Trickster Feminism

Description

New from celebrated poet and performer Anne Waldman – an edgy, visionary collection that meditates on gender, existence, passion and activism

Mythopoetics, shape shifting, quantum entanglement, Anthropocene blues, litany and chance operation play inside the field of these intertwined poems, which coalesced out of months of protests with some texts penned in the streets. Anne Waldman looks to the imagination of mercurial possibility, to the spirits of the doorway and of crossroads, and to language that jolts the status quo of how one troubles gender and outwits patriarchy. She summons Tarot’s Force Arcana, the passion of the suffragettes, and various messengers and heroines of historical, hermetic, and heretical stance, creating an intersectionality of lived experience: class, sexuality, race, politics all enter the din. These are experiments of survival.Praise for Trickster Feminsim:

“The pervading mood in Trickster Feminism is of a piece with our national mood: gloom-filled, sorrowing, yet occasionally threaded with hope . . . Reading Waldman is like being in the world today.” —Daisy Fried, The New York Times Book Review

 “Waldman calls upon multiple resources – spirits, suffragettes, and heroines alike – to help defeat the trickster who disempowers women through capitalism and other tools . . . Waldman presents a complicated panorama of places and events – including resistance after the 2016 U.S. presidential election – in these accomplished, intertwined pieces.” —The Washington Post
 
“Very apropos and very prescient . . . what’s reeling and alive is the freshness of topicality, personal and public, in this collection:  ICE and immigration, the DOJ’s current personnel, the Women’s March, Oligarchism and global money laundering, technocracy, ‘Anthropocene weather complexities, nuclear threats, and so on.” —The Brooklyn Rail

“Reads like a spellbook — a mix of prose, verse, illustration and photography, woven together like the instructions to a ritual.  But the incantatory poetry of Trickster Feminism is practical magic, Waldman’s way of meditating on — and taking action against — what she says are increasingly difficult times.” —PBS.org
 
“Waldman’s poems are layered, enchanting, and challenging, but if you’re willing to go along for the ride, their movements will unsettle your thinking on gender, feminism, and the political powers at large in the United States today.” —Tricycle Magazine
 
“Waldman searches folklore and legends for wily women overlooked as members of the trickster canon and claims trickster’s power for the present resistance.  In the process, she imagines a new mythology to serve as the model for an uncertain future feminism.” —PoetryFoundation.org

“Trickster Feminism arrives in the nick of time as a lightning strike of wisdom that illuminates this moment in history. Anne Waldman’s voice is epic, mythic and above all, wild. She gives us direct courage from the force of her great heart. Her words: sacred text.” —Terry Tempest Williams

“Trickster Feminism spins wily counter-logics and connection in lyrics and chants supple enough to face pervasive death–of friends, the body count in our century’s nameless global war, and even the planet’s epochal decease. Waldman’s poems enact insubordination, a kind of pinwheel parataxis, to offer a necessary second sight. We are summoned to peer past appearances, past the sense of square one beginnings and ineluctable dead ends. Instead, we are invited to raise our gaze afresh and to rise to our feet.” —Erica Hunt

“Wit, real teaching and speed all meet up here. Words fall out as the pace quickens, it’s like a clown car bumping into itself, then suddenly the poet takes charge, and backs us right into a confetti of deceptively wacky oracular pronouncements. This is such a read. Trickster Feminism is an awesomely serious book, Anne Waldman’s poetry being nothing but the eye and sound of prophecy itself.” —Eileen Myles

“A rich exploration of how we can escape the straightjacket of gender norms and assumptions . . . [Waldman’s] language is by turns sensual and lush, pointed and playful.” —Lion’s Roar

“Anne Waldman’s passionate, quick-witted poetry doesn’t back down or away from anything, outer or inner, big or small, and confronts an exceptionally wide range of experience and feeling.  Playful, ingenious, edgy, vital in its feminism and in its humanity, Trickster Feminism is a gathering (to paraphrase Frank O’Hara) of political meditations in a time of emergency.  One comes away from her poetry stimulated and—rarest of all these days—hopeful.”  —Charles North

“Caught in the uncanny glint of the trickster gaze, this book contains a masterful, instructive set of texts. Easily a classic on par with Diane Di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters. There is a torn and highly addictive edge to its line, a restless counterpoint that feels in rhythm with our current struggle.” —Cedar Sigo

“An essential poet of our time, Anne Waldman hears the centuries rousted from their sleep in Trickster Feminism.  She sees how the cosmic plight can be turned around in the concealed fragility of late capitalism, and she never fears standing inside the entanglements.” —CAConrad

“Acclaimed poet Waldman plumbs the variations and nuances of female subjectivity and paths to liberation through the performance of words and rituals. . . . the subtext is a rich and stirring commentary on feminine empowerment.” —Publisher’s WeeklyAnne Waldman is a revered poet, performer, professor, editor and cultural activist. She is the author of more than forty-five books, including Gossamurmur, Manatee/Humanity, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and the feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy, which won the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for poetry. The recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Before Columbus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Waldman makes her home in New York City and in Boulder Colorado, where she is a Distinguished Professor of Writing and Poetics and Artistic Director of the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University.trick o’ death

when you are sitting
with the corpse of your friend
this is what to do
when what do you do

if you are strong
make a binding of your mind
surface the body
breathe in quick breaths

huff! huff!
this is what to do
libation in small drops
on heart center
coins of ancient India on eyes
feathers and serpentine
remembrance
and open words like talismans
that shake the cosmos
as in opening a crypt
asleep too long
for death is awakening
and the alive, like you, ahunted
like “art” like “phantasm”
they will guide you
around the heart
circle around heart’s cold
with drops of amrita

leave them there
of candle, frugal
or flame
can she see?
she can still hear they
say hearing is last to go
more of this is what to do
images of all you loved
to go and lastly
enterprise to repeat
acts of love, and in going
pound heart once more
dear suffragette
summon here
to outlast the misogynist
other curative wisdom
what is our speed
to know from branches of laurel
trick o’ death a strategy
this is what to do

be tactful
the dead are shy
go inside them
visit their nooks & crannies
visualize their ash & impermanence

then how to start a spirit fire
play some music with your hands
sing masculine song of the mourning dove
you are alive in cosmetic time

her death chamber cooler now
stretched on the plinth
her cheek fading
you can whisper: see the syrinx,
laurel, a tuft of reeds offered
reeds like to hold you close
one hundred eyes see from inside you
no false twitch

could be nothing
going on
but seeing like this
a cut, a scar the beautiful slit
of feminine aperture

and can laugh at trick o’ death
that’s what you say to
a fabulous corpse
ungendered now
trick o’ death
growing younger by
stuttered moment:
have no fear

she’s getting out of this
into another maelstrom
or just nothing, no breathing
streets are quieter
world violence
feels less structural
lies as secrets seem truer now
you nab them
the interlocutors
blue calcite
most prominent heirloom
in color, texture
imagination of mercurial
twilight words to utter
in the doorway
the bottom of the mind
paved
smart luck
with crossroads
encryption, generation
to know you, spider
of crypt

what does the trickster say
kinetic or
clown
or
hiding so as in retreat
how many come-ons in one lifetime
you will stand in for her beauty
fend off patriarchal poetry
and your own struggle
in cultural anachronism
bombing unilaterally
nothing about
socially constituted
witch trials
women restrain or manipulate desire
face understood it must vocalize
a kiss
working a voice
(dead lady of the lake)
opposed to state apparatus
my sword! my sword!
my mirror! my mirror!
come, sirrah, come
help your mistress sleep

behind the dull glass
what face
pleasure gleam
herself
in status quo
mottled
ragged coyote
of display
acculturation text
rite’s viability
bleeds
naked return?
code this
anatomical
“mothers”
dressing up like
a prince to love you
form is arbitrary
ruins hard
to
imagine
what the country wants
needles
appropriate to
need
“the people
want it”
look of the west
mysterious logos
rock on the road
the Ghent Altarpiece
and its tribulation
exemplified in the material
worship they nibbled
monsters under cartel
broken-down colonial
power
it issues forthher disordered mouth
erotic wish
or queer?

I believe in crucible logic
harassment & insubordination
breaking through
no regulation
but performance
what is the grammar drag,
how exquisite demon feminine
not be victim
a vow, a queen
will not be plaything
you, sister, reckoning
a large-scale genome algorithm

taking you down
maelstrom
of own mind
it pulls it spins you, gender
into fragmented realities
of future past & present
a span is epic is how
every life-form is turbulent
where you are seen in
a series of guises
and some go exhaust
the void, a full place
and a sensory gate still opens
what wanted to believe
went there in a dream
of sleight of hand
shark of all cards
giving out
the tactile organs
kinesthesia like handshake
eidetic tesserae
bargained my kidney,
my spleen, my
temporal lobe
eyes in all heads
too many impostors
hacker in a past life?
how’s the glitzy facade?

saying, your woman’s hand has
a detour
if you just open this door
ghost was saying
your woman’s bed has a detour

is true? I wonder
in red
she wears the same scarf I do
her hair is shorn,
tonsured

this is and
this is and this is
the way it looks
and this is the way it is
and this is the way she looks and
this is the way she is
this is the nimbus she is
and this is her rebus
this is the category and
this is a song of her restitution
this is the calyx and this is the individual
this is the etiquette and this is the lung
this is the shadow & abacus of hovering
a trace to count on
who will bear the weight of this tissue
this issue, hair & nails of the yogini
this is the clinical this is the invasion
this is the odds and these are the statistics
whatever you meet unexpectedly on the path
embrace,
cross purposes whenever you can
expand the road

longer limb that long extends
and this is the longer lung that extends
longer speech, she was always vocally
the longest of all
concatenation
mouthing off the longest syllable
ask and whatever you meet
and your own death, asking
this is and this is a longing
this is Ceres summoning Dame Hunger
this is Ethiopian Andromeda
or Lady Midnight’s Songs of the Four Seasons
this is tranced attention
this is Hermaphroditus
this is a shouter, an Engine-Woman
become a midnight star, Callisto

when you are in your trouble
and turn from death
this is what to do
find the meeting place:
intersectionality
under stars
way to gnosis
saying this is the place
this is indeed the place
with many layers
lie down here
where one thrives in parity
with thieves and lovers
where one can fuck without retribution
(meet me at the edge of town)
a road out there
answer to curiosity
don’t you get it?
derivative mimicry
isn’t going to reflect world’s
madness like she can
out of doors mimicking love or death
junction where you can go either way
and feminism is old mistress to strange
tiers of it to make you think
on death
how cold it is out on the road
making love like this
with the stars conspiratorial, hey!
they are your neighbors
slivers of twinkling form
in and out of many universes
existing in “probability space”
ice rustles, shimmers above
clouds and you are probable too
what shape, body?
with what do you inspire devotion?
how do you construct existence?
your pioneer apparatuses
your added-on
identity, a voice hits all the
registers
your conglomerations
with your timidity
with your power
your willingness to die
and cairns where we’ll leave
markers for you
find the way
to love that drives you?
loosened aside a bower
down the road

little tones piling up to make a melody of
a way your various parts organize to
be here in fiction
stones can be struck
will one still sit astride
his thigh
or it hasn’t started having onto you yet
heaving, hanging
bright girl
don’t you get it
how they fuss you over
with love of all things mental
meant to be in your care
innermost being
insides of things, as poet feels
inner bark from a ghost tree
aspiration, and go down
and some still resting on laurels of survived
dominance look again
a factotum
a dead book perhaps
drive my sex into its covers
driven by lust outside
fear that money drives
the world down under
to shut all feeling of existence out
great mind
will I be bought by
last-ditch patriarchy
how weakens

maybe passed by here
and bowed and made offering
to corpse of rascals

stones speak of hardship
where you boil them for food
for their mineral ink magic
scribe is the biologist
new phase coming
of tones made visible
odd patches of kin
scribe is tentacular
memes of evolving feminism
and the means of it
speak your heroes, mash them
mixed with fervor of protists
how assiduously seeking truth
this is what to do
as in ways or means
and a committee meets to
make sure
a con won’t push over you
force goods that enhance
misty feminine way of life
how to sell it? undiluted
disempower the girl

get down, morphing sister
get down
what are your ploys
stacking up
capitalist wiles
may they be dashed
lauded over aroma
scents of perfumed doom

avaunt idiots of compassion
and the titular rape mode of quest & scheme

what do we see? a weeping
Capitalocene
a weeping many centuries wide
vaster submersible system
it weeps
and weeps crocodile tears
a stall of state
the Mao of
hurt
the heil for hell
the muss of the hurt
churl
a Franco murders
a pol a pot a Papa Doc
somo, pero pino Assad
of the hurt
capital hurts

despots go down
on bite of diction
& silence of sycophants
complicit in their slimy way
attend
won’t bend hearts

to abused
moans of extinction
trauma, trauma
to this poetry now

get over right now
paradox of fear
ineptitude
muscle up
find yourself in boundary
a name which means
“I have tricked you”
woman up
your paradox of betrayal

false?

didn’t steal the poems,
am I not their keeper?

want to crash gates of
city, life gives
ambiguity & deceit to
old fem con to make you pay
all this curvaceous beauty
and tough sisterhood
take heart my lovely
meet me on the other edge of town
(one for lovers
this one for assassins)
dagger glints in moonlight

how many femmes can you hold
in dusk time
when it’s too late
the friend the enemy
hag in retribution

how many years, an icy lore
remote that they do this to any bodies
you know they do this to women
on their rounds
and to bodies sensitive as women’s
the strange, displaced the transposed the
fully realized however declaring self

expression to move,
chiasmatic,
heaven & earth
resumes holy measures
and it is a spiritus praxis I sing
O lordy lordy
to open your own tomb
then you’re fearless
when you are both tomb
and prescient womb

go down, matrix
down, sepulcher of women
stealing your secrets
and these are the secrets I steal
innermost beings
a mesh of silicon & copper
all the pulchritude in the world

they’ll beat it, meme of us: metataxis
the oligarch is in charge
is at it metabolically and has to go
we make him go

grasses will hide and rejoice
we make him go
please learn this before you leave the earth
rout plights to bury the wild girl
women in abstraction thinning
facedown ones
they do rise
in disguise of agenda
what is the ploy?
a strange miasma. . . .
catch him
make him go
from our body of light
though we be trickster shadow
a scented elixir
drank the
what is it?
wordless amrita?
without word
crossroads will make you stand tall
in your architecture of chance
“down the rabbit hole”
you rise out the other side
you survive

feminism is your ploy,
ofttimes retired
come out now
not disenfranchised
nor abandoned
nay obsolete
how many you go con
bruited lab death of feminism?

when you sit with
the corpse of your world
let it shut its corpse

rabbit is in the moon
illusion’s illusions strumming on
being around voice
jumping thrice over coyote
trick o’ death
take down the big horrible men
destroy them in their icy sleeves
cuff them
not you brethren but impostors
and their minions
who cater and mew and shuffle

just so you know what stage femme
is on evolving
its fluid body
its principle
the crossroads can’t nail you down
to ignorance
but it’s a promise
meets you there
speculating
with choice & impetus
which way the wind blows
avenge all deaths of hers
poet-thief
drive the stake inUS

Additional information

Dimensions	0.4200 × 5.9000 × 9.0000 in
Series	Penguin Poets
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780143132363
ISBN-10	0143132369
Author	Anne Waldman
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	SOC010000, POE024000
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