Vow to Poetry: Essays, Interviews & Manifestoes

Like her epic Iovis, which incorporates 12 languages, Anne Waldman's Vow to Poetry: Essays, Interviews & Manifestos draws on intersections of the foreign with the familiar, crossed with Waldman's ""skewed associational mathematics"" and Buddhist present-moment sensibilities. The Post-Beat luminary and activist, co-founder of the Saint Mark's Poetry Project and (with Allen Ginsberg) the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute opens the book with her visit to Hanoi in 2000; it's followed by Feminafesto (""I never promised domestic bliss"") and a Socratic Rap with Questions & Answers from 1976. The book's nonchronological, associative tumble varies genre (poetry is included in various pieces), form, subject (Colorado's Amendment 2 criminalizing homosexual sex; Buddhist poetics; her last days with Ginsberg) or ambiguity thereof, and references Keats, Stein, Schuyler, Pound, Hejinian and on and on. ""Language... arrives, it manifests, it is a relationship,"" she declares, describing her own work and providing a how-to of sorts for writers of all stations and affiliations. (July)