Marriage: A Sentence

by Anne Waldman

Anne Waldman's new collection is a set of high-spirited poetic meditations on the delights and pitfalls of marriage in all its guises -- traditional marriages, same sex marriages, the nuclear couple in the contemporary context. Marriage: A Sentence weaves together folklore, autobiographical detail a meditation on the first five days of the marriage of famed modernist dancer Nijinsky, memory, dream, politics, and the play between opposites and dualities. The work is based on the traditional form of the "haibun, " in which a prose-like poem is coupled with a condensed lyric poem of the same theme. The overall drive in this innovative work is an impulse to restore and maintain the spiritual life of marriage in all its diverse manifestations. Lyrical and "berserk, " this is Waldman's most exciting, energetic, and accessible work yet.

Genres: Poetry

116 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2000

About the author

Anne Waldman was part of the late Sixties poetry scene in the East Village. She ran the St. Mark's Church Poetry Project, and gave exuberant, highly physical readings of her own work.

She became a Buddhist, worshipping with the Tibetan Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who would also become Allen Ginsberg's guru. She and Ginsberg worked together to create a poetry school, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, at Trungpa's Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Anne Waldman is one of the most interesting, vibrant and unpredictable members of the post-Beat poetry community. Her confluence of Buddhist concerns and thought-paths with sources of physicality and anger is particularly impressive (did you get all that?).

She was featured in Bob Dylan's experimental film 'Renaldo and Clara.'

Reviews

[Mitch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my favorite Waldman book, but I love the title poem, a total rockin' masterpiece. To hear Anne read her work, you might not notice how well-crafted it often is. Sometimes she stomps on the rhythms too hard in performance. This poem, for example, is quite subtle musically, and has some hilarious moments in it. When I first heard her read it aloud, she overdid a lot of these lines, and their delicacy was lost on me. I found a reviewer's copy of the book soon thereafter, and was knocked out by the way she combined high and low notes, angry and witty notes, as good as Corso's Marraige, which is saying something, and more insightful to boot.

[Dana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I'm getting jaded by poetry, but I wasn't amused, challenged, inspired...actually, for me, that was the one thing this book did have going for it. I did want to experiment with repetition and language after reading certain poems, so as a poet maybe I should, for that reason alone, be giving it a higher rating. But I'm not. Maybe it's just the nature of the form, but all in all, the poems were inconsequential to me. Interesting, but no sparks. I really wanted to like this book but in the end I just felt like it was working too hard for what it accomplished.

I'm willing not to give up on her, because I sense something exquisite and alluring and cheeky beneath the surface, something worth exploring, but I'm just not getting it here. I can tell I like her sense of humor and maybe I'll just have to accept I like the way she thinks but not how it translates. This maybe a re-read in the future. But, if you're a fan of hers and recognize maybe this isn't her greatest achievement, I'd love to hear your suggestions of what is/are.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

KSKS