If you read a review of Keith Waldrop's "Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy," this year's winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, there's a good chance it will include the word "postmodern" or "avant-garde." These are terms that put a lot of readers on guard, signaling experimental verse. And it only takes a glance at "Transcendental Studies" to see that Waldrop's poetry isn't the sort that will ever turn up in a hallmark card.
In an interview with the website The Jivin' Ladybug (we really are in avant-garde territory here) Waldrop suggested that poetry is "having nothing to say and saying it," explaining, "In my work you could find statements here and there. It isn't what I'm writing for. What I'm after is closer to music than to philosophy or information in that sense." And that aim can be confusing for a reader expecting a poem to make sense in a more traditional manner. Waldrop addressed the issue:
What I write down is a kind of script for something that sounds. I find people often don't read it that way. They have a hard time translating from lines on a page to. . .part of this is the way poetry is taught in schools and such. You get a poem and you're supposed to figure out what it means. Once you know what it means, you throw the poem away because you have the meaning. That is the destruction of poetry. I want the words to remain and if people don't know the meaning of them I don't think that's as bad as losing the sound.
Waldrop's methods of composition are also, at times, unorthodox. He employed a collage technique to create "Transcendental Studies" --building poems, in part, by combining phrases from other works. Waldrop has explained the process as "a way to explore, not necessarily the thing I am tearing up, but the thing I am contriving to build out of torn pieces." He described his method for composing part of "Transcendental Studies" in an interview to the National Book Foundation:
I put three books in front of me, all prose, a novel, then something psychological, then whatever I happened to have around. I would take phrases from these three books and make some stanzas, four, five six lines. Once I had that I'd make more stanzas of the same number of lines, and when that gave out, after a page or two, I'd say alright I have this poem now and I would take it to the typewriter and type it up and in doing so I would rearrange the stanzas alphabetically.
Alphabetizing stanzas after writing them may seem oddly arbitrary, but the process was important to Waldrop. When a portion of "Transcendental Studies" was translated into French, he instructed the translator to rearrange the stanzas alphabetically after translation--leading to poems that differ considerably from their English counterparts.
What sorts of poems do Waldrop's unorthodox poetics produce? Here a few excerpts from the book
1.
Balancing. Austere. Life-
less. I have tried to keep
context from claiming you.
Without doors. And there are
windows. How far, how
far into the desert have we come?
Rude instruments, product
of my garden. Might also be
different, what I am thinking of.
So you see: it is
not symmetrical, dark
red out of the snow.
2
Enemies for therapy, the
rind of the lime tree
in elaborate garlands.
Strew the table. Let the hall
be garlanded and lit, the will
to break away. Welcome your couches.
Witness these details. Your judgment, my
inclination. Hear. Touch. Taste.
Translate. Fixed: the river.
Disquieting thought, I am not
ultimate, full moon, memory.
Prepare for rout.
3
Here, even, in the
sand. Among the rocks, I have
heard, remnant of a cloud.
Unfleshed, short, thin, pointed.
Independent of you, a
revelation. A great city.
Flatly unknown, you do not
know of yourself, do not know
yourself, not stuck full of nails.
Under such illumination, darkness
becomes terror. Under this high
wall, dark ground.
Long before this week's award, the poet Michael Palmer called Waldrop one of the vital and requisite, semi-secret presences in American letters." His wife Rosmarie, also an accomplished poet, said in the Ladybug interview, "We haven't gotten so much attention that it got to be a bother. We don't have that problem." Let's hope it isn't a problem, because they're going to be getting a lot of attention now.
Keith Waldrop currently teaches at Brown University and edits Burning Deck Press along with his wife.
Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More
Famous Poets and Poems - Read and Enjoy Poetry
The Poetry Foundation : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.
Poetry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Brown professor wins national poetry award
Pick-Up Lines In Rome: Sexual Harassment Or Poetry?
Loading comments… 
He just wrote this book of poems by taking random sentence fragments out of three different books, putting those into stanzas, then alphabetiz
So rather than end up with something with some kind of meaning we just have gibberish in the form of sentence fragments. And that's all it is, gibberish.
Watch this:
The old photos.
Former Jon wall.
Top state regifting.
NYT's text 9.
Public subway woman.
Colorado.
I made that "poem" by clicking on every section on this site in order from left to right, top to bottom. I then went to the bottom article with a picture. I then took the first word from the headline and made stanzas. Am I pushing any boundaries yet?
Come and gone
Blue shades of a moon
Captured by eyes
Hallucinat
Nothing is what it seems
Light bent apart
Years spent in the cold
Homeless we all are
Just beggars in tow
-me
One school wants to have a locked door and you have to find a key to get anything. If you aren't smart enough to find the key, well too bad.
The other one, and the one I prefer, closes the door, but leaves it unlocked with some light showing through the bottom. Anyone can open the door and get something out of it.
Sadly, this sort "experimen
That wasn't what I was saying. Of course great art is complex and hard to understand at times. What I guess I was trying to get at, and what I didn't make very clear was that art should be accessible on at least some level immediatel
On another level, art should be entertainm
I can't say whether I like the poetry or not. What I do know is that I prefer to hear poetry instead of reading it. Anyone living in NYC should check out the Bowery Poetry Club.
Tree falls... down, hits... ground, road blocked.