Skin Meat Bones

by Anne Waldman

Book by Waldman, Anne

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

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

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Waldman does follow Ginsberg style of mixing lyrical, technical, and prosaic language and uses repetition like Gertrude Stein in ways that mirror Buddhist mantras. Waldman also tends to favor stripped down everyday language to be the mortar to connect the other kinds of language. Sometimes this works well, sometimes it comes off as didactic or pastiche. I also find her use of "I" to be somewhat alienating at points. This is not as rich as some of Waldman's later and more mature works and still feels like it under the beat's sway, but Waldman's vitality comes through here despite the caveats I have made in this review.

[David]

Anne Waldman's style was so similar to Allen Ginsberg switching between revelatory language and political science or current event terms in a stream of consciousness style. There were places in the book where she was very successful with this technique and others where it seemed awkward. The book also lacked focus in subject matter and was more of a collection of unrelated poems which was a disappointment because her Manatee/Humanity collection of poems is focused and powerful. The power was generated by her deep exploration of the loss of ecological diversity and how to accept it and regret it. Skin Meat Bones had some gems but all-in-all it was mixed tid bits.

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting variety of forms, but lack of spicy language. she tries to chant a lot and i'm sorry but that just looks stupid on the written page. silly buddhist.