reviewed on August 27, 2025​

​

There was a time when I loathed Anne Waldman’s work.

 

I saw her read at the University of Chicago in 2017, when I had not yet learned to appreciate the sub- or para-conscious forces animating Waldman’s poetics, interested as I was then in a more or less “scenic mode” in the lyric first-person.  UChicago changed me in important ways, though, inducting me into a more “open” or “experimental” poetics beyond the realm of “the workshop poem” and “official verse culture.”

 

Which is to say—I think Mesopotopia may be the best book of the year.  With Rick Barot’s Moving the Bones, it certainly deserves short-listing for the NBA.

 

The book draws on two distinct poetic traditions: an incantatory mysticism routed back, through Beat poetics of the 1960s and ’70s, to indigenous and non-western ritual and, on the other hand, the world-historical vision of the modernist epic, especially as it exists in Eliot, Pound, and post-Poundians like Duncan and Olson.  As in the latter tradition, the poems in Mesopotopia rely in large part on fragmentation and collage rather than explicit argument and analysis, their suppressed connections—“hungry as Pinochet / or Cotton Mather”—offering an alternative historiography outside of and resistant to more rationalized systems of language.

 

Put differently, for Waldman history is structured as a syntax.  It matters, therefore, with what language and with what kinds of linguistic construction one recounts that history.  These poems are trances and conjurings rather than re-presentations.

 

Waldman suggests this investment in alternative historiography most explicitly in the poem “Nocturne: Martyrdom,” in which she discusses the 2007 death of Benazir Bhutto, Prime Minister of Pakistan and the first woman to head a Muslim state.  Killed by an al-Qaeda car bomb, Bhutto becomes part of what Waldman calls the “master narrative” of martyrdom when her death is retroactively rescripted, secularized, and de-glamorized by Scotland Yard:

 

can’t make a martyr of her now it’s already happened it happens martyrs will

                                                                happen

make up story make it unseemly not the death of a martyr hit by lever of

                                                            sunroof how

secular it sounds ‘lever’ ‘sunroof’ how unseemly not the cause for death of

                                                          a martyr ‘lever’

 

There is certainly an argument being leveled here, but one fully understands that argument only by means of a post-poem “weave” that serves as a glossary, what in other books might make up a “notes” section.  To narrate the specifics of Bhutto’s death within the poem proper, for Waldman, would be to compromise by over-explanation the vatic poetics she wants to achieve.  In Mesopotopia, as throughout Waldman’s work, the poet occupies a seer-like role in channeling the past into the present. 

 

Or, as Waldman puts it, “I, memory / of the Isis cult of Cybele / come out of the Dark Ages, hieratic.” 

 

And reader, I believe her. 

 

Waldman’s intellect is simultaneously razor-sharp and wide-ranging, the book working through “jumps in time, old time religion” in its associative incorporation, among other references, of the Blombos Cave, St. Catherine of Siena, Deleuzian spatial theory, the Medicis, Spuyten Duyvil, Urdu etymology, and Amazon Prime.  Reading Waldman, one learns.

 

Recurrent among her obsessions is the increasing influence of finance capital on geopolitics, making Waldman one of very few poets addressing perhaps the gravest danger facing the planet and species.  “PRESENT-DAY CAPITALIST STATES ARE ENGAGING IN / AN EXERCISE / OF METHODICAL SELF-DISMANTLING,” Waldman diagnoses, exposing the hypocrisies of a neoliberal “Capitolocene” in which free-market “adepts rise to end [financial] border patrol.” “We were pirates and handsome,” Waldman writes, “[a]nd developing more markets.”  Here too is the opening of the poem “Extinction Urge”:

 

Luxury condos / offshore oil

is that what

the creeps say who murder children in their sleep

is that what the cushy ones say?

 

Given the fibral reach and ghostly invisibility of contemporary capital, Waldman’s ability to conjure and visualize its flows seems to me a crucial intervention.

 

So too is her nostalgia for patterns of development that western capitalism has rendered untenable.  I adore, for instance, her use of what I think is the past-perfect subjunctive—someone correct me—in the poem “Herminuisance: Mesopotopia the Intro.”  “It was to have been a compendium to perform with you,” she writes of the betrayed inheritances of history.  “It was supposed to have been trumpeted from the earliest time, names, scales of tribes, discoveries of first touch, bone instruments, rattles of teeth, the runes on maps to find a psyche’s way back.”

 

By the end of the book, Mesopotopia does find its way back, invoking a Romantic return nonetheless tainted by Capitolocene apocalypticism.  “A yard is waiting for you,” Waldman writes in the book’s last poem.  “[I]t’s somewhat spare good-size yard / a variant of rubble / it was never a garden.”  “Will water come in pellets[?]” Waldman wonders, channeling Villon.  “[W]ill it rain and snow ever again?”

 

Resonant with a sense of belatedness and betrayal, of what-might-have-been, Mesopotopia casts its gaze backward in the hope of shaking loose, as Eliot and Benjamin endeavored, some redemptive fragment of history, some syntax alien and antithetical to those in which we are increasingly inscripted. 

 

It is an impossible project—but/and this book is a stunning achievement.

​​