The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment

by Anne Waldman

Overview

The Iovis Trilogy, Anne Waldman's monumental feminist epic, traverses epochs, cultures, and genres to create a visionary call to poetic arms. Iovis details the misdeeds of the Patriarch, and with a fierce imagination queries and subverts his warmongering. All of Waldman's themes come into focus—friendship, motherhood, politics, and Buddhist wisdom. This is epic poetry that goes beyond the old injunction, "to include history"—its effort is to change history.

This transformative twenty-five-year labor is published here for the first time in its historic entirety, including the first two out-of-print volumes.

Deemed a "countercultural giant" by Publishers Weekly, Anne Waldman is one of the best known and celebrated female poets not only in the United States, but around the world. A prominent figure of the Beat Generation and New York School, she has had close ties with poets such as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Patti Smith, Ted Berrigan, and Barbara Guest, and she was a poet in residence during Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue Tour. She has published over forty books of poetry, including Fast Speaking Woman, Marriage: A Sentence, In the Room of Never Grieve: New and Selected Poems, and Manatee/Humanity. She has also edited numerous anthologies including The Beat Book, Civil Disobediences, Angel Hair Sleeps with a Boy In My Head, and Beats at Naropa.

Anne Waldman has performed on the world stage from Madrid to Mumbai, from Beijing to Berlin, from Prague to Nicaragua. She divides her time between Boulder, Colorado, and Greenwich Village, New York.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566892551
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	08/16/2011
Pages:	720
Product dimensions:	7.40(w) x 10.10(h) x 2.60(d)

About the Author

Deemed a “countercultural giant” by Publishers Weekly, Anne Waldman is one of the best known and celebrated female poets not only in the U.S., but around the world. A prominent figure of the Beat Generation and New York School, she has had close ties with poets such as Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Patti Smith, Ted Berrigan and Barbara Guest, and she was a poet-in-residence during Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue Tour. She has published over forty books of poetry, including Fast Speaking Woman, Marriage: A Sentence, In the Room of Never Grieve: New and Selected Poems, and Manatee/Humanity. She is also editor and co-editor of numerous anthologies: The Beat Book, Civil Disobediences, Angel Hair Sleeps With A Boy In My Head, and Beats at Naropa. Her work may also be found in numerous films, videos, and sound recordings.

She was one of the founders and directors of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project from 1966 to 1978. She and Allen Ginsberg also co-founded The Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired school in the West. Currently Waldman is Artistic Director and Chair of its renowned Summer Writing Program.

Waldman has received numerous awards and honors for her poetry, including The Dylan Thomas Memorial Award, The Poets Foundation Award, The National Literary Anthology Award, and The Shelley Memorial Award for poetry.

Her play Red Noir was produced by Judith Malina’s Living Theater in NYC in 2010. She has performed on the world stage, from Madrid to Mumbai, from Beijing to Berlin, from Prague to Nicaragua. She divides her time between Boulder, Colorado and Greenwich Village, New York City.

Table of Contents

anew

I. yea, i am salt

II. “i; myself of jade grow cold

III. worrying yr logos: conversant you speak to the dead

IV: broke the talk down

V. a slice at that

VI: war crime

VII: rasp

VIII: [things] seen/unseen

IX. apotropaic

X. g spot

XII. signatura rerum

XII. robert creeley came to me in a dream

XIII. eleven faces one thousand arms

XIV. colors in the mechanism of concealment

XV. sky-goer

XVI. dark arcana: after image or glow

XVII. a kind of feminist eclogue marx would sanction

XVIII. ceremonies in the gong world

XIX. secrets of the ambulatories

XX. matriot acts

XXI. if you had three husbands

XXII. rigpa (irreparable)

XXIII. tears streak the reddest rouge

XXIV: problem-not-solving

XXV. welcome to the anthropocene

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Begun in the 1980s, this mammoth work may be the summit of [Waldman’s] career and . . . an attempt at a new world history, a radical re-creation myth, an homage to Blake’s epics and Pound’s cantos, and a mystic or matriarchal answer to the male-dominated civilization that we have known. . . . A book to admire, to pay homage to, to get lost in, Waldman’s epic goes splendidly on and on, mixing the shamanistic with the diaristic, the topical with the prayerful, incorporating almost everything . . . ”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Waldman takes you by the collar and slams you down with language, image, and message, leaving you breathless and shattered in the aftermath of her incantatory vision. . . . The poems repeat themselves, wrap around themselves, glide through linguistic holes that only the poet herself could have seen. They trumpet, blare, and whisper vision upon vision of a world gone crazy with war and patriarchal mores, then proceed to share another vision, one of healing and peace. . . . This is a book of action, a poetic clarion call. Huge and weighty, it will be compared to The Cantos and Paterson. It is neither. It is Iovis ; it is an act of incendiary love, and it stands alone.”—Powells.com

“Encompassing over twenty years of personal, national, and international comportment, The Iovis Trilogy tracks familial and marital relationships, numerous wars, and encounters with other cultures and human visages, male and female, in person and via letter.” —Alice Notley

“Waldman’s achievement in Iovis is very real, a 1000 page epic poem by a major American woman poet...The discipline and the range of the task here are truly awe-inspiring.” —A Gathering of the Tribes

Editorial Reviews

New York City prophet and seer of daily life, beat or postbeat feminist pioneer, known for her work with Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg as well as for her riveting live performances, Waldman (Manatee/ Humanity) has in four decades of books and events stayed strange, a charismatic outsider, even as her long career has gathered respect. Begun in the 1980s (Book I appeared in 1993), this mammoth work may be the summit of that career: with chants, meditations, letters to the poet, synopses of ancient and recent Greek, South and East Asian, Latin American and U.S. history, ideograms, mythography, and much else, Iovis is Waldman's attempt at a new world history, a radical re-creation myth, an homage to Blake's epics and Pound's cantos, and a mystic or matriarchal answer to the male-dominated civilization (Jove or Iovis, the male god) that we have known. To the first two books—published in 1993 and 1996—Waldman adds an all-new third: set in New York, India, Vienna, and many other sites, it looks at a series of wars, from ancient Rome to Vietnam and Iraq, imagining their consequences and their alternatives in meditative practice, in travel, in song. "To validate/ or calculate/ cosmological parameters/ of singing/ her need," Waldman sets "this world of Warring States" against "she who painted like the Taoist Ritual... or the Dipper Mother/ reincarnated." A book to admire, to pay homage to, to get lost in, Waldman's epic goes splendidly on and on, mixing the shamanistic with the diaristic, the topical with the prayerful, incorporating almost everything, from a "Femanifesto: Plurality" to an account of how "Robert Creeley Came to Me Turning to Che in a Dream." (June)

Publishers Weekly

Begun in the 1980s, this mammoth work may be the summit of [Waldman’s] career and . . . an attempt at a new world history, a radical re-creation myth, an homage to Blake’s epics and Pound’s cantos, and a mystic or matriarchal answer to the male-dominated civilization that we have known. . . . A book to admire, to pay homage to, to get lost in, Waldman’s epic goes splendidly on and on, mixing the shamanistic with the diaristic, the topical with the prayerful, incorporating almost everything . . . ”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“This Virgilian epic song, a vast written performance that must be acknowledged for its “orality of intention,” is an expression of knowledge—embodied and disembodied, material and transcendental, violent and pacifist, visionary and starkly realist, present and transhistorical. To read it, to move across its many pages, is to invite a demand for and a belief in freedom that is platonic and phonemic. The three books collected in The Iovis Trilogy . . . together show the force of Waldman’s galloping collection of forms as a vibration of knowledge through ceaseless experiment, a sensorium through which the roundness of self burrows in to win the furthest circumference.”—The Poetry Project Newsletter

“Waldman takes you by the collar and slams you down with language, image, and message, leaving you breathless and shattered in the aftermath of her incantatory vision. . . . The poems repeat themselves, wrap around themselves, glide through linguistic holes that only the poet herself could have seen. They trumpet, blare, and whisper vision upon vision of a world gone crazy with war and patriarchal mores, then proceed to share another vision, one of healing and peace. . . . This is a book of action, a poetic clarion call. Huge and weighty, it will be compared to The Cantos and Paterson. It is neither. It is Iovis; it is an act of incendiary love, and it stands alone.”—Powells.com

“This dense, mythic, personal cycle that looks at life, relationships, and war is an altogether admirable achievement.” —Time Out New York

"This great work makes itself open to all, both for its great poetry and for the spiritual and familial contexts it presents.  This masterwork, Waldman’s masterpiece, presents itself independently and fully formed, at last, for anyone who can read the English language to peruse and enjoy and many surely will as time passes.  This great book’s time is now, however, after a gestation period apparently of over thirty years in its author’s mind and pen.  . . . Waldman’s Iovis is the first major epic to be completed in the twenty-first century and it is likely to remain one of the best as the century proceeds and other poets weigh in with theirs."—A Gathering of the Tribes

“[An] epic, richly textured poem exploring the manifestations of patriarchy, braiding history and myth, Buddhist philosophy, and conversation snippets.” —The Shambhala Sun

“Encompassing over twenty years of personal, national, and international comportment, The Iovis Trilogy tracks familial and marital relationships, numerous wars, and encounters with other cultures and human visages, male and female, in person and via letter.” —Alice Notley

“Waldman’s achievement in Iovis is very real, a 1000 page epic poem by a major American woman poet...The discipline and the range of the task here are truly awe-inspiring." —A Gathering of the Tribes

“We are lovely people for each other when we read Iovis together. We are forces of good together.”—Jacket2

From the Publisher