I don’t recall, exactly, how I came to Providence, Rhode Island poet, editor, translator and publisher Rosmarie Waldrop’s work. Her writing, predominantly shaped via the prose poem, is constructed out of incredibly dense phrases and sentences; a poetry that punches from point to point, ideas and narratives that quilt in unusual shapes and contortions.
Looking at a picture of the landscape is easier than looking at the landscape. The past, upon scrutiny. Not just postwar focus, but deep and fetid. Interval eclipsed. By fog misunderstood as bird and egg, shadow by shadow. Once father and mother dissolve: dragonflies, mosquitos, missing ribs? The sign for hand in the upper right corner perhaps indicates ownership. Culture gives us these ideas. Depending on the number of chambers in the heart, trepidations of the flesh. (“Split Infinites”)
Waldrop’s poetry is constructed out of a sequence of sentences, tangentially direct and fiercely intelligent, engaged in a philosophy of meditations, writing and politics, as well as the ways in which language can accumulate and twist towards alternate meanings. As she writes to open the poem “from Hölderlin Hybrids,” from Blindsight (1998): “The world was galaxies imagined flesh. Mortal. What to think now?” In his introduction to the collection, Duffy situates the uniqueness of Waldrop’s place in American writing: “Born in Germany in 1935, but resident in the United States since 1958, Waldrop is both an American poet with a continental European accent, and a European poet whose foreignness is one of her principally American characteristics. It is also for this reason that it is difficult to know quite where to place Waldrop: her work shares and develops many of the concerns of the post-second World War American avant-garde but at the same time it does not quite fit neatly into any of the critical molds or theoretical pronouncements of American experimental poetics. Similarly, Waldrop is closely connected to innovative poetries in French and German, but she comes at them, despite her own German roots, at a cultural and linguistic divide.”