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Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born
Waldman appropriates the idea of Blake’s unborn spirit of Thel to explore artists’ and activists’ roles during the Anthropocene.
Coming in the wake of her vast and magnificent epic (The Iovis Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment), this volume brings Anne Waldman’s work into the more intimate, paradoxical folds of poetic (and prophetic) knowledge. This should not suggest that Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born is a book of small things; it is anything but. Juxtaposing lyric arcana, journalism, critical fragments, visions of mythic and mystic beings, narrative, polemics, and even ekphrasis, Waldman has created a work that is simultaneously jeremiad and psalm. It is, then, both fearful and celebratory, an epic of a “time before birth.”
Coming in the wake of her vast and magnificent epic (The Iovis Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment), this volume brings Anne Waldman’s work into the more intimate, paradoxical folds of poetic (and prophetic) knowledge. This should not suggest that Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born is a book of small things; it is anything but. Juxtaposing lyric arcana, journalism, critical fragments, visions of mythic and mystic beings, narrative, polemics, and even ekphrasis, Waldman has created a work that is simultaneously jeremiad and psalm. It is, then, both fearful and celebratory, an epic of a “time before birth.”
- GenresPoetry
160 pages, Paperback
First published June 7, 2016
About the author
Anne Waldman
184 books145 followersAnne 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.'
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.'
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 12, 2016
This remarkable Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to be Born summons the voice of the unborn. Using William Blake’s The Book of Thel as its suggestive model and poem and prose poem as its form she creates an awakening meditation on our times and all times.
Full of conscious and subconscious energy it bravely brings forth the diverse forces of our lives. It is a work of epic vision delivered as if in a trance of truth saying. Waldman describes herself as a writer, “I feel myself in the lineage of epic poets everywhere, with special emphasis on the melopoeia of the work, the music of the language, the music of the spheres.”
The book itself is not easily classified, its essence elusive, and yet critics attempt to characterize it as: “a vast and magnificent epic” (Lyn Hejinian), “dark meditation on endings, on revolution, on embodiment. . . . poem is a place of grief and resistance, of improper questioning, and of explosive, irrefutable imperatives”(Elizabeth Willis), “a grand listening, a discourse inside ecstatic presences”(Dawn Lundy Martin). It pulls you into some new understanding of writing and art, one that requires the reader or viewer to come to terms.
A comparison that many might miss is with Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight the provocative and edgy anti-novel written to prevent the U.S. from going into war. It is a panoramic vision of the apocalyptic nightmare vision to wake us to our humanity. This is what Waldman intends though she presents a vision with more light and beauty. Patchen’s narrator declares directly to the reader: “You have read many books. This book is reading you.”
Early on the mythic figure of Thel is put before the reader:
“When Thel lifts her head, flowers feel it in their cellular dance. She is like water for them, she is a kind of thirst unsatisfied. Her Offworld is womblike, and safe to venture out when the metabolism is not cloaked or clocked. The unborn reaches into her vocabulary to “starry” a sentence that would relieve the others of their woes and cares but because she is not established, no home! No shelter! She does not know her way about, mistakes her standing, her possibility for survival, the postures that she would take with Other, with outside. . . .”
Confusion and doubt are mixed here for Thel and the reader. The poet is just the Sayer. Interpretation is left for us all. Thel’s character or force, if not essence, is presented variously throughout the text, as in:
Thel, uneasy rider
came part way
Thel as inquiry
Thel in elation
Thel close to fading ones
snowflakes on a warm rock
arise and die
writ in truth serum
Like Thel, the book is a dynamic force refusing to be defined or boxed, and so the reading becomes an act of self understanding and creation. Willis’ words echo truly, “This poem is a place of grief and resistance, of improper questioning, of explosive, irrefutable imperatives.” It is a real challenge to the reader and to our times, but the rewards are transformative because they are well earned.
If we use William Faulkner’s criterion for greatness we must judge by “the magnificence of the failure,” and here the vision and art are powerfully combined. Waldman has always been a writer of the “outriders,” the visionary rebels who make art new and engaged. She delivers that here.
Full of conscious and subconscious energy it bravely brings forth the diverse forces of our lives. It is a work of epic vision delivered as if in a trance of truth saying. Waldman describes herself as a writer, “I feel myself in the lineage of epic poets everywhere, with special emphasis on the melopoeia of the work, the music of the language, the music of the spheres.”
The book itself is not easily classified, its essence elusive, and yet critics attempt to characterize it as: “a vast and magnificent epic” (Lyn Hejinian), “dark meditation on endings, on revolution, on embodiment. . . . poem is a place of grief and resistance, of improper questioning, and of explosive, irrefutable imperatives”(Elizabeth Willis), “a grand listening, a discourse inside ecstatic presences”(Dawn Lundy Martin). It pulls you into some new understanding of writing and art, one that requires the reader or viewer to come to terms.
A comparison that many might miss is with Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight the provocative and edgy anti-novel written to prevent the U.S. from going into war. It is a panoramic vision of the apocalyptic nightmare vision to wake us to our humanity. This is what Waldman intends though she presents a vision with more light and beauty. Patchen’s narrator declares directly to the reader: “You have read many books. This book is reading you.”
Early on the mythic figure of Thel is put before the reader:
“When Thel lifts her head, flowers feel it in their cellular dance. She is like water for them, she is a kind of thirst unsatisfied. Her Offworld is womblike, and safe to venture out when the metabolism is not cloaked or clocked. The unborn reaches into her vocabulary to “starry” a sentence that would relieve the others of their woes and cares but because she is not established, no home! No shelter! She does not know her way about, mistakes her standing, her possibility for survival, the postures that she would take with Other, with outside. . . .”
Confusion and doubt are mixed here for Thel and the reader. The poet is just the Sayer. Interpretation is left for us all. Thel’s character or force, if not essence, is presented variously throughout the text, as in:
Thel, uneasy rider
came part way
Thel as inquiry
Thel in elation
Thel close to fading ones
snowflakes on a warm rock
arise and die
writ in truth serum
Like Thel, the book is a dynamic force refusing to be defined or boxed, and so the reading becomes an act of self understanding and creation. Willis’ words echo truly, “This poem is a place of grief and resistance, of improper questioning, of explosive, irrefutable imperatives.” It is a real challenge to the reader and to our times, but the rewards are transformative because they are well earned.
If we use William Faulkner’s criterion for greatness we must judge by “the magnificence of the failure,” and here the vision and art are powerfully combined. Waldman has always been a writer of the “outriders,” the visionary rebels who make art new and engaged. She delivers that here.
November 2, 2026
Anne Waldman in Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born pushes the idea that we're way too proud of being "low maintenance" and it's quietly teaching us to stop asking for what we need. I felt like it was solid, because the examples are painfully ordinary, like eating a cold dinner so nobody else has to wait or saying "whatever's fine" when it really isn't. The chapter on relationships got me thinking about the last time I told a friend I was "fine" and watched the conversation end right there. You don't have to agree with everything, but it definitely forces you to rethink what you're giving up when you never make a fuss.
October 30, 2026
I'll be real: Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born looks like a beach read and sneaks up on you like a sad song. Anne Waldman spends the first half making you fall for these people, the road trips, the dumb nicknames, the cheap motels, and then quietly pulls the floor out. The shift is rough, and not every thread gets tied up. For readers who don't mind getting their heart bruised. Not for anyone who picked it up for pure escapism.
March 2, 2026
4.5 Stars—A bit harder to wrap my head around at times, but maybe this will get me to reading more William Blake. I'll voice a slight preference in this work for Waldman's verse sections over the prose sections, but maybe that's just in the internal tempos that work so well in verse here.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews