Anne Waldman5 Female Poets Next to a Block of Ice
(--Wrestle the damn dream down!)
--Eleni Sikelianos
This was the dream where I left the palm and stereo at home left my fatigues at home I became lost in a Theatre of Reading I was provoked by aggressive how-to book titles bobbing out at me as I passed the (fluctuating) shelves "Incapably Positive Chronicles" "Received Ideas But In No Things Received" "The President Is Not Projective Thirst You Can Be Too" "My Hands Are Tongue-Tied" "More Than Laura Riding Knows" I open a volume, hands shaking but my condition ordered me to salute Heil! I felt like Queen Mab, I wanted to eat nightshade and ply the spirits of poesia out of their caves My sisters--all four of them--reminded me of the Library in Alexandria--think of it before its sacking --(time is a spiral) and suggested how one might behave in such a place-- such a Memory Palace, you need, girlfriends, to bow Joanne was seen polishing marble Diane remained in samadhi Alice had her glasses on to scrutinize a miniature map Eleni was eager for the card catalogue, she started "And you?" She was enceinte, she held the future in a book I was a lumpen proletariat, a deadbeat, a shaman I wanted him, the only librarian in the room (snap fingers) to be a nurturing woman librarian The world was askew how get it right again? Stacks of glassine Duncan, Olson thin, weathered Ginsberg, his pages long with hair It was "all about" Spicer's grail, the Enron scandal It was all about death in war, torture The empire of reading was clear You needed special glasses provided by Homeland Security But here there was no "home," there was no "secure" But something was going to change, get born.
Anne Waldman's most recent books are In the Room of Never Grieve: Selected Poems (Coffee House Press) and Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble (Penguin Poets). She is the Artistic Director of the Summer Writing Program of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, a program which she co-founded with Allen Ginsberg.
