Anne Waldman takes the opportunity with this 20th-anniversary expanded
edition to add 20 poems to this collection that brings into focus her
lifelong engagement with "chant" as central to contemporary performative
poetry.
Here are spells, invocations, laments, ritual rants. Archaic beliefs in
magic and ecstasy meet current notions of the power of the spoken word.
Waldman writes, "The poem is a textured energy field or modal structure.
The poems for performance seem to manifest as psychological states of
mind. They come together in a mental, verbal, physical, and emotional
form, making their particular demands on my voice and body. I am the
'energumen.' The poem is the experience." Also included in this book are
three essays on the oral tradition in poetry. One essay discusses the
history and occasion of the title poem. The others treat such topics as
performance art and poetic tradition, ethnopoetics, intoxication and
transformation, Tibetan Buddhism, and the renewed ascendency of feminine
energy in writing. Anne Waldman, world-renowned for her high-energy
poetry performances, is the author of over 30 books and chapbooks of
poetry. She is the co-founder and director of The Jack Kerouac School of
Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
"Anne Waldman is one of the fastest, wisest women to run with the wolves
in some time." (The New York Times Book Review)
Anne Waldman, world-renowned for her high-energy poetry performances, is
the co-founder and director of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied
Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. She is the author
of over 30 books and chapbooks of poetry including The Iovis Trilogy:
Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, Voice's Daughter of a Heart
Yet to be Born and Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets).
