Waldrop, Rosmarie
WALDROP, Rosmarie
Also wrote as Rosmarie Keith. Nationality: American. Born: Kitzingen/Main, Germany, 24 August 1935. Education: Universität Würzburg, 1954–56; Université d'Aix-Marseilles, 1956–57; Universität Freiburg, 1957–58; University of Michigan, 1959–66, M.A. 1960, Ph.D. 1966. Family: Married Keith Waldrop in 1959. Career: Assistant professor, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 1964–70; poet-in-the-schools, Rhode Island, 1971–72; visiting poet, Southeastern Massachusetts University, 1977; visiting lecturer, 1977–78, and visiting associate professor, 1983, 1990–91, 1993, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island; visiting lecturer, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts, 1979–81. Since 1968 co-editor and publisher, Burning Deck Press. Co-founder, playwright, and director, Wastepaper Theater, Providence, 1973–83. Awards: Hopwood award, 1963; Humboldt award, 1970–71, 1975; Howard award, 1974–75; Translation Center award, 1978; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1980, 1994; Rhode Island Governor's Arts award, 1988; Fund for Poetry, 1990; PEN Book of the Month Club Citation in Translation, 1991; DAAD Berlin Artists Program, 1993; Landon Translation award, 1994; Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest award, 1999–2001. Address: 71 Elmgrove Avenue, Providence, Rhode Island 02906, U.S.A.
Publications
Poetry
The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger. New York, Random House, 1972.
The Road Is Everywhere or Stop This Body. Columbia, Missouri, Open Places, 1978.
When They Have Senses. Providence, Burning Deck, 1980.
Nothing Has Changed. Windsor, Vermont, Awede Press, 1981.
Differences for Four Hands. Philadelphia, Singing Horse Press, 1984.
Streets Enough to Welcome Snow. Barrytown, New York, Station Hill, 1986.
The Reproduction of Profiles. New York, New Directions, 1987.
Peculiar Motions. Berkeley, California, Kelsey Street Press, 1990.
Lawn of Excluded Middle. New York, Tender Buttons, 1993.
A Key into the Language of America. New York, New Directions, 1994.
Another Language: Selected Poems. Jersey City, New Jersey, Talisman House, 1997.
Well Well Reality, with Keith Waldrop. Sausalito, California, Post-Apollo Press, 1998.
Split Infinites. Philadelphia, Singing Horse Press, 1998.
Reluctant Gravities. New York, New Directions, 1999.
Novels
The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter. Barrytown, New York, Station Hill, 1986.
A Form/of Taking/It All. Barrytown, New York, Station Hill, 1990.
Other
Against Language? The Hague, Netherlands, Mouton, 1971 Editor, with Keith Waldrop, A Century in Two Decades. Providence, Burning Deck, 1982.
Translator, Bodies and Shadows by Peter Weiss. New York, Delacorte, 1969.
Translator, Elya by Edmond Jabès. Bolinas, California, Tree Books, 1973.
Translator, The Book of Questions by Edmond Jabès. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1976.
Translator, The Book of Yukel/Return to the Book (volumes II and III of The Book of Questions) by Edmond Jabès. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1983.
Translator, Yaël/Elya/Aely (volumes IV, V, and VI of The Book of Questions) by Edmond Jabès. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1984.
Translator, with Harriett Watts, The Vienna Group: Six Major Austrian Poets. Barrytown, New York, Station Hill Press, 1985.
Translator, Paul Celan, Collected Prose. Manchester, Carcanet, and New York, Sheep Meadow, 1986.
Translator, with Tod Kabza, Archeology of the Mother: A Selection of Poems by Alain Veinstein. Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, Spectacular Diseases, 1986.
Translator, The Book of Dialogue by Edmond Jabès. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1987.
Translator, The Book of Shares by Edmond Jabès. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Translator, Some Thing Black by Jacques Roubaud. Elmwood Park, Illinois, Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.
Translator, The Book of Resemblances by Edmond Jabès. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1990.
Translator, Intimations The Desert (volume II of The Book of Resemblances) by Edmond Jabès. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1991.
Translator, From the Book to the Book by Edmond Jabès. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1991.
Translator, Rimbaud in Abyssinia by Alain Borer. New York, William Morrow, 1991.
Translator, Dawn by Joseph Guglielmi. Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, Spectacular Diseases, 1991.
Translator, The Ineffaceable The Unperceived (volume III of The Book of Resemblances) by Edmond Jabès. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1992.
Translator, The Book of Margins by Edmond Jabès. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Translator, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book by Edmond Jabès. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1993.
Translator, Heiligenanstalt by Friederike Mayröcker. Providence, Burning Deck, 1994.
Translator, The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis by Jacques Roubaud. Normal, Illinois, Dalkey Archive Press, 1995.
Translator, Mountains in Berlin: Selected Poems by Elke Erb. Providence, Burning Deck, 1995.
Translator, The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion by Edmond Jabès. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1996.
Translator, with Harriett Watts, With Each Clouded Peak by Friederike Mayröcker. Los Angeles, Sun and Moon Press, 1998.
*Critical Studies: "The Ambition of Senses" by Craig Watson, in Montemora #8 (New York), 1981; "Non-Euclidean Narrative Combustion" by Joan Retallack, in Parnassus (New York), summer 1988; interview with Edward Foster, in Talisman (Jersey City, New Jersey), 6, spring 1991; "Syntextural Investigations" by Jonathan Monroe, in Diacritics 26, fall/winter 1996; Wittgenstein's Ladder by Marjorie Perloff, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996; "Rosmarie Waldrop's Shorter American Memory" by Kornelia Freitag, in The Construction and Contestation of American Cultures and Identities in the Early National Period, edited by Udeo Hebel, Heidelberg, Verlag, 1999.
* * *Rosmarie Waldrop began her writing life with a little book of prose called Against Language? This was her manifesto to the world that language, such as we use every day and pour into our daily newspapers and novels and poems, was exhausted. When the fund of words and expressions is exhausted, the mind itself goes brittle, social vision shrinks, and life is more or less imprisoned in the triteness of a used-up consciousness. It is the duty of writers, she tells us in this manifesto, to go to the edges of language, to work out what is for now the unsayable, the unknowable, and to revive speech. Here is how she puts her argument in the conclusion:
… the poets who are seriously dissatisfied with our conventions of language (and do not just take this attitude as an excuse or because it is fashionable) are working at the borders of the unsayable and unknowable. They are trying to explore the areas bordering pure spirit or the void, unformed matter or energy, and their realm of 'things' considered as having a self-sufficient being alien to man. And since our language is our world, changing the language seems a possibility of changing our ways of seeing and thus to some extent changing what is seeable and knowable.
This attractive program was set forth some few years before the public became aware of language poetry, the school of American poets who studied Wittgenstein and Derrida and pursued the notion that language is a finite realm within a broader human consciousness. It could be said that these poets wanted to explore the rest of consciousness beyond "the city of words." The theory goes that, if the speaker deranges syntax—Rimbaud's suggestion—and explodes grammatical structure—in which sexism, white bias, imperialist master class illusions, and subject-object dichotomies (Cartesian thinking) are concealed—it is possible to liberate the tongue so as to enter the hinterlands of knowledge obscured by the walls of conventional language.
These absolutes are not new to poetry. Emerson spoke of an attitude to nature that would free the voices within and restore wholeness of vision. Pound's notion of the image as a glimpse at the gods in nature and Olson's "human universe" prepared the way for Waldrop's pronouncements. She tells us that poetry has always borrowed from the arts and music, but she adds that it must also borrow from autism and mathematics so as to gain the ground that consciousness otherwise excludes. Autism gives us a window into daydreams, and mathematics is "pure relation."
The result is an eerie mode of lyric, in prose poem format, in which subtleties are uncovered, as in Waldrop's squibs in The Reproduction of Profiles:
You told me, if something is not used it
is meaningless, and took my temperature which I
had thought to save for a more difficult day.
In the mirror, every night, the same face,
a bit more threadbare, a dress worn too long.
The moon was out in the cold, along with the
restless, dissatisfied wind that seemed to
change the location of the sycamores. I expected
reproaches because I had mentioned the
word love, but you only accused me of stealing
your pencil, and sadness disappeared with
sense. You made a ceremony out of holding
your head in your hands because, you said,
it could not be contained in itself.
Implicit here and elsewhere in Waldrop's poetry is the principle that things are alive in their own dynamics and that they make relations and forms from an imagination in nature. The poet is witness, an imitator of natural creativity, not a copyist. By subduing some of the instrumental logic of the self, nature regains its original autonomy and instructs the human soul.
Beneath Waldrop and her language peers is a steadily building faith in nature religion. The codes in which they write this new logic of expression, with its strange Piranesi staircases going nowhere, rising and falling in goalless antiprogress, suggest a new, secular Latin prayer book, a priesthood of nature mystics in America. The more we hear of "reenchantment" in contemporary discourse, the easier it is to believe that language mysticism is the means by which the old spells, visions, and reverence for otherness are returning to mind.
Consider the following passage in "Overshadowed," from The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger:
Spidery running
a phantom child
all the dead are eager
to be remembered
the concave world where
souls smelled
and pleasure came in a net full of fish
glassy
desolate
This is a lyric at the edge, but it is also about something, Waldrop's childhood years growing up in Germany. We get glimpses here and there of cold, removed parents, the German rituals that are now tainted in retrospect by visions of the Holocaust. Waldrop does not write the equivalent of Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," which draws its fire from conventional logic. Instead, she writes from several ongoing conscious tracks of thought, picking a few details from one, merging them with a few from another. The style is similar to the recollective mode of Lyn Hejinian and to Leslie Scalopino, Susan Howe, and other language masters.
Here is another sample of the mode from "Menstruation," also in The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger:
My appetite's for waking
chill crystals in the clouds
pebble seeds
Flaubert devoted years to
accumulation of details
worthless
next to a bare wall
I insist on living
with words
vicarious birth vicarious existence
each month my womb cries
its mouth swollen
What one often hears in Waldrop's poetry are the words "sleep," "waiting," "mist," "grey," and "solitude" and mathematical terms like "equation" and "correspondence." But she also has a fine, inventive ear for new phrases, like these from "Kind Regards," included in Streets Enough to Welcome Snow:
Your air of kind regards*
kind randomness
of a museum
canvas sneakers
along with raspberry lips
lately you say I've had an awkward
pull
toward the past tense
my remarks renovate
details in oil
If there is a plot, it is the regaining of Waldrop's own autonomy in a marriage, the working up of a separate consciousness with its own vision of the world. She writes often about an Amerindian woman named Saltwoman, her alter ego. The surprising function of this figure is that Waldrop makes her from the kind of sleep talk she writes, and it holds our attention. It works perhaps more deeply and strongly than conventional taste will sometimes want to admit.
—Paul Christensen