Archivist Scissors by Anne Waldman
Staircase Books, 2025
Review by Michael McCarthy
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“I was just a poet ready to serve,” Anne Waldman writes in “Fashion Animal.” “Humble milkmaid gazes out a window,” she continues in the same line. In this single joke, Waldman outlines her poetic purpose. Identifying as both poet and proverbial milkmaid, Waldman humbles herself in the same moment she mounts a daring claim: poetry is a form of service. Archivist Scissors, then, is an act of stewardship, of care. Both a delight for the ear and a cleansing of the spirit, this book reminds us what great poetry can do.
It is a Buddhist truth that there is no stable self across time. This book’s numerous invocations of Buddhism, alongside other spiritual traditions, indicate an off-and-on engagement with the sacred. Waldman’s loyalty seems split between the ethereal realm of transcendence and the vivid quagmire of everyday life. Her poetry contains elements of both because the world contains elements of both—they bleed into each other. Chief among Waldman’s talents is her ability to blend disparate subjects within a single poem while maintaining the semblance of poetic control, as in these lines from “Core Text (from Prajñapāramitā)”:
the state authority
must we reckon a life of will?
such sudden insurgency
a citizen in gay parenting
not different in a story of Genesis
transcends, and thousands denied biology,
remembering Abu Ghraib where crimes never end
you dream too much and will land
the Pope in hot water
At times, Waldman seems to be not speaking for herself but allowing something larger to be spoken through her. That something larger, however, vacillates between benevolence and malevolence. Waldman writes from a “cracked universe,” as she puts it in “Fugue State,” and her inspirations consist both in the consolations of the divine and the rejoinders of materiality.
Writing from “the country that didn’t quite go fascist,” Waldman’s unstable speaker captures the prismatic, schismatic politics of identity in order to subvert them. Indeed, it is at her most subversive that Waldman writes her best verses. A child of the 60’s. she doesn’t attempt to assert that flower power is the be-all-end-all of protest, but the friendships forged amid shared resistance continue to resonate in this artist’s imaginary. This book testifies to a generation reared on the freewheeling re-reinvention of the Beats. Archivist Scissors is a study guide for any reader keen to dissect the language of contemporary resistance in art.
Within a culture eager to label and identify, Waldman delights in her pirouetting identifications, her funhouse-mirror distortions of the impermanent self, and her unique skill for blurring public and private lives. Archivist Scissors contains a dramatis personae of fellow art-makers and versifiers who grace the stage of this book. Poetry is infamous for being a one-person show, but Waldman defies that platitude by incorporating wide-ranging influences, both intimate relations and high-flown members of the American canon. There seems to be precious little that Waldman is not ready to write about.
Archivist Scissors does not present a unified poetic narrator from poem to poem. Rather, it allows a glimpse into the life of an artist that consists in borrowing, lending, grabbing, grafting, and repurposing the raw poetry of her contemporaries. Borrowing lines is not a form of theft but of citation, even recommendation. In “Poem with a Line by Barbara Guest,” the “whole impossible timing” of “a dream of jazz” recalls the lending, borrowing, and stealing of music. Not only does Waldman speak these poems, but she also allows other poets to speak through her. With her. A lyrical conduit, Waldman puts on a stunning performance for the page.
Archivist Scissors is comfortable—eager, even—to name names. Waldman’s friends romp through long poetic sequences as she points out their quirks and quips, what made them them. Waldman reminisces as if she is among old friends, as with her friend Harry Smith’s jokes “about running off to Thailand together.” The comfort of reference creates a warmth, the knowledge that, even if you don’t know who this or that person is, you know the kind of person they are, something of their gait or face, a feature, a trademark maybe. Reading this book, you are immediately among poetic society.
Naming names also creates a poetic lineage, a canon to which Waldman adds this supreme accomplishment. Her title, then, is ironic. Does not an archivist’s memory-work contradict the purpose of scissors—to excise (forget)? Although she writes “We are here to benefit others and disappear,” the community of artists she remembers attests to the sublime, lasting gift of care. Remembering, however, is also a form of re-membering, of putting back together. “A grinning corpse,” she describes one friend lost to death, and this macabre image resurrects the happiness of her friend’s life while confronting their passing head-on. Death and life commingle. Again, Waldman’s dual loyalties come to the fore.
Just as she toys with identity, Waldman also fiddles with authorship. Her authorial mischief appears most prominently in “Our Mind in Hand (Written with Cedar Sigo).” “We wrote this,” Waldman explains in a footnote, “spoke this as, ‘fellow membrane speakers” in a back and forth zone of thinking […]” The harmony of two voices creates an exchange, an interplay between distinct but resonant entities that collapse into each other—two voices, one song. It is as if there were two voices singing rounds of the poem, a communal music.
The flow of de-grammatized verses excites how improvisational music excites: neither the listener nor music-maker knows what will happen next. To call Waldman’s style stream-of-consciousness is too modernist, but to call it anything else misses its grandeur. If Waldman herself is a second-generation Beat, she seems to be reaching back to the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti only so she can launch even farther back towards Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, and T.S. Eliot. Her aspirations are staggeringly great.
And Archivist Scissors succeeds in everything it attempts. Blending the cosmic and the microcosmic in the same poem (even in the same line!) creates resonant harmonics that linger long after each poem is read. When they are re-read, they lose nothing of their freshness and verve, or their ability to surprise. A daring collection, this book proves that it takes a village to put together a book. Here, it becomes necessary to note the fabulous cover art by Joe Brainard and the superb assemblage of this volume by the up-and-coming press Staircase Books. A community of artists came together to make Waldman’s latest contributions to poetry possible. A lasting achievement, Archivist Scissors contains some of the best poetry written today.
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Michael McCarthy is a poet, translator, and critic based in Boston. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Circumference, and Prairie Schooner, among others. His first chapbook Steve: A Gift was published by the Moonstone Arts Center.
Anne Waldman is the author most recently of The Velvet Wire with No Land (Granary Books, 2024); Rues du Monde (Apic Press, English and French, 2024); Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House Press, 2023), a memoir with poetry, essays, and interviews; Para Ser Estrella a Medianoche (Arrebatos Libros, English and Spanish, 2021); and co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat Books, 2022). Her book Mesopotopia will be published by Penguin in 2025. The Grammy-nominated William S. Burroughs-inspired opera and movie Black Lodge, with music by David T. Little and libretto by Waldman, premiered at Opera Philadelphia in 2022. She has recently curated for Giorno Poetry Systems’ events; the “Beat Art Work: Power of the Gaze” exhibit, celebrating visual work of the Beat literary generation; and the Outsider Art Fair in New York City in 2024. She also served as co-curator for The Video Work of Ed Bowes: Language and Light (Anthology Film Archives, 2024). Patti Smith has called Waldman’s album SCIAMACHY (Fast Speaking Music, 2020), with cover and interior art by Pat Steir, “Exquisitely potent, a psychic shield for our times.” Waldman has published over sixty books of poetry, including the thousand-page feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press, 2011), which won the PEN Center Literary Award for Poetry. She is a founder and former Director of The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church in-the-Bowery and a founder of the Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where she is the Artistic Director of the annual Summer Writing Program. Outrider, a documentary directed by Alystyre Julian with and about Anne Waldman (produced by Sarah Riggs, with executive producer Martin Scorsese), will be released in 2025. annewaldman.org
Psaltery & Lyre 