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Overview
Vow to Poetry is a clarion call from one of our most dynamic and iconoclastic poets that tears down the walls of prescribed creative processes. This stirring assemblage of autobiography, interviews, essays on politics, poetrics. Buddhism, and Naropa University lays bare a life dedicated to the imperatives of experimental poetry and cultural activism. This is much more than a "how to write" book -- it is a "how to live the life of poetry" book. Like a radical instruction manual, this collection plaits together many of Waldman's most powerfully felt and deeply examined experiences to wake and dare its readers to make the ultimate commitment to one's life and art.Synopsis
Vow to Poetry is a trumpet call from our most iconoclastic poet that tears down the walls of prescribed creative processes. This stimulating mix of autobiography, interviews, and essays reveals a life possessed by the muse. You've seen the "safe" versions, now comes this unconventional, irreverent, transgressive volume.
Anne Waldman ran the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York for over a decade. She is the co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she teaches and directs the Master of Fine Arts program in Writing and Poetics.
Contents
Author's Note, 13
Prelude: "My Long & Only Afterlife", 15
Feminafesto, 19
My Life a List, 23
Oppositional Poetics, 48
That Light Is Sandino, 49
Managua Sketches, 51
Seeing What Happens (Interview with Joyce Jenkins) , 54
Kali Yuga Poetics: A Manifesto, 60
"Take Me to Your Poets!", 74
Loom Down the Thorough Narrow, 81
Hermeneutical (Light to Read By), 91
Vow to Poetry (Conversation with Randy Roark), 96
Sikelianos's Delphic Idea: Site & Poetic Legacy, 123
Hags, Nuns, & Magpie Scholars, 135
The Outrider Legacy (Interview with Mark DuCharme), 142
Poetry as Siddhi, 155
Noösphere & the Six Realms, 167
I Is Another: Dissipative Structures, 173
The Talisman Interview (Interview with Edward Foster), 192
Warring God Charnel Ground, 205
Deviant Identities, 213
Minstrel Bard, 228
Last Days, Hours, 230
Burroughs: Hurry Up. It's Time, 235
Go-Between Between, 238
Grasping the Broom More Tightly Now (Interview with Eric Lorberer),247
Creative Writing Life [Reading/Writing/Performance] Experiments, 247
Alphabetic Tesserae, 262
Epic & Performance, 266
"Surprise Each Other": The Art of Collaboration (Interview with Lisa Birman), 272
Spare Us Your Epiphanies, 280
Marriage Marriage: A Sentence Sentence, 283
Muse, 286
My Life a Book, 289
Acknowledgements, 292
Selected Bibliography, 295
Oppositional Poetics
"wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?"-Hölderlin from "Bread & Wine"
How do we
Publishers Weekly
Like her epic Iovis, which incorporates 12 languages, Anne Waldman's Vow to Poetry: Essays, Interviews & Manifestos draws on intersections of the foreign with the familiar, crossed with Waldman's "skewed associational mathematics" and Buddhist present-moment sensibilities. The Post-Beat luminary and activist, co-founder of the Saint Mark's Poetry Project and (with Allen Ginsberg) the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute opens the book with her visit to Hanoi in 2000; it's followed by Feminafesto ("I never promised domestic bliss") and a Socratic Rap with Questions & Answers from 1976. The book's nonchronological, associative tumble varies genre (poetry is included in various pieces), form, subject (Colorado's Amendment 2 criminalizing homosexual sex; Buddhist poetics; her last days with Ginsberg) or ambiguity thereof, and references Keats, Stein, Schuyler, Pound, Hejinian and on and on. "Language... arrives, it manifests, it is a relationship," she declares, describing her own work and providing a how-to of sorts for writers of all stations and affiliations. (July) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.