Marcella Durand Reviews Anne Waldman's Trickster Feminism

Anne Waldman's new book, Trickster Feminism (Penguin, 2018), is reviewed by Marcella Durand for Hyperallergic this week. "Her intimate knowledge of the 'outrider' tradition is, at this point, so invaluable that she should be considered not only a 'national' treasure, but an international one," writes Durand of the legendary poet. More:

In Trickster Feminism, form follows function — to undergird her invocations of feminist activist lineage, Waldman employs a range of poetic forms that also have long lineage: the chant, the blues refrain, the prose poem. In the past, Waldman has expressed how she felt “insulted that the epic is seen as a male form,” and has made a conscious effort to reclaim such forms as female too. (Interview with the author, Poetry Project Newsletter, 2003.) But in Trickster Feminism, it is perhaps the chant, one of the earliest forms of poetry, that most effectively anchors and amplifies her intention to shift perspective and point the reader toward thought and compassion. With their repetition and rhyme, it is easy to imagine many of the poems being memorized and performed in arenas of protest. “Don’t forget orality of wild purpose,” she reminds us in “crepuscular”:

What is my musical disorder?

How may I sound my feet & hands?

How may I clasp the code and sing?

It was the last white stand to hold women down.

But it is the more discursive prose poems in which Waldman takes a step back to observe and to question; she reminds us that poetry is not theatre or spectacle, and that it has own essential role to “shadow,” to remind, to subvert. We are not only going to chant with her (although, of course, that is a cathartic pleasure) but we are also going to think about what, exactly, the hell is going on...

Read on at Hyperallergic.