Anne Waldman, Iovis. Books I & II. Coffee House Press, 1993
With the publication of Book II of Iovis last spring, Anne Waldman’s poem is now six hundred forty-eight pages long. Book I contains twenty-three and Book II contains twenty-five individual poems or sections of varying lengths, as short as three or four pages, as long as twenty. Each section is preceded by an italicized head, a third person plot summary also containing parallel information, side facts. The prevailing form for a section is an amalgam of verse and prose, the latter including letters from others, selections from interviews, dream narratives, journalistic facts and so forth, though some of the sections are in a more homogeneous form: repeated stanzas say, or a consistently surfaced “score” for a performance. It is difficult, in fact, not to project into the silent reading of the work, at almost any point, the sound of a Waldman performance: the whole work is a score, as well as a poem for the silent reader, with no loss of quality and force in either aspect. The theme of the poem is male energy and power, the fact of its dominion over all of us in both the harmful and so-called harmless forms, and most specifically the author’s relation to it in her personal and professional life. In a way the form of the poem is Waldman’s ongoing life, as in Frank O’Hara’s sentence “What is happening to me… goes into my poems.” However, what is happening to Waldman is experienced by her as mythic as well as quotidian, and she identifies with many more personages, real and imaginary, than herself in the course of this investigation, passing among an array of cultures and vantages.
Is the poem rightfully to be called an epic? That probably depends on how picky you are about your definition. In “Both, Both: An Introduction,” at the beginning of Book I, Waldman acknowledges “a debt & challenge of epic masters Williams, Pound, Zukofsky, Olson” as well as a more indirect debt to H.D.’s Helen in Egypt. I myself wonder if the first four of those authors have written what can rightfully be called an epic since their works contain, really, no story and have, rather than a continuity of narrative and form, a continuity of consciousness. There is a letter towards the beginning of Book II of Iovis which brings up the question of definition in a different way. The writer of the letter, K, has participated in a class taught by Robert Creeley, one of Waldman’s specific heroes in Iovis and also certainly a friend, in which he seems to have eliminated Iovis from the category of epic on the basis of the poet’s “ego”: Waldman does not manage to transcend hers, Olson in The Maximus Poems does. K writes that “what he meant is that your work is more personal in that you bring in letters, stories about your child, emotional instances, etc.” As the letter makes clear, a male definition of ego/egolessness tends to be a little special. My sense is that Waldman’s form is close enough to that of those four masters to be called epic if you’re willing to call their poems epics, and most American poetry specialists are. Iovis is big in spirit and scope, it includes history, it’s very long, and it’s replete with an appropriate grandeur of language frequently undercut, in the twentieth-century manner established by those same men, by ironies inherent in being American.
Why would a woman write a feminist poem in a male form? Why isn’t this poem in one of the newer exploratory (“subversive,” post-modernist, more impersonal) forms in which many women (e.g. Scalapino, Dahlen, Susan Howe, Hejinian) are now working, often writing long and even very long poems as well? The reason women are writing at such length is the need to say all the things that have been suppressed for so long, to invent mythologies themselves, to devise a world in which their imaginations actually participate. But why do so in the modernist male form? Because, if this is the form that the “greats” worked in, if it is acknowledged as the “great” form of our (at least American) century, surely a woman can be “great” using it, as great as any man. The form, it must be acknowledged, is still wonderfully serviceable, a collaged entity which seems able to manage any juxtaposition of material, sound, and tone, and which is welcoming to most kinds of novelty of line and layout. All of that is also the form’s weakness: it tempts endless heterogeneity and in its fragmentation makes little room for whatever unity there is in actual existence. I myself think there is quite a bit of unity in actual existence, and also that an epic is by definition a presentation of unity to whatever culture the epic serves. However that’s just me. I’m perfectly willing to accept Waldman as being on the grand level of my heroes Williams, Olson et cetera where she dialogues with them in radiant language. They must include her now—we must let her be included there among them, or their ranks will remain sick from lack of the female; that is, she is in the process of restoring that poetry to health.
There is a very good reason for a woman’s use of her own life events to make an epic: the fact that she has nothing much else specifically female to work with, since “all is full of Jove”:
You speak my own thoughts always. The tracks in my own mind remind you to speak. I listen
to you ranting, and dream myself dressing in
front of a mirror.
(X, “Revenge,” Book I)
The details of her daily life are a woman’s story when hardly anything else is, hardly anything legendary or generalizing, the ready-made sense of position and importance that informs the male story. Waldman ransacks other cultures for generalizing myths about women, but her own life, being an interesting and various one, contains more possibility than the female stories she calls on, the Navajo myth of Spider Woman, or the Gaelic song of the Hag of Beare, or the not-quite-Mythic notion of the trobairitz or female troubadour. At the beginning Waldman’s specific purpose is to explore and celebrate where possible the ways of Jove, mainly because those seem to be the only ways to explore, but her own story comes more and more to dominate the poem, mediated through mythology and made urgent through personal crisis. Waldman’s method in Book I involves the invocation and participation of her father John, a gentle masculine figure who fought in bloody circumstance in World War II. Through his agency, his life, war is discussed and condemned; thus one of the most moving events of the poem is John’s death in Book II:
if it could be put
how simply could it ever be put
putting feet on ground put
head to pillow the cold hospital
down honorably a load for
a body put its mark
shadow putty
puts its remarkable weight
which is frail, still now
for the marking
no trace but what
haunts her like a mirror
her father’s sperm
that makes her breathe
(IX, “Ancestor, Ancestor”)
In a poem that used “history” in the academically approved way, the poet would be exploring the records of the past and “John” would be an ordinary man discovered by accident in centuries-old annals of a town, Gloucester, Massachusetts say, and how fascinating it would seem to speculate on his life and significance! But why can’t the same significance be found in the present and in one’s own life? The risks taken by the author are extraordinary: you write about your father but he dies in the middle of your poem. You write about your relationships with men and a crucial one is severed in the middle of your poem. Everyone sees you; then there’s thankfully nothing left to hide. In “Both, Both: An Introduction” Waldman states, “I feel myself always an open system (woman) available to any words or sounds I’m informed by. A name. A date. Images of war. Other languages to which the ear attunes.” In order to be open to the outside, the inside has to be bared. As this quote indicates, Waldman’s poem is as mediumistic as it is self-expressive. It tells what the culture tells her to—thus the inclusion of letters, quotations, and whatever language catches her fancy, as well as the events of her life lived in the culture. In such a work what’s new isn’t going to be the author’s own ideas (that’s only one way to conduct a mind): it’s going to be what happens next.
The structure of the individual sections can be fascinating, being never predictable: “Mom, you’re so random” is one of the little motifs of Book II, something the author’s son Ambrose likes to say. In XV of Book II, “Devil’s Working Overtime,” that slogan is subtly recurrent and Waldman’s method of making supposedly random elements cohere is explored. Waldman and her son are in the Virgin Islands, where she is working with a group of writers and where mother and son are also swimming, snorkeling, and stargazing. The section opens with what seems to be a verbatim transcript of a local radio preacher:
the Devil’s workin overtime
the Devil’s workin overtime
He’s workin harder’n he did a year ago
Yes, that’s sure
hmmmmmm that sure is true
the Devil he’s workin overtime
he’s workin triple time
quadruple time yea he’s workin…
Immediately juxtaposed to that passage are a short description of the snorkeling son who claims to have seen a great barracuda (the Devil?), a fact or two about the history of the islands, a vignette of a chat on the beach with a woman who’s channeling a spirit named Emmanuel. The random is spookily connected from the beginning here; the quotidian is haunted by myth. Then the first of several lists of Virgin Island-ish things: “termite nest,” “poison apples,” “slave quarters,” “Valiumed out,” ending with the prayer “that this ode not erode.” Then a passage still evocative of the setting alludes to Waldman’s father’s death, asserts her own resemblance to the fish that are everywhere about them, and invokes images of her own birth. In the same passage the student writers’ voices enter with short dream accounts; soon there are more bits of local history, more lists and descriptions of wildlife, followed by a suddenly frontal rendering of the author and son as fishlike or amphibious:
All of a sudden I faced “it”
took the robe off
& the garment was a mirror
of myself
saw my whole self in it
and faced my whole fish self
in facing it
& We were separate…
and I watched my son
amphibian his rubber feet?
now webbed?
emerge from sea
son of the sea of her great foam
The genesis of land creatures from the sea, and the genesis of the author from her father, and her son from her, are thus performed, neatly, out of dailiness, without academic effort. The next few pages of the poem display a diagrammatical burst of names of the constellations, all over the place, “all out on the map, named & delivered to sky / because we study in reverse & code a name, color it, it seeps in / marrow-down, and then look up…” The page and the sky mirror each other, as the robe and the body in the previous passage mirror each other. The sermon from the beginning of the section now starts to recur in conjunction with the idea of the stars themselves being birthed “o yeah they working,” when Waldman tries to tell her son about the births of stars he counters, “Mom, you’re so random,” and so, fugue-like, the motifs become denser. Waldman continuously presses the poem to become itself: “work this / doesn’t work it will, though / working words till they work.” At the point at which the latter lines occur it’s obvious that the poem has found its form, has been delivered. It ends with a prose story by Ambrose entitled “A Day in the Life of a Malaria-Carrying Mosquito,” an energetic preadolescent exercise in “fiction” from the point of view of a mosquito, female, in Port Moresby who manages to eat some blood, lose a lover to Raid, and finally get swatted: any being’s life story, insect, fish, mammal, perhaps even star. The section is all mirrors now but not in a sense of parallelisms so much as in a sense of implications, connections. It isn’t the estrangement of an image in the mirror that’s emphasized but its relatedness; Waldman’s poetry always works towards health and, in spite of its being piecemeal, wholeness. The language of Ambrose’s story is not at all lofty or poetic, certainly not mature, but it belongs in a poem about mother and son; why shouldn’t he speak too and have fun? When he gets the last word the poem gets the last word, rather than the poet, perhaps because innocence is allowed a proper position counter to “the devil” and innocence doesn’t really speak the way, say, Blake does, like a poet.
The mirrorings and echoes and spiraling stars of “Devil’s Working Overtime” reflect the structure of Iovis as a whole. The work never comes to a point, because it’s faithful to the life process; dramatic personal events make for dramatic points in the work, but they are unanticipated, as in a life happening now, and can’t be fed into a linear overview. The reader is not allowed the old pleasure of plotted development and resolution but is instead asked to recognize the recurrent forms and happenstances of phenomena. Book I ends with a sense of a change won after considerable personal stress and the dissolution of a marriage. The closing section, XXIII, “You Reduce Me To An Object Of Desire,” calls on the circular form of the whole poem as a means of gaining power over being an “object”:
For what got clearer was architecture, was my power & that if you kept coming back around section by section you’d reach my ultimate protest which reduced me to an object of desire.
(Not.)
You reduce me to an object of desire. But I come back again. Never reject anything. You reduce me to an object of desire. Never reject anyone…
The you in that passage is the “twin” or male to whom the author has now proved her equality: “villains, brothers, saints, deities.” As the poem itself is built and becomes more powerful, the you comes back around each time, each section, to confront the author and to find her more desirable through the act of confrontation. Waldman both accepts and refutes (her professed motto is “both, both”) being that object of desire, the refutation being couched in the Wayne’s-World (Ambrose’s-world) witticism, “Not.” In saying “Never reject anyone,” Waldman identifies being rejected in love with being intellectually rejected and with being socially and politically rejected, since much of the book is a cry of outrage against forms of contemporary injustice. Book I ends with the sentence, “To blunt the knife.” As if by a circular or repeated process something might realistically be blunted, whereas in the climax of a linear story, a male story, the enemy is conquered and the weapon is seized, but that isn’t real. Poetry’s effects on life are gained through a gradual process not an instantaneous one. Book II ends in a shakiness which is perhaps more truthful to life than resolution is. The last section of the book, XXV, “Sprechstimme (Countess of Dia),” proclaims itself in the italicized head to be a “sprechblues,” a cross between Schoenberg’s operatic spoken-sung technique and the speech-wise phrasing of such singers as Billie Holliday and Nina Simone. It has a fairly consistent musical surface, comprised of lines which sometimes hang together in the usual way, sometimes are demarcated with equal signs and made to have more space around them so that a special articulation is implied:
=illusory shadow of love?=
=did I but dream his face his cock his sound?=
==it is the sounds in love?=
==the words=
==he did grab me with his words=
=entered the secret place in another language=
The poet’s lover has been unfaithful and she bemoans this. The section is structured inside a time zone of not-quite-simultaneous settings and circumstances. There is scrutiny of the life and work of the female troubadour, the Countess de Dia; there is a poetry conference in Vancouver, which provides certain kinds of thoughts and references and the simplest formal clue to the poem: “you understand all these words are from a notebook / three by two and one-half inches / given to me by Ann Lauterbach…”; there is a visit to a museum in Vancouver full of masks of Northwestern tribal peoples; there is a voyage to Germany which includes a screening of World War II and holocaust footage. These arenas are presented overlappingly; happening in mind time they are all of a fabric. The poem contains toward its end, in large bold letters, the ambiguous word DISARM, and the boast, “I sang him down,” for that is what the female singers of love’s trials do: disarm the audience and sing the bad feelings away. This is a fitting message to end with, a known but profound thing to say, but the life circumstance from which the section springs, the betrayal by her lover, remains unresolved in the book. Both books end in an unanticipated personal disaster. The divorce at the end of Book I necessitates the tonal change of Book II, which is lonelier, perhaps harsher, less full of letters from men. Book II must also deal more with death and illness, being the book of a now middle-aged person.
As pervasive as the poet’s own life drama in the poem is a sense of a political world, national and international, tugging at her for constant response. The poem is about love and war, just like an epic, but love includes the love between parent and child and war does not include participation or firsthand knowledge. War is the distress of observation, never combat or suffering; the author, being a woman and an American, has never seen a war, has only been as close to it as her father’s participation in the European theater of operations in the 1940s before she was born. On the other hand the equipment of war is everywhere about her: Waldman cofounded and still teaches at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, next door to Rocky Flats and its plutonium plant, and her immediate community is always aware of the environmental danger of that element. The United States may not be under any threat of war but the newspapers are still full of descriptions of new kinds of weapons (there are lists of these throughout Iovis), as the video games Ambrose plays are all about combat and weapons. The United States is forever catching up to its war in Vietnam; there is the Gulf War, the ethnic war in ex-Yugoslavia, other wars about the globe to keep track of and react to. Waldman’s reactions vary from citizen’s letters to spells and chants designed to “sing down” the spirit of war; the image of the poet is of someone all sensitive and ever-vigilant though powerless in the conventional senses. The whole self is given over to interaction with “what’s happening,” but it all takes place on the page or stage, in the spirit or imagination. No other setting is possible. Waldman presents, especially in performance, a sort of symbolic figure, a theatrically triumphant force. “I sang him down” and then “I rang him down,” her having sung and rung down in Iovis the masculine ego’s will to power, is a boast that isn’t true, for nothing ever gets sung down by anyone, certainly war doesn’t. On the other hand, if one is moment by moment singing against such power, inside such moments, the power is sung down. And if everybody participated in such singing down…?
There may be initially irritating aspects of Iovis; I find that familiarity with the voice of the poem, really giving oneself over to it, alleviates the irritation. Since the poem is built on the presentation of a person and her life, one accepts the poet finally as a friend, gets used to her “faults” and comes to enjoy her company. One may at first think the heads self-aggrandizing and nineteenth-century in tone; after a while one just reads them, takes them for granted like anything a friend does that you wouldn’t dream of doing. Parts of the poem may feel thin; I think that is built into the genre, parts of Maximus, Paterson, and The Cantos feel a little thin to me—as well as garrulous, cornpone, flowery, forced, self-indulgent, pretentious, and impenetrable. The form makes flaws possible; possibly poetry should make room for flaws, being a human form. There are other kinds of flaws in other kinds of poetry: stuffiness, coldness, the omission of nearly everything we think about. Poets like Waldman, her close friend the late Allen Ginsberg, and Williams himself have sometimes had trouble getting the critical appreciation they deserve, as if to be unpreciously in life can never coexist with being intellectual, “smart enough.” Williams as far as I can tell is still not taken for an intellect: his acceptance by the mainstream tends to be an excuse for more prose-in-verse descriptions of objects, yards, and animals. It seems to me that Waldman has evolved from the earlier modernist epic her own form based on an acute observation of life’s form, how things come and go around. Unlike those of her predecessors, her epic is based on the intellectually sophisticated tenets of Buddhism. Buddhism, like politics and the personal, infuses the books. It provides an ethical and philosophical base for much of Waldman’s stance, certainly supporting her rejection of a god outside the mind, a Jove, and even supporting the “random” form of the book: “I will tell you about the Buddhist approach to cause & effect. There is no first cause, there is no final cause…” (Book I, XXIII). Buddhism is imbedded, after some twenty-five years of practice, in her mind and in her daily activity. Buddhist terminology supplies detail and color of language. Buddhist ceremony sometimes supplies the shape of a section. For example section XIV of Book II, “One Taste,” is a scored performance based on a Buddhist meditation to the point that “all experience & phenomena have the same inherent quality of energy, whether it be negative or positive, painful or pleasurable”:
TEAR YOU OUT OF ME!
long long enough
rub together the deceptive existence
of me & other
(rubs hands together)
TEAR YOU OUT OF ME!
You exist because you do not exist.
Other
I taste my hand
All two of them, salty
I extend them to the mountains & the sea
(bends over, rocking from side to side
licking both hands)
& of my crackpot nation, what of it?
& of my anticipation, what of it?
It waits…
it waits…
If one and the other, mountain and sea and crackpot nation, all taste the same, if I am the other, surely a simple harmony is possible between us, between all that is. If war has the same taste as peace, why bother with something so costly? Waldman uses mythology, all sorts of mythologies, somewhat differently from her modernist forebears. For her it is less of a narrative or way of participating in the ongoing ancient stories. Sometimes myth is a way of confronting serious moments, is connected with performance not just of a poem but of a dangerous time. Through identification with mythical figures one can rise high enough above events to take them calmly and even perform potentially curative ritual. Myth is a proper place to pray and hope from. In XXII of Book II, “Cosmology: Within the Mind of the Sleeping God,” Waldman concentrates on the figure of Bernadette Mayer (a poet and Waldman’s close friend) lying comatose in a hospital bed after having had a stroke. Mayer becomes the Hindu deity Vishnu, the “sleeping god,” supported by the nine-headed serpent Ananta, the tubes which surround her body in the bed. The seeming danger of the coma, which has been induced by the doctors themselves to protect the patient, recedes; the fearfulness the occasion invokes in Waldman is overcome, by making the events exalted, cosmic (as they likely are); at the end of the poem Mayer “abides in the nursery of young stars…studded with stars she sleeps.”
But the most obvious mythic figure used throughout Iovis is the title figure, though the adventures and deeds of the Roman god are never invoked. Jove is a concept, a key to meditation on the world’s condition, and a means of praising and attacking the masculine without getting personal. The title of course speaks to the word “Maximus,” but whereas Olson identifies with Maximus, Waldman can never be Jove, and the irony of the title is in its necessary lack of egoism. We are back at the beginning of my essay. Can a woman have an ego, can a woman poet get away with having an ego?
Waldman’s poem is directly involved with the ego question, as she is determined both to be allowed an ego by society and also to find a means to transcend it, a double process which seems to be as cyclical as everything else in the poem. How can one be oneself, and at the same time how can one care for others—all others, female and male? Myth is used in the search for harmless and healing ways to be grand, and in the search for ways to free one from the quotidian, as we are expected to live it in a society grown away from myth and religion. In fact, Olson uses myth to the same end of deepening and sacralizing a “personal” territory, his Gloucester, which is in danger of trivialization. Any good poet recommits life to its full depth, nowadays in the face of great odds since depth is denied in favor of genetics, economics, the thin images produced by the great variety of new machines. As everyone would seem to know but doesn’t really, the images of myth and of poetry aren’t limited by the dimensions of what we literally see and hear: the mind holds them almost without the senses and so they are potentially as enormous as all there is. That is the wisdom of Olson’s epic, and of Waldman’s.