Baby Breakdown Poems by Anne Waldman

And Waldman is easily the most exciting part of her generation, and Anne and her poems are among the great pleasures of everyone’s generation. Half the population of America is under 25, Anne Waldman, at the age of 25, is a star. It seems she can do anything, and she has, and she does. The poetry magazines, she edits, ANGEL HAIR, and THE WORLD, the magazine of St. Mark’s Art Project, are the best poetry magazines in America. In them one finds some of the finest writing being done in America today, and perhaps no one for, and could bring together such a diverse and vital selection of tell us a People and make it all work as the community that the poetry world really is today and radiant, and vibrant integrity, animates that community and gathers it. Her natural manners and warm, friendly, elegance, allow each, and every person, poet, painter, actor, musician, and just played person that open clean space so necessary to community. She has altered all our lives for the better simply by her presence, but she has no wielder of power, but simply of presents that permits everybody to be themselves, and more often than not the best in the world. I love her. Her poems are full of life-giving, energy, easy and graceful intimacy, a lovely, probably dignity, and a willingness to see anything that happens through. If ugliness depresses her, and it does, she has a wet and the confidence (courage) not to exclude it from her poems, for her poetry is an open circle with many selves at or near the center, and those selves deal honestly and openly and passionately, with what is happening to her, to all of us, right now. That’s what Anne Waldman‘s poetry is, *Now*. Technically, she is impeccable. If her poems are clumsy in places, those are clumsy places. She knows what she is doing, though I am not saying that she knows before she does. She has no Emily Dickinson, but she could be, if this time we’re not now, and if Whitman and Williams and Philip Whelan and Frank O’Hara, we’re not alive in her heart. Her radar is open to the speed of light. What she discovers she discovered before she discovers it, and so the fresh discovery of each new day Springs, directly from the eternal, feminine spirit, which personifies and shapes for every movement a moment. Her poems sing, like prayers, pray, like songs of joy, never failing to catch the rush of Hope, despair, intensity, and desperation, with spores in and golden smog, filled redheads with each breath of life. This book is an ordinary miracle. -Ted Berrigan May 18, 1970