ PI
I’m a groovin’ PI
I’m a Nesian Mystik, stratospheric, whippin’ it PI …

In a profound way, the performed I is invented line by line. It comes into being through insistence, by taking up time. (While fast, these poems are also long, ever expandable.) Waldman’s assertion that “I embody ‘voice’ over a kind of fixed ‘identity’” fits the traditions of the bard and the bodhissatva both. In an excerpt from “Dharma Gaze,” she writes: “This is the practice of a field poet, citizen, spiritual practitioner. This is what particular rituals seem to ask of us: gaze thru the solid sense of ‘I’ without attachment.” And later on: “In the Buddhist view there is no solid self or soul, and best to establish this dharma gaze of impermanence from the start.” In a brief homage to John Ashbery, Waldman quotes him as saying “that ambiguity seems to be the same thing as happiness—or pleasant surprise, as you put it.” The litanies of “I am” statements assert a cultural/gendered identity in this realm, and detach from it into a spiritual one. Out of this detachment arises compassion. For Waldman, Buddhist and activist, the litany or mantra is the perfect form.

It makes sense, then, that Waldman’s memoir might be described as a series of performances, rather than as the story of her life. Early on she writes “Bard, Kinetic as a field of possibility, with selected texts from parts and measures of my life lived interconnectedly. A book of memory. And I want the field strewn with poems.” If it’s not quite true here, as Ashbery said to her of Roussel, that “The real subject is its form,” then Waldman gets at her subject through a volley of forms. In the absence of much direct material, Richard Sewell illuminates the world around Dickinson — her family, friends, correspondents — so that we see her reflected in it. Waldman does something similar with herself. The book is reflective, like a mirror zipping — not dawdling — through her life’s stages.

She acknowledges the hybrid quality of her work in a letter to Karen Weiser in 2006: “I also gave a talk on ‘hybrid writing’ which referenced hybrid cars, genetic manipulation, ‘mirror neurons,’ and the biz of being a writer.” So Bard, Kinetic goes through the following genres, and more: prose memoir, oral/performative poems, letters, interviews, homages, literary criticism, discussions of Tibetan Buddhist and other Eastern thought, stories of birth (her own, several times, and others), fragments, questions, manifestos, reports from the front, photographs, and a lot of elegies. Now in her 70s, Waldman lives as much with the dead as with the living. She is their re-sounding board.

While there are doubtless many routes through this memoir composed of many kinds of texts, my compass as reader points strongly toward an intersection between oral performance and political action. The human voice, more than print, calls a world into being; reception depends on one’s proximity to the Bard, rather than on solitary reading. The voice believes, while the printed word awaits our skepticism. In her opening “Sketch,” as close as she comes to a linear memoir, Waldman reports her own conception only after she tells us that she sat on Lead Belly’s lap as a baby. It was “Patti Smith, my neighbor, [who] insisted I start with this tantalizing detail in this sketch. Wear it as an amulet.” Blues musician, folk-rock singer, poet of the voice. A large part of her tradition lives there, inscribed in this first sentence. It’s a mixed tradition, not a pure jazz but more akin to Charles Mingus’s wild profusions of sound and genre.

Waldman’s ambition for her writing is for nothing less than awakening. What she learned from poet and dance critic, Edwin Denby, in particular, was an “observational poetics.” Such a poetics ameliorates a pervasive loss of immediacy. “[W]hat’s getting lost in how we don’t notice minute particulars of life around us or examine a ‘pleasure in grace’ as Edwin always did.” But out of this awakening into presence comes a more forceful, all-encompassing drive. After citing Milton and Homer, she writes, “I arrogantly wrote to display both rage — and lullaby — to a somnolent world.” In Buddhism, one meditates to awaken oneself, but also to awaken others. Tonglen is a compassion practice performed by one person that is meant to affect others who are suffering. Poetry might be said to mimic this process, albeit less quietly, in Waldman’s poetics. She takes in the pain of the world, then releases it through her out-breath, her poems — chants, mantras. A process that begins with observation — she trusts — ends with political change. Her friend Allen Ginsberg tried to levitate the Pentagon. Why not? It’s a different approach to Buddhism and poetry than those of Gary Snyder, Norman Fischer, Hank Lazer, but rests on the same ethical core.

Waldman has consistently opposed the scourges of our time: war, poverty, spiritual starvation. She joined other artists during the Occupy movement in 2011 (to occupy is to sit, in a sense). They put on plays and concerts and poetry events at sites of financial violence in large cities. Poetry’s economic worthlessness becomes powerful in this context. As Charles Stein said, “Money has an enemy.”  Waldman’s report from the front, “Have a Hand In, Occupy,” ends with a long list of poets who died between 2010 and 2022. This enumeration is, as she tells Jim Cohn earlier in the book, “itself a call to action.” To call out the name of a dead poet is not simply to read a name on a headstone or page, but to call a tradition into being, over and again. These are her contemporaries, both in an historical sense, and that intended by Giorgio Agamben, who writes, “the contemporary is the person who perceived the darkness of his time as something that concerns him, as something that never ceases to engage him.”

If the present day is rife with darkness, then poetry is a bright lantern pointed into it. Waldman’s optimism for her art performs a kind of grace — what happens not after long effort, but randomly, like a miracle. (I asked a disabled homeless woman on the Hilo bus the other day what her dog’s name was, and she replied “Miracle.”) Her poetic and Buddhist practices have opened the field of possibilities. While Waldman’s work has little if no overlap with the Language Writing of some of her contemporaries, the desire to cleanse the rot of our politics is equally strong in both camps. If Language poets aim to jam the circuits of absorption in language, as Charles Bernstein puts it, then Waldman and her fellow bards let loose a flood, enter another non-absorptive space. Dam or flood, their impulses are ethical and political.

Waldman’s memoir acknowledges its omissions in the gaps between sections, and there is one I wish she’d filled. While she includes a 2019 statement of a theme for the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, written with Jeffrey Pethybridge, Waldman tells us precious little about the process of founding the school or the exigencies of keeping it going. While her pedagogy comes through in myriad texts, her managerial style does not. Who is she as an educational administrator? (Pardon me while I cough at my own question.) We don’t get a clear sense of the community she has developed at Naropa since its founding in 1974 (the year Nixon resigned, the year after U.S. troops left Vietnam). How do we take such a voice and construct an institution around it? How does an institution keep that voice alive, kinetic, rather than obstruct it as often happens? Like so many of Waldman’s impulses, this one seems paradoxical. But her refusal to stand at the boundary between this and that, her kinetic dance and song that roam between them, is a great deal of what makes Waldman such a powerful figure.

Toward the end of her essay on fast-moving poems, Selina Tusitala Marsh takes an inventory of the real world effects of her “Fast Talking PI” poem. Her central aim has been to counter negative stereotypes of Pacific Islanders. She writes: “As it did for Waldman, the list form offers a powerful counter to the constant bombardment of negative, disempowering stereotypes in the public arena. The phrase ‘I am,’ claimed by ancient deities, drives individuated power but doesn’t preclude speaking in a community voice that rejects societal impositions of ‘you are.’” “Fast Talking PI,” like “Fast Speaking Woman” before it, is a very well-traveled poem. Raying out from schools in Auckland, to Pacific Islands, Marsh notes that the poem has reached, and been transformed by, Somali refugees in Aotearoa. “For me,” writes Waldman, “poems are small acts redone, and that can vibrate well into the future.” Here’s to that future and its vibrations!