BARD, KINETIC

The award-winning poet pieces together her life story.

Early on, writes Waldman (b. 1945), she took “an eternal vow to poetry,” and her work has influenced the lives of numerous other writers. Literary boundary-pushers require loyalty, understanding, and close attention from their readers, and this compendium is no exception. Waldman’s assemblage of observations and recollections (in various forms) displays the restlessness of her life as an activist poet. Immersed in her “frenetic” energy, readers embark on a journey that originates on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, where nearly all her neighbors were artists, writers, and musicians. Waldman attended Bennington College, where “highly strung, sensitive, creative students were the norm.” Upon graduation in 1966, she returned to Greenwich Village, where she helped establish the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, which became the spiritual and intellectual home of poets emerging from the 1960s coffeehouse scene. Throughout, the author tells tantalizingly sketchy tales of friends and collaborators such as Allen Ginsburg, Ted Berrigan, Bernadette Mayer, Frank O’Hara, and Edwin Denby. Many themes emerge from the scattershot narrative: Waldman’s attraction to and rejection of male dominance (“Were our bodies the only source of women’s power?”); her concern over the “cyborgian future” and ecological destruction; and the belief that only poetry can get us out of the mess we’re in. While the text rewards readers with moments of oracular clarity—“We are in the Anthropocene, where nothing is not affected or infected by the ‘hand of man,” our massive carbon footprint, our War Machine”—it is weighed down by imprecise verbiage. Readers would benefit from more clearly marked signposts in the presentation of the poems (in particular) and more hard decisions with regard to content. While Waldman’s loyal readers will undoubtedly seek this book out, it remains an unnecessarily choppy flyover of an important artist’s intellectual and spiritual journey.

An uneven autobiographical rendering from a cultural beacon.