Anne Waldman

T: It recently struck me that you're often described as a performance poet, as if this is an entirely different kind of poet—is it?

AW: No. Of course not. I am a poet, bard, scop, minnesinger, trobairitz who is driven by sound and the possibilities for vocal expression, the mouthing of text as well as intentionality or dance on the page. Orality goes with the description of poet in the primary sense when poetry was composed by people who didn't read or write. It was generated for ritual purposes and for cosmological and mythical and chronological purposes: telling the story of a particular tribe, a particular battle and defeat or victory that sort of thing. Epic and ballad are the narrative forms. Then there's incantation, love song, lament, dirge, curse, spells, mantra, songs for fertility, etcetera. As well as sonnet, sestina, pantoum, ode which also have oral roots. I've worked in all these forms (in some cases composing on the spot) and extended them and come to my own shapes. I also grew up on classical music, folk music, and jazz. Ideas arrive as oral ideas that evolve into modal structures-clear musical patterns. Vocal range interests me, Sprechstimme interests me, timing interests me, collaboration with instruments and other voices interests me. I'm drawn to the magical efficacies of language as a political act. And to musics, rituals and poetries out of India, Tibet, Indonesia, Thailand. When Andrew Schelling and I worked with the Theri and Theragatha poems of the Pali canon (of India) we struggled to revive the oral moment of these renunciant monks and nuns. These poems were originally sung in a tradition passed down for centuries before written down in 80 B.C.E. Much of my praxis is a gaze toward the East, if you will, mingled with all these other tendencies.