Manatee/Humanity

by Anne Waldman

A fascinating work from an internationally renowned poet

Anne Waldman's new investigative hybrid-poem explores the nuances of inter-species communication and compassion. It draws on animal lore, animal encounters (with grey wolf and manatee), dreams, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and Buddhist ritual to render a text of remarkable sympathy, reciprocity, and power. The poem asks questions as well as urges further engagement with the endangered (including our human selves). Part performance litany, part survival kit, part worried mammalian soundings, Waldman explores, as ever, what it means to inhabit our condition through language and imagination inside a wheel of time. This is the mature work of a philosophical field poet with a shamanic metabolism.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published February 24, 2009

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

[Gabriela Ventura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am no zoologist
but field poet (...)

[AuthorsOnTourLive! · Rating 5 out of 5]

We met Anne Waldman when she visited the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver. You can listen to her talk about "Manatee/Humanity" here: http://www.authorsontourlive.com/?p=450

About this podcast:
Internationally renowned poet Anne Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she still teaches. Waldman reads from and discusses her new work "Manatee/Humanity<." This new investigative hybrid-poem explores the nuances of inter-species communication and compassion. It draws on animal lore, animal encounters (with grey wolf and manatee), dreams, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and Buddhist ritual to render a text of remarkable sympathy, reciprocity, and power.

[Tristan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book-length poem veered between pretentiousness and incomprehensibility on the the one hand and an intriguing exploration of the relationship between the human and the world on the other. The poem is divided into five sections, with the first, "Undercurrent," functioning, more or less, as an introduction. "Undercurrent" was the least welcoming beginning to a book I have ever encountered. As Waldman explains the Buddhist initiation that she used as her model for the work and says things like "Finally, invoking the gnosis of the natural environment and its denizens as recommended in the mandala of the Kalachakra initiation, I summon life-forms that seem particularly threatened. The poem's litanies of the manatee and lemur and the wolf-dream are meant as lyrical interludes--modal structures--of both plea and restitution, and they stand in for all endangered species," it feels like she is using a display of er knowledge and worldliness in an effort to keep readers out of the poem, like it is only by chance that I can make sense of what she is saying here and she wants to force us to prove ourselves before the unworthy spoil her pristine poetic enlightenment. This was not appreciated. In other locations, the poem becomes actually unreadable, like the first eleven pages of "Inner" the section section of the poem proper and third section of the book. This takes the form of two parallel columns, one with a sort of meditative poem in the vein of the rest of the book, (

If you could imagine, said again,
imagine knowing
elf kin

the "imagine" be in a kind of animal in
knowing

or resumed of knowing

If you might swell to it, imagining, kind,

or heroic but knowing

need, in need be needed in knowing of
kind

), the right-hand column is the above-mentioned "wolf-dream". This dream is interesting and fluid by itself "she knows herself / she is counting coup / the sexual frenzy / sexual priority / she knows herself / she is counting coup / everyone a partner in the / dream /everyone a wolf in the dream", it seems to bear absolutely now relation to the left-hand column. I was unable to find an order in which to read the words on these pages that I felt that I could assemble any kind of meaning out of it.
On the positive side, this poem, while dense and strange even in its best places, engaged in some very interesting explorations. A few sections:

chimp see chimp do a shell game
find artifice? chimp "know thyself"
in mirror-recognition

mother-to-son:
this is the way we operate down here
in virtual humanity

monkey-under-scalpel test monkey
task tedium monkey
pity for you the long afternoons examining the validity of a hypothesis

unplug monkey from the neuroscience machines!

which reaches for the interactions of science and language and culture in a somewhat surprising and sideways manner. Or this section:

analogy is "universe"/is "current had tangled"/is "esoteric venture"/
is "menagerie prescience"/is "teacup, a strange desire"/is "tabulation"/
is "restitution"/is "once a meaty quark"/ is "any part her nutrient"/
is "recondite"/is "porta principalis sinistra/is "phenomena meme text"/
is "verbal oral clarity"/ is metabolism/ is "calibrated spinal cortical
synchrony striatum integral melatonin"/is "my light of new millennium
don't abandon me here"/is "last chance estuary pineal brake"/is "nucleus
cycle pigment blood"/is "wavelength light pause"/

is circadian clock

which straddles the good and the bad of the poem handily. It is lacking in clear sense and in perhaps a bit too heavy on big, impressive-seeming words to the point of not quite making sense. It inspires questions of form and purpose that seem to accomplish little: "why the scare quotes, do they add anything that not having them, as in "is circadian clock" would lack?", "why the slashes as if line breaks when commas would do just as well, or better, for a simple list?" At the same time, it is interesting to think about what it might mean for analogy to be any or all of these things--the idea of analogy as universe and as "verbal oral clarity" are particularly intriguing for me. The quoted sections are pretty emblematic of the whole work, a confusing and often excessively oblique poem that nonetheless does have some good qualities and engaging ideas, if you want to bother with the effort it takes to make your way through the text.

[David]

The prose remind me of Allen Ginsberg in its revelatory and free verse style. It focuses, with a deep and mournful spirit, primarily on the crumbling and destructive relationship of humanity to our natural world. I was enchanted with the strength in Waldman's connections of Buddhist/Hindu understanding of change and cycles of life and death with environmental deterioration. And the fascination with the gentle and friendly manatee as the victim was reverent and lovely. It is a well informed and composed way to contemplate my own ecology- and I guess now with this large oil spill in the Gulf its helpful to appreciate the nonHuman scraps we have left.

[Kathline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Manatee/Humanity contains striking projective language, and it was really helpful to see her read from this book. She plays with formatting, casting poems like endangered species to the sides of the text; plays with sound and texture of verse, and she brings information on the wolf and the manatee, makes them symbols of our failings to nurture the earth in our careless “civilized” world. Useful to me as a hybrid text, a way to approach “true” subject matter in a fictive work, or a poetic work (or both). The blending of science and literature, performance and spirituality is very germane to my current project.

[Angela · Rating 1 out of 5]

Does Manatee/Humanity deserve more than one star? Maybe. But going purely on how much I enjoyed it, one star is charitable. When I bought this book I don't think I knew that "Poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the 'Outrider' experimental poetry community for forty years as writer, sprechstimme performer, professor, editor, magpie scholar, and infrastructure cultural/political activist." I tried to get into experimental poetry when I was younger, even wrote a few experimental poems, but I quickly realized there's no way to do it that doesn't make you sound crazy and pretentious.

Could I have put more effort into my reading of Manatee/Humanity? Absolutely. I did make an effort in the first half: re-reading, picking up on diction and poetic devices, actively engaging with what the author's big ideas...but eventually, I skimmed through and didn't even care what substance I might be missing out on. Even when I read bad books of poetry, I'm always hoping to find a good poem, stanza, or even a few lines to make it seem worthwhile. But no such thing materialized this time.

Waldman's poetic project consists of three lengthy stream-of-consciousness poems (and two shorter stream-of-consciousness poems) that deal with neuroscience, endangered species (particularly the manatee), Buddhism, meditation and consciousness, time, and the universe. None of these are bad topics. But Waldman's treatment of them is just painful. The lines ramble on without much punctuation other than ampersands. Words are repeated to death. Jargon appears frequently. It's like the author tried to be as inaccessible as possible. Maybe I just don't "get" experimental poetry; it reminds me of Robert Rauschenberg's Canyon: a bunch of trash thrown together, but since it's "avant garde" it's automatically special, deep, and somehow valuable. Yes, it takes a special kind of visionary to create work like this, but aside from a few elitist pricks, does anyone actually care?

Excerpts:

rhythms depend upon the activating system at the core of the
upper brain stem & the thalamus
chemicals it releases unlock the hemisphere to the information that bombards us from the senses
    why are we conscious
why do we experience what happens in our brain why do we see colors,

      hear music,

          savor taste

why aren't these processes enacted in darkness in silence as they happen without body without langauge, why?

(p. 40-41)


& standing in the nimbus of that genus of strange species

as if saying, this is the mind of manatee

Manatee reminded me ~

that multiple
hydra-headed
  universes,
all fractals in
  chaos
including more cycles
  will emerge

  formation,


  stabilization,

          disintegration,

emptiness . . .

(p.72)

lemurs evolved before anthropoids living during the Eocene epoch
55 million years ago
(the first monkey dates to 45 million years ago, the ape 35)
Madagascar broke from Africa 160 million years ago
did lemurs travel to Madagascar on clumps of vegetation?
lemurs are the closest living analogs to man's ancient primate ancestors
lemurs differ cognitively in the development of the associative areas of the brain
lemurs have scent glands on their feet that leave odors on the surfaces
  they cross
lemurs have a heightened sense of smell
lemurs are arboreal, spending much of their time in trees & bushes
lemurs have large bushy tails that wave in the air to communicate
their tails help them balance when they leap from tree to tree
lemurs have a good grip for hanging onto trees & branches
lemurs are well-groomed & use their teeth as a comb
some lemurs are hermetic, live alone, awake & active at night
others live in large stable groups & in fluid associations
lemurs show female dominance
lemur babies are carried in their mothers' mouths
lemurs are usually vegetarian, primarily eating leaves & fruit
as they move from flower to flower lemurs transfer pollen on their foreheads
all lemurs are found in Madagascar & the neighboring Comoros Islands

(p.79-80)

[Matthew Stolte · Rating 4 out of 5]

inspiring, highlight p. 64-70 "fossil fuels" to "manatee"

[Mannhi Tran · Rating 1 out of 5]

lol i rlly can't

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

MSKS

[Lauren]

This book is freaking amazing so far. That is all.

[Catherine Altice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Straight beauty.