Poem of the Week: Anne Waldman

             

excerpt from Manatee/Humanity 

the aquarium deserted now,

this is the song at dusk I write in the notebook:

strange skin

not quite seal

not quite dolphin

inchoate

texture like

something you forget

something you didn't even see

the first time

old shoe

sentient being with others in watery caves

lights off

with motive & mind up a ladder

mouth moving

quixotic mind

quick flick

who are me

who haunt me

please haunt me

summoned by the dream

the kusha grass instructs

you might say a kind of ceremony

gather up these nightmares

this in a public space

where many minds meet

& pass around the objects of this dream

a blindfold, a crystal, a card with a bodhisattva upon it

gather them up & making an offering

all the bikkus going down on their knees for this

in this world marked out by the augur

interstices between living & dead

an initiation on the nature of time

& of continuity in a dark time

mean world: humanity

dream world: manatee

secret world: om mani padme manatee hum

om mani humanity padme hum

the center of reference becomes movement in this ritual

-Anne Waldman

Used by permission.

From Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Books, 2009)

Anne Waldman is the author of more than 40 books of poetry and poetics, and an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry movement, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg, and in the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. Her publications include Fast Speaking Woman (1975), Marriage: A Sentence (2000), and the multi-volume Iovis project (1992, 1993, 1997). Waldman is a recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award and has recently been appointed a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Marks's Church and she co-founded with Allen Ginsberg the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where she is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics. She was active in Occupy Art, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street in NYC, and has recently been involved in projects around the theme of Symbiosis, which studies the interaction between two or more different biological species.