Transcendental Studies
Keith Waldrop first burst onto the literary scene with the publication of his poetry collection A Windmill near Calvary in 1968. The collection was nominated for a National Book Award for Poetry. Over the years, Waldrop has established himself as not only a leading American avant-garde poet but also a brilliant translator, editor, and artist and an important figure in experimental theater. He is the author of many cutting-edge poetry collections, including The Garden of Effort (1975), The Space of Half an Hour (1983), The Opposite of Letting the Mind Wander (1990), and The House Seen from Nowhere (2002). In addition, he and his wife, Rosmarie Waldrop, began Burning Deck Press during the 1960’s. He also has been involved with avant-garde theatrical performances.
This experimental bent has been at the heart of Waldrop’s approach to the creative process. He has been drawn to absurdist writers such as Alfred Jarry and André Breton. He also was deeply influenced by the experimental American writer Gertrude Stein. Waldrop learned from her how to focus on style, and not become mired in the meaning of what he wrote. For Waldrop as for Stein, it would be the general mood or essence created that was of prime importance. Waldrop has translated several French writers, including Breton as well as Paul Eluard, René Char, and Pierre Reverdy. In 2000, the French government bestowed on Waldrop the rank of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres for his contribution to French literature.
Waldrop has taught at Brown University for more than forty years and is currently the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of Humanities. Never one to consider slowing down, he continues to work with graduate students who are working toward a master of fine arts in poetry. The poet believes in not giving up on alternate or older versions of a poem. He always advises his students to keep the original version of any poem, no matter how many times it gets revised. What a poet sees as a problem on first reading may on repeated readings become more valuable at a later date. Although Waldrop has criticized himself for “keeping too much,” he remains leery of giving up on a poem, a fragment, or a line too quickly.
The poems that Waldrop has stored away may serve him well in the present. Transcendental Studies includes poetry that was written decades ago. The jigsaw puzzle that is a poetry collection can contain material that finally works together now, after many years of misfits. The poet finally is smart enough or aware enough truly to see what belongs together as a whole. Since memory plays an important role in most of what Waldrop writes, it is no wonder that his older musings could find a way to the surface decades later. He loves creating art collages as well as word collages. He surmises that he has produced more than one thousand art pieces. The collages spark investigation, spark new ways of looking at the world.
At Kansas State Teachers College, Waldrop studied psychiatry. He has long been fascinated to how the brain processes images. During the early 1950’s, his studies were terminated when he was drafted into the Army. He was stationed in Germany, where he met Rosmarie Sebald. They eventually married in 1959. She also was a poet and translator, and they have greatly influenced each other. For decades, they have pushed ahead, made their mark whether the poetry establishment took notice or not. In a bold stroke, the judges for the National Book Award for Poetry tapped Waldrop as their 2009 winner. They indicated that Transcendental Studies
(This entire section contains 1799 words.)
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Transcendental Studies “is a powerful work that merges the metaphysical and the personal.” After forty years, Waldrop is on the cutting age of a new millennium. He would have it no other way.
Waldrop has continued to do what he has always done. He has stayed the course, remained true to his approach. Memory, art , and death still remain at the center of his creative spirit. As usual, he has filled in what is blank, what is missing. While in translation Waldrop must be respectful of the original poem, he has no such consideration in putting together a new collage. The poet is less concerned with the “meaning” of what he has created than in having his work “read.” Waldrop is more concerned that a reader gets the “sense” of his work, as opposed to the “meaning.” For the poet, “meaning” is merely part of the “sense” of a poem. If a reader looks for the meaning then that reader only has scratched the surface. Waldrop believes that a poem cannot be figured out “without really listening to it.”
Waldrop has divided Transcendental Studies into three poetic sequences and an epilogue. The three poetic sequences are “Shipwreck in Haven,” “Falling in Love Through a Description,” and “The Plummet of Vitruvius.” Some of the material has been previously published. Shipwreck in Haven was published as a volume in 1989. “Falling in Love Through a Description” was published in 1995 in a French translation as Aimer par description: Études transcendentales. The epilogue “Stone Angels” was published as a chapbook in 1997. This collection has been published as part of the New California Poetry Series through the University of California Press. The series is edited by Robert Hass, Calvin Bedient, Brenda Hillman, and Forrest Gander. Transcendental Studies is the twenty-seventh collection to be published in the series. The series has earned a reputation for publishing some of the most cutting-edge poetry in the country. Some of its most notable volumes include Carol Snow’s For (2000), Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), Mark Levine’s The Wild (2006), Ron Silliman’s The Age of Huts (compleat) (2007), and Cole Swensen’s Ours (2008).
Waldrop’s poetry takes readers on an “inconclusive” yet fascinating journey. It is a journey to the far reaches of human experience as envisioned by the poetic imagination. This is not established territory that readers already know. Waldrop is a poetic adventurer, an explorer in the finest sense. In this journey, he can be compared to such poetic visionaries as Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Paul Celan, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Waldrop believes in the power of language, in what it can reveal. As a skilled magician of words, he balances between cracking the code through the dance of words and the needed silence in-between. It is by employing contrast that the most light shows through.
Widely regarded as one of the most important avant-garde writers of his generation, Waldrop, critics have said, “brings results we’ve never heard before” as he presents poetry as “a vast, holistic science, a science of sciences.” For this reason and several others, it is tragic that he is not better known among readers of serious poetry. He is never less than engaging, and more times than not his writing rises to the level of true exploration.
In Transcendental Studies, Waldrop is at the top of his poetic game. The collection features plenty of sly wit and a generous helping of spellbinding cadences that carry readers along. Waldrop is always seemingly able to mix old and new work in order to add richness to the magical whole. The opening sequence is divided into six parts. There are no titles, merely numbers. The first part opens with “Balancing. Austere. Life-/ less. I have tried to keep/ context from claiming you.” The poet does not want to become bogged down with too much meaning, too much pointless searching for cultural clues that can only deaden life. The first part ends with
Oh yes and wheels on the pavement,angels of incidence, rebounding fromwaves, but precisely. Reflective angels.Like the hand of a clock which, minuteby minute, crosses its appointedspaces. Oh! You are passing!Things are ready. Allthings, because somethingmust be settled. Slung.Answering laughter. Mixture ofdiamond and diamondand blood, a rope of flowers.
There is much of this urgent universe, this inquisitive mind that must be balanced. The poet takes comfort in language that has the potential to reconcile memory, experience, knowledge, and spirituality. This imaginative approach proves itself to be a meditation on the great mystery of where the mind possibly ends and the world possibly begins. In the blink of an eye, the poet can change how all boundaries are to be perceived. In the sixth part, Waldrop boldly states “Behind and above, I saw then everything/ that was happening on earth and can/ describe the hum of clouds.” And what shall a poet-philosopher-shaman do with all of this information? For Waldrop, it can only come to one end: He must describe, ponder, question, and look into the abyss with childlike wonder.
The second sequence is made up of discrete images, fragments, and parts looking for a whole. Its first poem, “An Apparatus,” finds the poet viewing the world (real and imagined) around him. It opens with “From where I sit, I can see other/ things: a silver porcupine, pins/ standing upright. It is a vanished tale of a/ vanished forest at the shore of a vanished ocean.” For all the attempts to make sense of what is entering the mind’s eye, danger still remains close at hand. Transcendental Studies can be viewed as a book of evidence. The jagged fragments, the collages that seem to come out of nowhere, the musings of a madmanall of these elements are pieces that add up to something, add up to glimpses into the abstract puzzle that is the human psyche.
Waldrop presents readers with a pinch of death, a dab of sweet art, and a generous helping of brazen memories. Out of this assortment, readers must come to terms with the complications that make up the informed thought process. For all the outer trappings of everyday life that fly by, it is the inner complexities of life that run the show. In the poem “The Growth of Private Worlds from Unattached Feelings,” the poet surmises that “Something is going on. The dead Arch-/ duke is resurrected. Unusual/ beauty of the landscape. I think the world/ is turning around me. Whatever position we/ take, space is not place.” The very foundation is a bit shaky, a bit uncertain in these trying times. In the third sequence, the poem “CarriageA Transition” includes a series of potent fragments. There is “My gravity distorts/ the neighborhood every/ quality adrift rub/ the panes roar/ of escaping steam,” and “Walking across someone/ else’s farrago (confused/ world) an un-/ bounded capacity for pain,” and “Zeno must have been/ wrong since time’s arrow has flown from/ him to me/ and is flying and/ yet sometimes his argument/ gives me pause.” The poet recognizes that there is much to consider, much to take under advisement. Waldrop is very much at his most substantial in this collection. He invites readers to relish the experience of absorbing Transcendental Studies.
