Anne Waldman
Mesopotopia
Penguin Books, 2025
A tycoon of poetry for more than fifty years, Anne Waldman has written a new book that searches out the value of the imagination amidst imminent global catastrophe and ultimately teaches readers to work, build something of human value, as our world collapses. Mesopotopia undertakes a poetics of immersive, overwhelming world-historical awareness, and what emerges is a grounding human vision for the work of poets and artists, work which turns out to be surprisingly indispensable. “My brave accomplices,” the poet seductively challenges, “weigh in.”
Mesopotopia is a 207-page book-length poem, built of seven “staves”—a word that can refer to a post or plank in a building or to a stanza of poetry. “The word conjures a place, an architecture,” Waldman told Poets & Writers Magazine, with the insight that the structure of poetry could be a place to stand, or live. Instead of any topic or concern, the unnamed staves center on a “tightening of skills & associations”—they are sharply measured swirls of impressions, intimacies, headlines, notes on ancient and living poets, and wild meditations. Waldman’s technique involves energetic and studious layering: “the taste of uprising” sits beside the Sumerian roots of eco-feminism, beside cluster munitions painted to look like drops of toys, beside the words of ancient prophets (“they shall be driven to darkness”), beside ruminations on her friends and their art, beside “TV episodes,” beside “people creating new histories.” Memories of all-night parties and meditations, rituals she witnessed, temples and art galleries, strikes and protests, listening to music and singing at dawn—a portrait of a radical takes shape, and her “investigative rage” sabotages our passive habits of media, experience, and intimacy consumption.
Each stave is built of discontinuous, rarely-enjambed lines, which crackle with a spontaneous, incantatory quality that makes one line follow another in a way that feels both outrageous and just right. Something like “have been studying the way social media is ripping us apart” might be preceded by a disarming line like “What is law? Not allowed to make a right on red in a car, et cetera.” Her unpredictable flow makes silliness, misconceptions, and clouds of unknowing apropos in a poem, as perhaps all poetry should. Divested from context and narrative, the lines become the subjects of endless reflection. The staves are structured to hold the explosive lines, and the balance radiates a strength and energy that only extraordinary poetry can release. Mesopotopia witnesses many pains of our looming dystopia but is far from a work of bleak despair—it is a contemporary prophecy, true to the moral force of that ancient calling, and with no proportionate loss to the play and humor that always make Waldman’s poetry formidably human.