Anne Waldman weighs in on VIDA, culture, and life in general

By Harriet Staff

There’s a substantial interview with Anne Waldman conducted by Damian Rogers up on Lemon Hound. Waldman raps about her new work, collaborations, and the necessity for poets to make their own culture. Given the recent discussion around the VIDA count, she also takes the opportunity, as an established woman experimental writer, to dispense some advice to younger women writers who might feel discouraged by the male climate:

I think you stay on the case, as it were. And consider how you are immediately affected by the disparity in your own environment, as a writer or artist. Also start your own venues and publications, online magazines and the life. Keep the discourse going. Keep counting the pinks and the blues and attend to those whose genders fall between — there’s a huge spectrum beyond the dominant (usually white male) paradigm. I also like to acknowledge the support of some of my male elders — Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Ted Berrigan, William Burroughs… One needs to also not be shy and seek out sympathetic elders and hold one’s ground.

Certainly no one would accuse Waldman of shyness! Her thousand-page epic poem, the Iovis Trilogy, is a long-form exploration of masculinity and history, kind of like a feminist Maximus Poems:

IOVIS engaged a particular panoramic awareness, or something like that — “planet news” attention — and the urgency to keep this kind of investigation going to clarify my own thinking and consciousness and be more aware of the time I’m living in, its beauties and disasters was a real commitment. The world and the events in my own life and in the time we are living necessitated the continuation of this project, no matter what. And it needed to cover the time span and the ground of 25 years…be a kind of testimonial of a life lived in a lot of parallel directions simultaneously. I took breaks from it — the writing — but I was always taking notes.

Posted in Interviews on Friday, March 11th, 2011 by Harriet Staff.