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Anne Waldman is breathlessly encyclopedic. Her breadth is exhaustive, at times exhausting—the whole of a life filling, spilling over pages with the urgency of a woman who knows too well how things get lost. She is called on by her elders, as we (readers, poets, artists) feel called on by her; again and again she invokes Amiri Baraka’s call to action, the instruction she carries with her: “Don’t let this stuff get buried.”
INTRODUCTION
As I’ve learned from my own experiences in the classroom both as a student and as an instructor, poetry is so often taught badly to us in grade school (if at all). I am, to this day, learning how to undo the myth of poetry being the work of certainty a perfect command of a subject, experience, event proclaimed through verse. This is obviously a byproduct of the ways in which the Western canon is taught: the work of “great masters” whose genius we are trained to admire and respect. But my immersion in queer and disability writing has taught me the value of