Synopses & Reviews
A fascinating new work from an internationally renowned poet Anne Waldman's new investigative hybrid-poem explores the nuances of inter-species communication and compassion. It draws on animal lore, animal encounters (with grey wolf and manatee), dreams, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and Buddhist ritual to render a text of remarkable sympathy, reciprocity, and power. The poem asks questions as well as urges further engagement with the endangered (including our human selves). Part performance litany, part survival kit, part worried mammalian soundings, Waldman explores, as ever, what it means to inhabit our condition through language and imagination inside a wheel of time. This is the mature work of a philosophical field poet with a shamanic metabolism.
Review
Praise for Gossamurmur
"In Gossamurmur we see a master poet in the throes of the performance of a lifetime. Waldman rolls out technology, fantasy, wit, nature, passion and luscious fields of rapturous information for our temporary perusal and then with her magic stylus she flicks it away. Her poet is paranoid, funny, friendly, and lusty and all her wide passages of poethood, personhood, and history are cinched by a streaming network of lines that refresh, quake and accrue. The trembling suppleness of this poem creates a living miniature of the mythic ‘archive of poetry which for Waldman is the holy grail -- the deep subject of this wildly successful poem which she defends like a fire-breathing dragon by becoming it." —Eileen Myles
“Waldman continues Artaud's deep work as a curandera would — to bring us peace with the precision of her turmoil and the focusing of her mutilayered perception. Don't look in Gossamurmur for lambent light flickering. This is the drama of the dragging of dark secrets out into sunlit Nature, body and psyche. It is sciamachy, the battle with the battle.” —Michael McClure
“Imagine a world without archives. Untethered, history-less, a floating samsara. In this funny and very serious reckoning, secret agent Anne takes on those who threaten our very song, in its everyday making and in our memory of it. No one knows better than Waldman the stakes here near the end of time, where we could lose all record of this precious art that ‘reanimates sentient beings. Waldman is one of our great cultural workers, and in Gossamurmur her mind and art sing out in our marketplace to call us toward the gossamer webbing between tundra, plant, and poetry, back to the bed of our ancient song.” —Eleni Sikelianos
“Anne Waldmans enthralling philippic is a mix of lyric, epic, and sci-fi that pushes back against cultural amnesia. Gossamurmur gives fair warning that too many of the voices speaking in our name are out to get us. This book is a guide for living in the space between illusion and copy. Listen for the murmurs of liberation borne on Waldmans gossamer wings of art.” —Charles Bernstein
Synopsis
The Stupa of Borobudur in Java is one of the architectural wonders of the world, designed as both a mandala and as an aid for the Buddhist pilgrim that can be read as a holy book. It has inspired Anne Waldman to create a work which is at once a walking meditation, a ?cultural intervention,? a ?recovery? of a sacred site, and a take on contemporary reality and how the busy ?monkey brain? (as it is called in Buddhism) works and travels. Exploratory and meditative, even playful at times, it expands the sense of invocation and incantation that Waldman is celebrated for, while also reflecting an engaged political/cultural awareness.
Synopsis
A fascinating new work from an internationally renowned poet Acclaimed for her visionary, incantatory verse and her experimental ethos, Anne Waldman's newest book-length poem is an allegory of a radical spirit in lockdown, dominated by "Deciders" and "Imposters" who threaten the future of poetry and its archive. A doppelganger nightmare ensues: the imposter "Anne" is a succubus, and the original Anne has to break free from a metaphorical castle of torture and psychological domination. There are travels through Vedic cosmology and ancient Japan before resolution on a treeless tundra, where fragile life forms struggle to survive. Waldman's oracular poem is a witty meditation on identity theft and a searing plea for the primacy of imagination and for collective sanity in our provocative yet precarious time.
Synopsis
A fascinating new work from an internationally renowned poet
Anne Waldman's new investigative hybrid-poem explores the nuances of inter-species communication and compassion. It draws on animal lore, animal encounters (with grey wolf and manatee), dreams, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and Buddhist ritual to render a text of remarkable sympathy, reciprocity, and power. The poem asks questions as well as urges further engagement with the endangered (including our human selves). Part performance litany, part survival kit, part worried mammalian soundings, Waldman explores, as ever, what it means to inhabit our condition through language and imagination inside a wheel of time. This is the mature work of a philosophical field poet with a shamanic metabolism.
About the Author
Anne Waldman is a celebrated poet, performer, professor, editor, and cultural activist. She is the author of more than forty books, including
Marriage: A Sentence;
Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble;
Manatee/Humanity; and the feminist epic
The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment. A recipient of the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she lives in New York City and Boulder, Colorado.