^* For more on the legacy of the Muse, see Rasula, “Poetry’s Voice-Over” and “Gendering the Muse.” Black Mountain and Beat writers conspicuously gendered the Muse in private life, now increasingly disclosed in biographies and published documents. No wonder Alice Notley can ask “‘Was’ / ‘the human psyche’ ‘made of women’ ‘turned to stone?’” No one may be better situated to reflect on this legacy than Anne Waldman, who knows the ups and downs of male idolatry complexly infused with misogyny (and this is clearly one incentive behind her multivolume epic study of maleness, Iovis); but she knows another level of complexity as a woman poet for whom the Muse is nonetheless female : “She was my fixed star for a time of heart & I was perpetual motion too. I catch her as best I can/could through scent & ambiguity of verse. The pronouns you find us in in here are a relationship to secret notebooks and hallucinated masks. A relationship to a web of emptiness dotted with long molecules held near one another by the action of invisible forces … The ‘shes’ in it are our relationship. I am the mother most frequently & she too. And we are both daughters standing between the lines. And as children we both put on the shields like Amazons” (Kill or Cure, 127). Like H. D. and Virginia Woolf, Waldman is an advocate of a pan-gendered writing : “I propose a Utopian creative field where we are defined by our energy, not by gender. I propose a transsexual literature, a hermaphroditic literature, a transvestite literature, and finally a poetics of transformation beyond gender” (145).