Fast Speaking Woman: Chants and Essays

by Anne Waldman

Anne Waldman takes the opportunity with this twentieth-anniversary expanded edition to add twenty poems to this collection that brings into focus her lifelong engagement with “chant” as central to contemporary performative poetry. Here are spells, invocations, laments, ritual rants. Archaic beliefs in magic and ecstasy meet current notions of the power of the spoken word. Waldman writes, "The poem is a textured energy field or modal structure. The poems for performance seem to manifest as psychological states of mind. They come together in a mental, verbal, physical, and emotional form, making their particular demands on my voice and body. I am the ‘energumen.’ The poem is the experience." Also included in this book are three essays on the oral tradition in poetry. One essay discusses the history and occasion of the title poem. The others treat such topics as performance art and poetic tradition, ethnopoetics, intoxication and transformation, Tibetan Buddhism, and the renewed ascendency of feminine energy in writing. Anne Waldman, world renowned for her high-energy poetry performances, is the author of over thirty books and chapbooks of poetry. She is the co-founder and director of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "Anne Waldman is one of the fastest, wisest women to run with the wolves in some time."— The New York Times Book Review Anne Waldman, world renowned for her high-energy poetry performances, is the co-founder and director of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of over thirty books and chapbooks of poetry including The Iovis Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet to be Born and Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets).

Genres: Poetry, Feminism, Womens, 20th Century, American, Essays

159 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

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

[Lauren]

I had to read this in college, and I since re-read it myself for pleasure many times since. Her Buddhism and her re-investigation of the role of women are intermingled to create energetic, prescient poetry about modern womanhood. Though this may have been written to reflect a certain period in time, I think this will be a timeless book of poetry.

[Kate]

This girl is still alive and kicking up dirt in Boulder, Colorado. She was one of the youngest members of the beat generation, and I got the chance to see her perform live. She's incredible. Very inspiring. She's so full of life, energy and character.

[Annie Goold]

She had me writing my own songs of naming and speaking self into being upon the first few lines. Incredible voice and laser-fine eye: a bow and echoing return to you, Miss Waldman.

[Jo B]

un recueil de poèmes frappant, c'est viscéral et expérimental, "Fast Speaking Woman" deviendra sûrement un de mes poèmes préférés

[Mandy E]

"I am a dissipative structure—a flowing apparent wholeness, highly organized but always in process. The more complex a dissipative structure, the more energy is needed to maintain all its connections. It is exceedingly vulnerable to internal fluctuations. Connections may only be sustained by a flow of energy; the system is always in flux. The more coherent the structure, the more unstable it is. This ironic instability is the key to transformation. This dissipation of energy creates the potential for sudden reordering. This does not have to be a slow process; it allows for spontaneity. In my view this is also the potential in poetry and in the performance of poetry." (127-8)

*Extraordinary associations give the chant/poem momentum and effect

[Maleka]

one of my absolutely favorite books of all time. poetry, chants, essays. every time I re-read it I get something more out of it. So good!

[Keifer May]

I found the essays and poetics to be the most arresting and informing part of this book. The special care that Waldman takes to explicate her method and tradition is fascinating and compelling. I won't lie, there is something lost in reading the chants alone and missing the poet's unique performance. I wish I could have heard the chants and poems on her breath, but this book was a good read with some real jewels hiding inside.

[callista]

Strangely enough, I like Waldman best when she isn't repeating herself. A lot of these poems are much better heard then read, but "Lady Tactics" and "Queer Heart" really come alive on the page. "Light & Shadow," too, is a true celebration of language.

[Melany Dillon]

A good work, but not a great one.

[eleanor]

felt wrong reading this...she must be listened to

[EJ]

‘Battery’. Then stay for the rest.

[Mina Repice]

Happy Women’s Month 👸

Shocked that Anne Waldman is not more popular! Her writing is so so so beautiful and playful and interesting

[Joe]

If there ever was a book best described by the word "incantatory," this is it. Never out of touch with her sources, Waldman is perhaps the mediumistic poet of our time.

[Janel D. Brubaker]

Sometimes I read a book of poems and am immediately struck by how intricate, how lively, how powerful it is. Sometimes I read a book of poems and that striking attachment to the words on the page builds slowly. And then there are books like this one, where my interest ebbed and flowed from one page to the next, sometimes striking me in such a way I felt I couldn't breathe, and other times leaving me feeling a sense of wanting more.

This book is its own mythology. From the beginning, the reader is brought into a place both of the earth and more than the earth: "I'm the druid woman" (pg 4). This is a book exploring identity: what it means for the speaker to be a woman, to be a specific type of woman, to be many types of women combined together: "I'm the tungsten woman" (pg 5), "I'm the detonating woman, the demon woman" (pg 5), "I'm the egregious woman, I'm the embryo woman" (pg 6). The reader is keenly aware that the speaker identifies herself as all of these types of women, as well as stands in as host for all of these types of women, as if the speaker herself was a conglomerate of all women. And as the poems roll from one page to the next, as the reader is brought on this journey of what it means to be these women, the language becomes ever more strange, ethereal, untethered from the physical world.

This mythology is one of this books greatest strengths. The speaker is embarking on a personal and spiritual journey, and the reader is invited to witness. It feels communal, as well individual. It feels specific, as well as universal. I felt as though I could be any woman reading this book and I would find myself included among its pages. I felt imbibed with the presence of Medusa, Hera, Athena, Calypso, Persephone, Artemis, Demeter, Psyche...I felt a distinct disconnection from everything masculine while also aware that there were parts of me that breathed in the masculine. It sounds contradictory, and I think it is and was meant to be. There's a blending of what it means to exist as a woman, both pushing away and embracing the gender binaries simultaneously.

"The mind's a relic, a fossil, antiquated solider / the mind's a crone, a dowager" (pg 43). "My body is unprecedented, maturing / my mind is antediluvian / hag's heart scowls at this waning planet" (pg 43). The stereotypes thrust onto woman since the beginning of time are embraced unabashedly among these pages, taking crone, hag, witch, bitch, whore and anything else used against women and throwing it on the page as self-acceptance. I'm not ashamed, I felt this book was saying. "The saint is a woman scorned" (pg 52).

However, there were moments when I felt deeply uncomfortable by how close this book came to cultural appropriation. While I understand that Waldman spent years of her life dedicated to studying Buddhism and other such religions and was, herself, a practicing Buddhist, and while I always felt as though there was reverence for these cultures and their rituals, I nevertheless felt that this book, its speaker, and the writer are claiming some spaces not their own. Maybe this is me not quite understanding these poems. But it was enough to make me hesitate.

[J.C.]

These are meant to be read out loud. She explains such towards the end, in the essay. It's poetry that becomes more chant-like. I find her work interesting, but she's more into the spiritual and the mystical more than my mind is willing to follow. Still, good poet.

[Cedric Key]

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[Kevin]

some of the repetitious poetry became tedious to read, as i think they were written to be spoken. however, the essays on performance and the ritual of reading poetry to an audience were literally enlightening.

[Shannon]

KSKS

[Miloe Peck/Braden]

Wonderful book if you like that sorta thing.

[Wendy]

what's not to worship?

[Ed Smith]

Read this once I was out of college
around 1976. Fast pasted poems, quick
to the eye & good stuff from Anne

[Crystal]

Anne Waldman is one of the most powerful poet perfomers. She is so strong and full of life. This book explores and seeks to define the possibilites of what it means to be a woman.

[Amy]

http://www.ubu.com/sound/giorno_waldm...

[Dom Zuccone]

Reads,reaches and moves on the perfect book for a busride.

[Nigel Pearce]

Brilliant poetic chanting as well as the essays.

[Nicole Perkins]

An interesting collection of contemporary poetry, written in the style of chants and invocations. I'm adding this one to my bookshelf.

[Lissa]

the first one was 34 pages long......... but it was fun

[Brendan]

Rating: 3 1/2

Not sure if they translate well from the stage to the page. A lot of repetition, lines thrown together without really going anywhere; more like lists than coherent poems.

She seems intelligent and imaginative. I got the feeling that she could have written poems more to my liking. Her personal expression of confident feminism is both sexy and - in the current climate of hypocrisy and man-hating- sad.

I'm the woman with the keys
I'm the woman with the glue
- "Fast Speaking Woman"

empty body
no one touching
- "Empty Speech"