Kill or Cure

by Anne Waldman

“Kill Or Cure,” a bold prescriptive for these apocalyptic days, brings together substantial new work as well as the best of Anne Waldman's previously uncollected poetry. It includes credos, manifestos, dreams, homages to literary predecessors, “Shaman Hisses You Slide Back Into The Night” (the journal poem written during Bob Dylan's historic Rolling Thunder Revue), witty political diatribes, travel vignettes, incantations, and a new section of the ongoing epic poem “Iovis,” a powerful meditation on male energy.

Genres: Poetry

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

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

[Donna Rae · Rating 5 out of 5]

another just begun book! just the beginning intro titled "A Note" has earned this book 5 stars. I am working on a cento: a patchwork poem, this one of other poets work, not considered plagiarism- actually a couple 1000 year old form. And you won't believe it Waldeman writes "It is a cento of my mind and mind's musical making. It is also what's on my mind....A sampler." I also found a final line within this note, looking forward to cruising the pages of her mind.

[Kathline · Rating 4 out of 5]

This hybrid text is more focused than the Iovis books, and this collection contains the “Oppositional Poetics” essay I reference in my essay of the same title. Nice sestina in Nomad’s Song; interesting caesura in “From a Continuing Work in Spanish” and lots of other good work. Good range of genres, from essay fusion to straight poems, whatever that means.