11 Reconfiguring the Epic Space in Anne Waldman’s The Iovis Trilogy
ABSTRACT
Anne Waldman’s The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (2011) is a twenty-five-year-long project self-styled as a feminist epic. With the original premise ‘to shoulder/abdicate patriarchy’ (2011: xx), the three tomes that comprise the epic – ‘All is full of Jove’, ‘Guardian and Scribe’, and ‘Eternal War’ – seize upon positive and negative forms of masculine energy through the deeds of the archetypical patriarch Jove. Tracing or tracking Jove down becomes in Iovis a quest with a marked spatial dimension. On the one hand, movement and travel delineate the heroine’s investigation, and the poem becomes a remapping of the world – a cartographic effort through which she complicates hegemonic representations. On the other hand, and closely linked to this idea, the epic text itself is approached in Iovis as an available space to study and contest the subordination of women in history and literature. To explore these intersections, this chapter accesses Anne Waldman’s use of space in The Iovis Trilogy through two main points of entrance: the literary and literal movement delineated by an ‘investigative poetics’, and the exploration of genre and gender through the space of the epic text itself.
Poetics of Movement
As a literary genre, the epic has long been associated with spatio-temporal journeys. ‘Epic storytelling’, write Mario Skempis and Ioannis Ziogas, ‘comes into existence by describing persons’ movements through space, [recounting] sets of successive events whose flow resembles the shifts inherent in a journey’ (2014: 3). Indeed, from Homer’s Odyssey to James Joyce’s Ulysses, movement – regardless of the actual mileage covered – has remained a basic ingredient of the epic literary concoction. In Anne Waldman’s ← 241 | 242 → reconfiguration of the genre, nevertheless, the role of movement and travel go beyond the basic level of content to a more profound understanding of the relationship between genre, gender and power. Spatial metaphors abound in the poet’s description of her approach: her poetics in Iovis, for instance, are referred to as ‘[i]nvestigative travel’ (2011: xi) and ‘writing-tracking’ (2011: xi), and the feminist twist to the epic is interpreted as ‘further deterritorialization’ (2011: xiii), a term with philosophical connotations which results in the heroine’s need to isolate, investigate, and expose patriarchy’s claim to land – Jove’s conquering mode. In the essay ‘Epic & Performance’ (2001), Waldman reiterates the centrality of movement in her understanding of the genre by listing, as necessary elements to an epic poet, ‘[a] planet. A narrator. Hearty Lungs. A moveable desk’ (2001: 313).
This ‘moveable desk’ (2001: 313) is actualized in Iovis through the various spatiotemporal travels and journeys that shape the epic, and that are used to explore recurrent themes such as: the perpetuation of patriarchy through historical, mythological or literary discourses; the social construction of masculinity and its similarly constructed connection to war and violence; and the mechanisms used to oppress and subjugate the less powerful. Before beginning her journey, nevertheless, the speaker ‘positions herself in the cosmos, already filled with the sperm of Jove who, “peoples space”’ (2011: 7). This vague geographical coordinate resonates throughout the collection, and serves the poet to situate her heroine in a world dominated by men – a situation also shared by the female writer who dwells in traditionally masculine literary circles and genres. Born in 1945, a few months before the end of the Second World War, Waldman consciously positions herself within a masculine world governed by war and violence in which women are often reduced to clichés – witch, body to be conquered, muse, seductress, or scapegoat, among others. Most frequently associated with the notoriously men-dominated Beat Generation, Waldman also belongs to a highly masculine literary world, where different incarnations of divine presences like Zeus/Jove, or human – but still semi-divine – writers like William Burroughs or Allen Ginsberg simultaneously act as teachers and oppressors. With this in mind, in the section ‘DEAD GUTS & BONES’ her epic poem becomes the medium through which she negotiates her position as a female writer: ← 242 | 243 →
Telling the story
telling the story on the hour
How to become a writer out of the rib of a man
How to spit out the man’s marrow to breathe free
How to stand on the ground & contend with his mystical hormones (2011: 238)
Even if the author, and by extension any other woman included in her epic, is necessarily part of patriarchy – ‘born on the hem of war / arise out of father sperm’ (2011: 50) – as a poet she can still use her literature to fight patriarchal complicities and create a space to redress the exclusion of women from historic, political or artistic realms. This she does by putting into practice her ‘investigative travel’ (2011: xi), a technique that allows her to survey historical, mythological, or literary sources of different epochs and places and rearrange them in the space of her epic. For instance, in the section ‘SPRECHSTIMME (COUNTESS OF DIA)’, Waldman moves from the troubadour and poet Beatriz de Dia towards jazz and soul singers such as Mabel Mercer, Billie Holliday, Sarah Vaughan, Nina Simone, and Ella Fitzgerald. From twelfth-century France to twentieth-century North America and Europe, the speaker also moves – by substituting the singular ‘I’ for the plural ‘we’ in the course of the poem – from a globalized position of female artists to the individualized space of their art. In addition, she jumps from the specifically located art of these singers – voice, rhythm, pitch, improvisation – to a broader celebration of speech as a means to expose collective and individual injustice – ‘tongue is salvation, tongue stands in for all-the-body / she tells the truth about matricide, about genocide, about rape / about torture / cleansing is not unfamiliar in her witness trope’ (2011: 620). Shifting again in space and time to refocus the poem on her own position, the speaker elevates poetry – by default the epic in which she is relocating all these narratives – as a means of resistance: ‘she who was remains in lines of poetry’ (2011: 638). As a tool to contest historical, political or artistic representations, poetry becomes a space to reinvent not only oneself and others, but also language itself – ‘I will re=in=vent my roles / […] / sleep in the margins of my writing / speak there too’ (2011: 627).
While the poet celebrates the liberating potential of language and discourse, she is also – as numerous sections in Iovis demonstrate – painfully aware of its equal potential as a weapon of control and manipulation: ← 243 | 244 → for instance, as a tool to perpetuate patriarchy. In ‘OUSTED’ the speaker juxtaposes the chauvinism of her contemporary fellow-poets with the systematic subordination of women within mythological discourses. Writing matter-of-factly, she states, ‘[o]f course the stories known in many lands many tribes say this: about how men go off to battle, to catch a wild animal, to avenge a sorry deed, and if they slip, if they get maimed, if the animal eludes their grip, blame it on the wives. The wives were unfaithful. And so rush home to punish them. Oust them’ (2011: 292). Hoping to contest this situation, the section ‘EVANGELLE’ takes the reader to the heart of the matter by means of a polysemantic trip taken by the speaker: a physical one to Oregon with the Merry Pranksters, a hallucinatory one towards the mother Goddess, and an exploratory one through the evolution of mythological discourse. A story told by the fire by a woman who is refashioned into a goddess through the LSD-inflected perception of the heroine directs the speaker’s attention to Apuleius’s description of the Goddess Isis in his Metamorphoses – or The Golden Ass – in which the protagonist invokes the deity for divine help. Referred to as the ‘goddess of a thousand names’ (2011: 410), Isis is a prime example of the different incarnations and cults that have been attributed to gods and goddesses throughout the ages.1 This is followed by a quote from Enuma Elish, the Babylonian epic of creation, which narrates the defeat of the mother Goddess Tiamat, who is brutally killed by her great great grandson Marduk.2 While in an ← 244 | 245 → earlier myth Tiamat is described as a creatrix – responsible for creating the cosmos and a first generation of deities – in the later myth she is turned into a monster of chaos whose dismembered body is used to create – or recreate – the cosmos. The quotations included in Iovis focus precisely on Tiamat’s defeat, emphasizing the violence and aggression committed upon her female body. Interrupting the cutting-and-pasting of the myth, the poet adds critical comments that draw attention, not only to her process of research, but also to the malleability of myth and its connection to politics – ‘(we’re near the end of Sumero-Babylonian civilization / now see ever-increasing emphasis on war & conquest)’ (2011: 414).
Marduk’s destruction and later conquest of the Goddess’s body – which is literally used as the ground to build his empire – emphasizes the brutal imposition of masculine violence upon women, a situation that has been normalized and justified through the mythical discourse. Drawing attention to the development of Tiamat’s myth, Waldman shows how humanity was ‘born of brutality, rape, conquering, born of the heaped / mass upon / mass upon of female / suffering’ (2011: 414–15).
The kind of investigative, pseudo metaphorical, trip the poet takes in ‘SPRECHSTIMME’ and ‘EVANGELLE’, nevertheless, is not the only modality of Waldman’s ‘writing-tracking’ poetics. The speaker’s actual travels also take up a considerable space in her epic, delineating journeys whose purpose, as was the case in the previous example, is to expose the ‘colors in the mechanism of concealment’ used by patriarchy. A recurrent one throughout Iovis is the condemnation of war and violence in the name of god, greed, power or, as the poet puts it, the ‘antithetical hallucination / […] / that one fights for justice at all’ (2011: 724). Parting from the necessarily self-critical point of view of an American citizen, who ‘needs to be perpetually vigilant as investigator of the dark acts and mechanisms of war’ (2011: xiv), in ‘DARK ARCANA: AFTERIMAGE OR GLOW’,3 the heroine travels to Northern Vietnam to study the aftermath of the ← 245 | 246 → Vietnam War on its twenty-five year anniversary.4 Written as an emotional and political travel journal, the repetition of the structure ‘what is it like’ is used to shift from the personal, outsider, perspective of the speaker, to that of those who were directly affected by the war. While wandering through Vietnam, the heroine tries an exercise in sympathy to see what it feels like, ‘to be / old American soldier’ (2011: 847), ‘to resemble a child’ (2011: 848), ‘to be a destiny of the victor-to-be’ (2011: 849), ‘to be bestial’ (2011: 855), ‘to be dead’ (2011: 870), ‘to be colonial’ (2011: 847), etc. Addressing her fellow Americans at the end of the poem, the speaker urges them to free themselves of the demons of war by exposing injustice and war crimes such as Nixon’s: ‘Dear American: no patent on life / reverse your crimes in the altered rice-tree-corn world!!!!!!!!!! / (secret bombing of Cambodia) / repent your afterimage / repent your glow’ (2011: 877). Using the epic to revere the victims – ‘hill-tribe girl / maimed. / excoriated. / for collusion. / second-caste citizen of hoops’ (2011: 853) – the heroine prays to both Vietnamese and Americans to give up retaliation and revenge – ‘don’t shoot / no romantic attachment to ‘dirty tricks’ past / please’ (2011: 854) – hoping, through a reevaluation of historical and political knowledge, to break the cycle of war.5
Following the assumption that there is ‘[h]istory & one’s own sense of history’ (2011: 791) – as the poet puts it – the ‘investigative travel’ and ‘writing-tracking’ poetics achieve their ultimate power as counter-history ← 246 | 247 → through the construction and preservation of an archive. In this context, the ‘hag’ and the ‘scribe’ – two figures the speaker continuously identifies with because of their dominion of language and ability to record it – become efficient trackers of Jove. In ‘REVENGE, a section where the poet/hag follows a masculine god-like figure through a world in ruins, the archive is explicitly set against the perpetuation of patriarchal control:
Words on tapes
and notebooks, which fill my shelves now, collapsing
under the weight of grandiose insight and scoff.
Can you take them all back? I doubt it. You said
this, and you said that, and you lost the train […]
No ears are deaf
and all of you will hear me. Hear me. History needs
to be retold in couplets. (2011: 144)
The epic text, once again, becomes the repository of this archive; an alternative map to a world – or rather, to the construction of a world – where the Patriarch can no longer rule on his own, but must necessarily include those who have already studied the ‘colors in the mechanism of concealment’.
Female Body and the Space of the Epic
Independently of the actual form of travel described, the heroine’s mapping of the world is inscribed in the space of the epic. Just like the universe already ruled by Jove in which the heroine necessarily dwells, the epic text – rather than free, uncharted, territory – is approached as a fully mapped space in which women have been strategically located. Indeed, despite a considerable number of epic works authored by women – such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), or H. D.’s Helen in Egypt (1961), to ← 247 | 248 → name a few – the epic continues to be seen as a predominantly masculine genre. Bernard Schweizer notes that, ‘[b]oth in subject matter and in form, epic may well be the most exclusively gender coded of all literary genres; so much so that epic and masculinity appear to be almost coterminous’ (2006: 1).6 The generic history of the epic plays an important role in Iovis, as it helps the poet to explore her text’s literary lineage. In the introduction to Book I, Waldman frames her text within the modernist epic tradition:
I honor and dance on the corpse of the poetry gone before me and especially here in a debt and challenge of epic masters Williams, Pound, Zukofsky, and Olson. But with the narrative of H.D.’s Helen in Egypt in mind, and her play with ‘argument.’ I want to don armor of words as they do and fight with liberated tongue and punctured heart. But unlike the men’s, my history and myths are personal ones. (2011: 3)
In this short paragraph, Waldman tackles crucial aspects that will be relevant throughout the trilogy, including the tension between influence of and departure from the epic masculine masters, the play with language as a weapon to escape masculine control and – particularly interesting to this section – the representation of her own, situated, experience within the poem. One of the ways in which the poet approaches this last issue is by using the history of the epic, as well as the epic text itself, to contest the preconceived literary and real spaces women are relegated to. Not coincidentally, the gender/genre debate is fully explored in ‘OUSTED’ – a section where the speaker condemns the reigning sexism within literary circles and foresees herself becoming extinct like species, tribes, and ancient civilizations if men continue to ‘oust’ her and her poetry. In this context, Waldman uses the meta-narrative space offered by the epic to situate her poem within the specific context of the modernist tradition ← 248 | 249 → and the ‘worldly territories of epic poetry’ (2011: 1), to use Elisa Beshero-Bondar’s phrase. To do so, the poet includes a personal letter in which Iovis is criticized for the inclusion of autobiographical information within the epic. Reading Waldman’s piece in dialogue with the epic works of Charles Olson, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, the writer of the letter states:
You have declared these men/works as the ancestors of IOVIS, and your poem does have this architectonic puzzle aspect as well. But the pieces you use are not really like those in Olson or Pound; somewhat closer to Williams, and even Guy Davenport’s fictions in emotional content. Because your pieces are overwhelmingly personal history, not political or geological history, as the others tend to use. (2011: 294, my emphasis)
Clearly differentiating between Waldman’s ‘emotional’ epic and Pound’s and Olson’s – in his opinion – more political poems, this letter not only attests to the way academia continues to read gender as genre,7 but also draws attention to the spatial ordering of women and female experience in the world. This gendered spatial regime, as Carole Pateman notes, stems from a theoretical discourse based on a ‘division between the public (the social, the political, history) and the private (the personal, the domestic, the familial), which is also a division between the sexes’ (2013: 6). The perpetuation of this division, which dominates the historical spatial ordering of both men and women, is also visible in the construction of literary genres, being part of the ‘[s]ocial practices, state institutions, symbolic representations and cultural artefacts’ (McDowell 2003: 13) that have been shaped by it.
In this respect, the absence of Louis Zukofsky’s ‘A’ from the masculine – that is to say ‘political’ – epic writers in the critique of Waldman’s epic is quite relevant. Now studied as one of the most influential twentieth-century epic poems, A could also be considered to fit into the ‘emotional’ or ‘personal’ category Iovis has been negatively included in. Barry Ahearn stresses, in a precise way, the personal nature of Zukofsky’s epic in the introduction to the 2011 edition: ← 249 | 250 →
What other poem offers us so much of the poet’s daily life? The facts about Whitman one can glean from Song of Myself are surprisingly rare. What do we really know about Pound from his Cantos? Not a great deal, considering the length. […] [With A] we sit at the poet’s elbow as he writes, walk with him through the streets of Brooklyn, read his correspondence, and listen to the talk of his father, wife, and son. Zukofsky was quite serious in stressing the degree to which his poem was ‘of a life’ – his life. (2001: vii)
Much like Zukofsky’s epic, Waldman’s Iovis is informed by the poet’s life, and its modern ‘architectonic’ construction includes personal correspondence, as well as the voices of friends, relatives, students and other artists, whose dialogues create a collage of the historical, political and personal. Disrupting the public/private, masculine/feminine binaries, in ‘ELEVEN FACES ONE THOUSAND ARMS’, the speaker refers to Zukofsky as ‘the most complete in “A”–12’ (2011: 809), and opens her poem by quoting – and adding comments in brackets – twenty-two verses of the beginning of this movement, as Zukofsky referred to the twenty-four sections in his poem. Here, Zukofsky turns to the story of the genesis to welcome his son Paul into the poem, whose music and presence permeate the movement in much the same way as Waldman’s son does in Iovis.8 Despite Zukofsky’s extensive inclusion of autobiographical details, his position as one of the great epic writers – together with Pound, Olson and Williams – has remained fairly unquestioned, which shows, as the following analysis hopes to demonstrate, that the critique included in Iovis is not based on Waldman’s appropriation of the genre, but solely on her gender.
Indeed, the celebration of Zukofsky’s ‘A’–12 in Iovis foregrounds the poet’s situated poetics, manifest in the need to ‘speak out from within her personal narrative’ (xi). This discourse echoes what Susan Friedman has called ‘locational’ feminism, since it is concerned with depicting ‘the position ← 250 | 251 → one occupies, the standpoint from which one speaks, and the location within which one’s agency negotiates’ (2001: 22). In addition to using the epic, a genre already preoccupied with spatial relations, the speaker in Iovis is concerned with locating – but not solidifying – her situation with regard to factors such as gender, genre, nationality, politics and age, among others, to explore how these influence her position in the – literary – world. As a case in point, in the passage that follows the quotation from ‘A’–12, the speaker denounces the detrimental effect of binary oppositions in poetry, stating that she ‘did doubt gender in any passing literary indeterminacy’s irony as an old page […] did doubt itself as myself representing “person” “poet” and as person better dare to be part of the history of my time’ (2011: 810). Claiming back the political dimension of her poem, she situates herself in the lineage of those poets who were concerned with the state of the world, and validates the legitimacy of Iovis with the emergence of new problems: ‘We were preoccupied with the problems of the city-states. Me too, me too. And Hiroshima? And Lebanon? New Orleans? Fallujah?’ (2011: 810).
In any case, the question remains whether a female poet, preoccupied like the men were with socio-political issues, is able to use the epic genre to the same effect. This issue is tackled in another excerpt from a personal letter written by the poet and performer Kristin Prevallet – who was at the time taking a class on Charles Olson taught by Robert Creeley. After celebrating the epic’s ability to depict ‘how one goes about bringing one’s BEING into the poem [as well as] the complex intersection of mythology, history, and personal fluctuations in life’ (2011: 370), Prevallet denounces Creeley’s gender-bias: he refused to consider Iovis an epic poem on account of Waldman’s ‘ego’ – merely understood here as the incorporation of her autobiographical persona into the poem. Since the male epic writers Waldman invokes were also – to various degrees – personal,9 the writer rightly complains that ← 251 | 252 → ‘what was at stake here was not ego but gender’ (2011: 370). As Prevallet puts it elsewhere, ‘[w]hy is the masculine ego an explorable space and the feminine ego a restricted one?’ (2008: 145). Subverting this bias, in Iovis the speaker’s personal experience is essential – rather than detrimental – to the development of the epic quest. The text is not only informed by the actual or metaphorical travels analysed in the first part of this chapter, but also literally composed of the textual tokens and remnants of those trips. In ‘WHY THAT’S A BLADE CAN FLOAT’, she writes:
The poet has by now travelled a distance, spanning mental universe, moving cross country, moving cross town and comes to rest with her box of scraps, notes, journals, memorabilia, letters, unfinished versions, her major task continuing unsettled at her feet. She spreads the documents about her, and bows her head. She feels a burden to sustain the plan. The society is crumbling around her. (2011: 278)
The ‘scraps, notes, journals, memorabilia, letters’ (2011: 278) – while being the direct products of her experience – forge a strong link between Iovis and its modern – again, mostly male – predecessors. In Waldman’s epic, the rearrangement of ‘the chaotic fragments’ (1996: 112) – using Franco Moretti’s term10 – further disrupts the genre/gender debate as it often engages in explicit political dialogues. Indeed, a closer look at the fragments that helped create the ‘architectonic puzzle aspect’ (Waldman 2011: 294) of the epic – those that were in the first letter interpreted as ‘overwhelmingly personal history, not political or geopolitical history’ (2011: 294) – effectively exposes the lack of foundation of similar critiques.
Even when using documents of a strict personal nature – such as private correspondence – the letters chosen often transcend the narrow reach of ← 252 | 253 → the imposed ‘emotional’ label. In the context of the epic, they act as alternative versions of history that contest the dominant, patriarchal, recording of events. Set out against – or alongside – the ‘official’ version, these (hi)stories are counter-spaces potentially uncontaminated by the ‘mechanism of concealment’. In this light, family letters become alternative channels to report war, private means of communication turned into a medium to talk about ‘what the newspapers may not have told you’ (2011: 823). As such, the archiving and rearranging of these pieces of ‘counter-memory’ (2011: 831) in the space of the epic is not an incidental action, but a calculated strategy to contest the authoritarian manufacture of history. Much in the spirit of Walter Benjamin, Waldman ‘brush[es] history against the grain’ (Benjamin 1968: 257), recovering the stories of the less powerful and placing them in dialogue with the historical construct of the victors. This position imbues thoroughly the poet’s approach to the epic genre; she shifts from Virgil’s arma virumque cano11 – ‘I sing of arms and of man’ – to ‘lacrimare, lacrimatus’ (2011: 529), a transition guided by ‘the travails of weeping’ (2011: 529) of those normally left out of the scope of the epic.
In addition to the shifts characteristic of the modern epic tradition – ‘“Before-and-After” is transformed into an “Alongside” and history thus becomes a gigantic metaphor for geography’ (Moretti 1996: 52) – Waldman’s use of fragments echoes Benjamin’s monumental study of nineteenth century Paris in The Arcades Project. In Iovis, Waldman’s emphasis on ‘=Montage as resistance=’ (2011: 834), results in the creation of vast folders which serve as a source to investigate patriarchy. The reorganization of the fragments in the epic problematizes the notion of a linear conception of historical time. Although Waldman’s understanding of montage is not as radical as Benjamin’s,12 Iovis avoids an authoritative voice that frames the interpretation of the fragments, being the reader the one in charge of ← 253 | 254 → recreating the text’s meaning13 – even if the poet risks making none at all: ‘is this voice speaking merely to a specialized audience? / can you hear me in the back? / down under? behind a screen’ (2011: 813). Nevertheless, just as Susan Buck-Mors reinterprets and reconstructs Benjamin’s archive in The Dialectics of Seeing (1989), one can similarly create meaningful structures and patterns from the fragmented Iovis by paying attention to the repetition of concepts.
Indeed, fuelled by the heroine’s own emphasis on investigative poetics/politics, the connection between the different fragments is, if not guided, then suggested by recurring themes throughout the trilogy, such as the cyclical nature of war, the political and social perpetuation of violence and the subordination of women and other oppressed collectives to patriarchal control. In addition to using personal correspondence extensively, the poet rearranges whole sections from newspaper articles which, either directly deal with the poet’s main concerns, or are shaped and modified to do so. For instance, in the section ‘AEITOLOGICAL ONES’, the poet builds a whole paragraph using headlines or sentences from articles published in The New York Times – the majority from 5 June 1990. Pasted into the same conversation, the scraps strike up a globalized, transnational, conversation about war:
Bush and Colombian President to assess drug wars today, Canada premiers try to save pact, Dubcek rebukes Slovak protestors who rebuked Havel, Japanese feel quite ready for a visit from Gorbachev, White House sees aura from summit, in Europe few are cheering, Summit failed to narrow dispute on Afghanistan, Santiago: Allende’s widow meditates anew … (2011: 191)
Creating a complicated political dialogue – reminiscent of John Dos Passos’s ‘Newsreels’ sections in the USA trilogy14 – the different headlines expose the interrelation of global politics and the media’s manipulation in ← 254 | 255 → presenting them as isolated issues. A similar technique is employed in ‘TO BLUNT THE KNIFE’, where the speaker condemns Jove for ‘turn[ing] a blind eye / basta, basta’ (2011: 363) and for ignoring the interconnection of related events. To do so, Waldman pastes together two articles published in The New York Times in 1993; the first one relates the arrest of eight white supremacists who were planning a massacre at an African Methodist Church in Los Angeles. Quoting from the article, the poet notes that ‘[d]uring a search of five residences, numerous weapons were seized, including machine guns, as well as Nazi paraphernalia, including swastikas & portraits of Hitler’ (2011: 364). To complicate what Jove would define as an isolated incident, this article is pasted together with ‘Street Guns: a Consumer’s Guide’ – written a few months prior to the previous one – in which guns are referred to as if they were fashion accessories.15 With this cutting-and-pasting, the poet creates a new text that exposes not only America’s cult of violence, but also its hypocrisy towards the thousands of annual deaths by gunshot. As an example of the consequences of this paradox – the condemnation of armed, violent, groups and the encouragement to purchase guns for personal use – the poet includes an excerpt of an anti-gun protest letter relating the murder of a sixteen-year-old exchange student shot to death on his way to a Halloween party by a man who allegedly thought the student was trespassing with criminal intent when he mistakenly knocked on the gunman’s door. In the rearranged space of the epic, this accident – which took place in 1992 – becomes the ‘chronicle of a death foretold’; it also starts an inconclusive discussion about gun control in the USA that ‘Anne-Pacing-the-Floor-More-Vigorously-Now’ (2011: 365) – an alter ego of the heroine – joins with her own letter to request that the president ← 255 | 256 → ‘reassess the easy availability of guns in this country and in doing so help prevent the thousands of similar incidents …’ (2011: 365).
To conclude, in Iovis, the figure of the poet/heroine fuses with that of the archeologist, or researcher, who complicates simplistic historical discourses by stressing the interconnections of fragments and the multi-layered quality of reality. This, as Edward Soja (1989) writes, drawing on John Berger’s work, is central to the reassertion of space in a (post)modern landscape where ‘[w]e can no longer depend on a story-line unfolding sequentially, an ever-accumulating history marching straight forward in plot and denouement, for too much is happening against the grain of time, too much is continually traversing the story-line laterally’ (23). In Iovis, the extensive use of fragments and their rearrangement within the textual space of the epic implicitly eschew the linear (re)construction of history and convey instead the intersecting journeys and heterogeneous spaces that form human history. This history is duly framed outside of what Mikhail Bakhtin described as the ‘absolute past’ (1981: 15) of the epic, a past that is ‘monochromic’ (1981: 15) and ‘lacks any relativity, that is, any gradual, purely temporal progressions that might connect it with the present’ (1981: 15). Quite the opposite, Iovis is set in the continuing, ever-changing, space of contemporaneity, where the heroine’s poetics becomes a ‘[c]ontinued examination – investigating, gathering, tasting, participating in all its hues’ (Waldman 2011: xiv), rather than an heroic act with an attainable goal. In this regard, even if on some level the epic constitutes a remapping of the world,16 the heroine in Iovis runs away from absolute constructions and conceptualizations of space since, to do so, would mean perpetuating Jove’s autarchy. Much like Henri Lefebvre’s organic social space – made up of ‘[g]reat movements, vast rhythms, immense waves [… that] collide and ‘interfere’ with one another’ (1991: 87) – Waldman’s epic is not a fixed cartographic projection, but a reminder of the constant need to ← 256 | 257 → negotiate, reinvent and hybridize the real, imagined, and literary spaces in which we live.
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1 Quoting from Apuleius, Waldman has Isis herself stress the geographical reach of her influence: ‘Some know me as Juno / some as Bellona of the Battles / others know me as Hecate / other as Rhamnubia / but both races of Aethiopiansm whose lands the morning sun first shines upon, / & the Egyptians, who excel in ancient learning & worship me with proper / ceremony to my godhead, / call me by my true name, Queen Isis’ (2011: 411).
2 Waldman might have been influenced by Anne Baring’s and Jules Cashford’s The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (1991). Tracking different representations of the Goddess in literature, art, and history, this book exposes the historical subordination of the Goddess through the imposition of a patriarchal Judeo-Christian mythology. Chapter 6 focuses on Isis and analyses Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, and Chapter 7 looks at the ‘defeat of the Goddess’ through the Enuma Elish following, thus, a process similar to Waldman’s.
3 This long poem was published separately as Dark Arcana: Afterimage or Glow (2003), including photos taken by Patti Smith, who accompanied Waldman on her trip.
4 The poet’s emphasis on the position from where she speaks in this section, and elsewhere in Iovis, resonates with Addriane Rich’s politics of location: ‘It was in reading poems by contemporary Cuban women that I began to experience the meaning of North America as a location which had also shaped my ways of seeing and my ideas of who and what was important, a location for which I was also responsible. I traveled then to Nicaragua, where, in a tiny impoverished country, in a four-year-old society dedicated to eradicating poverty, under the hills of the Nicaragua-Honduras border, I could physically feel the weight of the United States of North America, its military forces, its vast appropriations of money, its mass media, at my back’ (‘Notes Toward a Politics of Location’, pp. 219–20).
5 Nevertheless, and despite the ‘[o]ptimism prevails in spite of old karma’ (2011: 846) of the prelude to this section, the poet doubts the effectiveness of her approach; as she puts it, ‘time heels’ (2011: 855), but not quite heals.
6 In Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion and the Female Epic, Schweizer traces the perpetuation of the epic as a masculine genre through the critical discourse: ‘Bakhtin maintained that epic represented “a world of fathers and of founders of families” (13). In a similar vein, Jorge Luis Borges stated that “the important thing about the epic is a hero – a man who is a pattern for all men” (64)’ (2002: 7).
7 For a study of the interrelations between genre, gender and feminism see Mary Eagleton’s ‘Genre and Gender’ (1989).
8 In the very first section, ‘ALL IS FULL OF JOVE’, her son is introduced as ‘her guide […] trickster, shape-shifter who both interrupts her & goads her on’ (2011:7). In a personal interview, Waldman specifically highlighted the role of Zukofsky’s son in his epic as an influence on her own approach to the genre. In her own words: ‘His son is so present in his work … and I admire the willingness to include, because some poets are distanced from the poem’ (personal interview, 6 November 2014).
9 ‘The Pisan Cantos’ are often analysed as the most personal of all the cantos in Pound, as he wrote them while imprisoned in Italy and with very limited access to books. In much the same way, neither Williams in Paterson nor Olson in The Maximus Poems excise their autobiographical personae. Williams, for instance, writes: ‘I decided there would be four books following the course of the river whose life seemed more and more to resemble my own life as I more and more thought of it’ (1992: xiii).
10 Moretti focuses solely on works authored by men – James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, among others. The only reference to women writers and the epic genre in the whole book is the following footnote: ‘The term hero, here, is not male by chance or mere habit. The original interweaving of epic and war did indeed relegate female figures to a marginal role, which has persisted to our own day. Joyce’s Penelope is fortunate enough to have a tremendous monologue – but she is restricted to the book’s last chapter. It is because of this symbolic imbalance, I think, that European women writers have always preferred novels to epic story-telling’ (1996: 14).
11 As Waldman puts it: ‘I sing of war, but not of its glory. I sing down war’ (2006: 90).
12 He wrote: ‘Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no values, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them’ (1999: 460).
13 The narrative pieces at the beginning of each section help, as the poet puts it, ‘track the field-poet’s steps as they thread through a maze’ (2011: 3), but do not necessarily explain the cohesion or overall meaning of the fragments.
14 In his trilogy USA, John Dos Passos had already blended together similar documents in the ‘Newsreel’ sections. These, as Juan A. Suárez writes, ‘are collages of found texts, including snatches of songs, journalistic prose, political speeches, headlines, and ticker-tape news releases’ (1999: 43).
15 See for instance, the sexualized language used in the following description: ‘Snap open the dark, gleaming weapon’s well-oiled cylinder, feel the silken weight of cartridges sliding into their chambers – the elegance and sensuous simplicity make the cranky semiautomatic’s advantages seem marginal’ (<http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/14/magazine/street-guns-a-consumer-guide.html?pagewanted=all>).
16 ‘Create your own country: to make the energies dance. Then rearrange the chairs, books, molecules, garden, tend lively phones & phonemes. Scramble the parts writ on buses, planes, on random scraps, on top of newsprint, sung into a machine, screamed into the void – now gather herein to create ongoing orderly chaos’ (Waldman 2011: 342).