Soldatesque / Soldiering | Poetry by Anne Waldman, Art by Noah Saterstrom

Soldatesque / Soldiering:
With Dreams of Wartime

Poetry by Anne Waldman
Art by Noah Saterstrom
Introduction by Bill Berkson

“The visual idiom unleashed in Noah Saterstrom’s online Work-a-Day drawings – improvisational, fragmentary, fluid – is perhaps related to the telling of dreams, and has found marvelous fulfillment in the frieze panels of Soldatesque. One image flows seamlessly into another as the oblique narrative unfolds within a shifting but oddly convincing space. Painted with great intimacy, these images seem perfectly at one with Anne Waldman’s simultaneously explicit and enigmatic text.”

—Timothy Hyman

“‘Be a soldier to thy purpose.’ (Shakespeare) With warrior-like stamina and unrelenting bravura, Waldman offers a template for ‘a different approach’ leading to an aphoristic, ecstatic truth. Here, this truth manifests visually in Saterstrom’s tender, faded images of war. We have seen them and not seen them, we have averted our eyes from them, we have forgotten them…yet how they lurk in our memories and haunt us.”

—Mónica de la Torre

“Here on the home front Anne and Noah’s word-and-image frieze blossoms like an immensely considerate device improvised for those Gentle Reader hands remaining.”

—Bill Berkson

From Soldatesque / Soldiering: Soldiering is not that simple, take it from “she,”
a “she” who left once and was out in the middle of it.
Walking toward a small hamlet.

—Anne Waldman

Book Information:

· Paperback: 66 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-076-7

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Anne Waldman

Internationally recognized and acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades, as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infrastructure curator and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg, and in the Beat, New York School and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. Yet she remains a highly original “open field investigator” of consciousness, committed to the possibilities of radical shifts of language and states of mind to create new modal structures and montages of attention. Her work is energetic, passionate, panoramic, fierce at times. She is the author of more than 40 books, including the mini-classic Fast Speaking Woman, a collection of essays entitled Vow to Poetry and several selected poems editions including Helping the Dreamer, Kill or Cure and In the Room of Never Grieve. She has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of The World Compared to a Bubble, Manatee/Humanity which is a book-length rhizomic meditation on evolution and endangered species, and the monumental anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment from Coffe House Press. She has recently published the text “Feminafesto” with CHAX Press in Tucson. Waldman is a recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award and was appointed a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2011. Waldman was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, working there for twelve years. She also co-founded with Allen Ginsberg the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired University in the western hemisphere, in 1974. Ginsberg has called Waldman his “spiritual wife”. She is a Distinguished Professor literary/ oral archive. She has edited and co-edited many collections based on the holdings of the Kerouac School including Civil Disobediences and Beats at Naropa. She is also the editor of Nice to See You, an homage to poet Ted Berrigan, The Beat Book, and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology. Waldman works with the anti-nuclear Guardianship Project in Boulder and was arrested in the 1970s with Allen Ginsberg and activist Daniel Ellsberg at Rocky Flats, which led to a commitment to the accountability for nuclear waste to future generations, a vow that according to Waldman is “a nearly quarter of a million year project.” She has also collaborated extensively with a number of artists, musicians and dancers, including Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle, Donna Dennis, Pat Steir, choreographer Douglas Dunn, musician Steven Taylor and the theatre director Judith Malina. Her play “Red Noir” was produced by the Living Theatre and ran for nearly three months in New York City in 2010. She has also been working most recently with other media including audio, film and video, with her husband, writer and video/film director Ed Bowes, and with her son, musician and composer Ambrose Bye. Publishers Weekly recently referred to Waldman as “a counter-cultural giant.”

Noah Saterstrom

Noah Saterstrom is a visual artist, lecturer and independent curator. His paintings, drawings, installations, video work and text/image collaborations have been shown nationally and internationally, most recently at Yardmeter Editions (Brooklyn, NY), Carol Robinson Gallery (New Orleans, LA), and the Central School Project (Bisbee, AZ). Noah’s print series Memory [Memory] was funded by Arts & Business (Edinburgh, Scotland) and installed at the Lodging House Mission homeless shelter in Glasgow, Scotland (2006). His video essay Empty Houses (2009), an autobiographical narrative about abandoned houses in his home state of Mississippi, has been shown throughout the United States. DoW 63 Recently exhibited or published collaborations with writers include How It Was With Scotland, with Joan Fiset (Warren Wilson College, 2011); Ghosty, with Kristen Nelson (Drunken Boat, 2010); Symmetry to Mound and Minds are Bumps, with Timothy Dyke (included in the anthology “The Spirit of Black Mountain College,” Lorimer Press, 2011); Bunny Neutrino, with Anne Waldman (Warren Wilson College, 2011); and Wastrels Hatch a Plan (an interactive image used for the homepage of Drunken Boat #14), with Kate Bernheimer. Noah’s paintings have been used for the cover of the Denver Quarterly, Thuggery & Grace, Review of Contemporary Fiction (Dalkey Archive), and Tarpaulin Sky journal, as well as books by Jenny Boully, Gordon Massman, Shelly Taylor, Tama Baldwin and Andrea Rexilius. He is the founder and curator of the online quarterly Trickhouse, and lectures on painting, drawing, text/image, and issues of contemporary curating. Noah builds websites, specializing in creating an online presence for artists and writers, and maintains a “Work-a-Day” website for his own paintings and drawings. He currently lives in Tucson, AZ.

Bill Berkson

Bill Berkson was born in New York in 1939. His first book Saturday Night: Poems 1960- 61 was published by Tibor de Nagy Editions in 1961. During the 1960s, he worked in various capacities at Artnews, the Museum of Modern Art, and as associate producer of a show on art for public television. He moved to Northern California in 1970 and during the next decade edited a series of little magazines and books under the Big Sky imprint. He has taught at the New School for Social Research, Yale, in many Poets in the Schools programs, and for twenty-four years taught in the Letters and Science program at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He is a corresponding editor for Art in America and has contributed reviews and essays to such other journals as Aperture, Artforum, artcritical.com and Modern Painters. His recent books of poetry include Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems; and Lady Air. Other books include a collection of his criticism, The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings: 1985-2003; Sudden Address: Selected lectures 1981-2006; an epistolary collaboration with Bernadette Mayer entitled What’s Your Idea of a Good Time?; and three words-and-drawings sequences: BILL with Colter Jacobsen; Ted Berrigan with George Schneeman; and Not an Exit with Léonie Guyer. A new collection of his art writings, For the Ordinary Artist (BlazeVOX) appeared in 2011, as did Parties du corps, a selection of his poetry in French translation, edited by Olivier Brossard, from Joca Seria, Nantes.

Soldatesque : Soldiering by Anne Waldman and Noah Saterstrom Book Preview