jump cuts to mystery at edge of protest

Kate Millar reviews Anne Waldman’s “Archivist Scissors.”

By Kate MillarSeptember 17, 2025

• Poetry

“[T]HE QUESTION OF the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past,” writes Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (tr. Eric Prenowitz, 1996). “It is a question of the future, […] of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. […] A spectral messianicity is at work.” The synoptic Gospels were written sometime between 70 and 90 AD, when eyewitnesses to Jesus’s life were dying out. With a generation’s passing, there was a sudden urgency to solidify and preserve memory, to archive what could not be carried in the living bodies of witnesses any longer. Being became bone. Memory moved from something stored in the body (living, breathing, speaking) to something stored in the written word. In many ways, a similar impulse undergirds Anne Waldman’s newest poetry collection, Archivist Scissors (Staircase Books, 2025).

With the Beat Generation survived by Gary Snyder, Waldman, and few others, Waldman seems anxious to preserve and memorialize her friends: artists, poets, and multidisciplinary creatives belonging to the “Outrider” tradition, a lineage conceptualized by Waldman herself, whose works pulse with a spirit of resistance and experimentation, communally integrated and politically engaged. The years since 2020 saw the deaths of many of her kindred spirits, including Diane di Prima, Alice Notley, Martha Diamond, Yvonne Jacquette, and Hal Willner, invoked and addressed throughout the collection. Archivist Scissors is an elegiac poetic archive, an assemblage of idiosyncratic love poems, ars poeticas, ekphrases, and elegies, punctuated by memory fragments, koans, letters, questions, footnotes, imperatives, and abstractions—notably, the collection does not include a single poem without the name or words of another poet or artistic contemporary of Anne Waldman, in the spirit of her rhizomatic communal poetics.

The archive is not a mimesis or replica of time past but instead captures something of the immediacy of experience, a palimpsest of past, present and future. This is grounded in what Susan Sontag wrote in her 1966 essay “Against Interpretation” (a foundational text for Waldman, as she admits in her latest essay collection, 2023’s Bard, Kinetic): “The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.”

New York is a charnel ground for Waldman, inhabited by ghosts. Remembering Harry Smith with disarming specificity and tenderness, Waldman writes, “& we stood, I remember distinctly on 12th & Ave A.” In “Arcana in the Breeze,” the speaker describes “mucus running out of your mouth, it’s winter, and I look into your eyes / mischievous as ever.” More than simply recounting memories, the poems are intimate addresses (the line, excruciating in its simplicity, “missing you in the dark ages, buddy” brought me to tears), archiving friendship as something historic and extending beyond death: “what you taught me: // genuine ornery compassion: / seeing your friend having a nightmare // you know how it is real / & how it is not real too.”

However, archive “will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience” (Derrida, again). Something will always be lost in the retelling. The dynamism of lived experience will never be adequately preserved in the finite materiality of archive (paper, words, pixels, even when moving). Experience is flattened into something contained, reduced. There was more than mucus that winter evening between Harry Smith and Anne Waldman, though not every detail made it into the archive. Waldman is not daunted by this failure; she makes it a feature of her collection, drawing attention to the instability of memory, which is the material of archive itself.

In the poem “Core Text (from Prajñāpāramitā),” Waldman ends with a piece of wisdom from James Schuyler: “We struggle in transmission, our tendrils open / to receive, I think he said.” “I think” couches the whole aphorism in irony, enacts the meaning of the aphorism itself—the uncertainty of whether she is remembering his words correctly embodies the struggle of knowledge transmission. Though we make ourselves as receptive as possible, it is impossible to experience a perfect transfer of ideas from one person to the next. Acknowledging this failure of transmission, Waldman says, “Meet poetry!” The written word need not carry the burden of perfection (which brings to mind the “astral corpse” Fanny Howe spoke of in her essay “Bewilderment,” to be organized with “interlocking symbols […] removing all stench of the real”). Instead, poetry preserves, more than content, something of the feeling of time, the act of remembrance, and the limits of archive itself. In the poem “Assignment,” Waldman draws attention to the performativity and artifice of archive. The poem reads like a transcript of email instructions for a documentary about Joe Brainard, whose famous work I Remember (1970) is itself an archive of memory. This assigned remembrance brings a self-reflexive element to the collection. Memory is commissioned (“Maybe you could start out showing / Sharon your Brainard pieces and talk / a little about those”). Memory is scripted (“these are the lines I’d love to / have you read”). Memory is assembled.

Archivist Scissors pushes archive beyond its stasis by embodying memory’s form. It is a collage-like assemblage, jump-cutting between memories and the context of their retrieval (bereavement, political upheaval, global disaster, art-making, art-receiving). Structurally, syntactically, the collection embodies the spontaneity, jumpiness, and inquisitiveness of experiential thought and memory. In it, we encounter false starts, shifting sentences, missing articles, imperatives, and hanging questions. The book seems to be written by someone running out of time, or sensing a whole civilization running out of time. The poems are alive—kinetic, as any poem by Waldman must be—with Waldman’s mind in action.

We have erratic scansion; propulsion by word ties, assonance, and repetition; impulsive lineation; frenetic switches of thought (“will act will axe. Will arc // the state authority // must we reckon a life of will?” the speaker asks in “Core Text”). Ultimately, as Waldman elucidates in the footnote of one poem, “the idea is not grasping at form, nor grasping at sensation, perception, volitions, or cognition,” but is instead grounded in the core reality of emptiness, which drives to the ethical conclusion that “we are to benefit others and disappear.”

How to benefit others? Witness. As has been true throughout her whole career, Waldman’s poetics is inseparable from her ethics and politics. Poems clutter with scenes of aftermaths of violence, and the United States’ culpability—“pooling of blood, many generations […] how deep the murders—deliberate violence […] our USA complicity, our taxes alone turn weapons” (“Burkina Faso”). Waldman writes of a civilization on the brink (or condition) of collapse and apocalypse. Climate disaster, political corruption, human rights violations and denials, war and genocide—all of which prompt Waldman to search for “new and deeper memorials” (to use Bernadette Mayer’s words from the epigraph of keystone poem “Buoyant”) than news reports where death is turned into “a trinket” by statistics, “as the bodies count, mount, sound / So that there is no more room” (“Satanic Spending”). Here, poetry is archive in the sense that it is witness to the atrocities of history and now. In this witnessing, language becomes resurrective in power, as enacted in the imagery of “Burkina Faso,” insuppressible even by death or burial: “layers of blood, old languages / sung into earth and sinking […] then running up, coming up / out of our throats.”

This persistence of language, its fleshy orality, is a core value of Waldman’s work—the materiality of words being their sound, as they exist in the mouth. This manifests in preoccupation and play with “the phones & phonemes of experience” (Waldman to Barbara Gates in Inquiring Mind). From the collection’s first poem, we are ushered into this type of wordplay, using a line of Barbara Guest’s, “Midnight / in the chrome attic,” like chromatic. To Waldman, there is such a thing as prelinguistic wisdom, related to the body, emotions, rhythm, tone, and melody. Waldman is less concerned about the power of language to define or give symbolic meaning and more interested in the semiotic potential of language—“come to this Kristeva moment,” she writes in “Ponder.” This leads her to enact syntactical jazz in her poems, moving through erratic scansion and incomplete sentences. A political act: “Why so deadly, cult of dead wants more to die / Simple, hate this, roll over, my arms, all of you / Until music shifts purposeful your hearts.”

In the face of atrocity, mortality, climate death, and loneliness, can this music really bring change? By the end of the collection, the idealism of poetry-as-archive loses some steam: a lone orca, devoted to singing ancient songs, grows mournful, weary: she “might die of it, / memory aspiration.” Waldman seems to identify with this figure, regal and powerful yet flagging. At the end of the whole collection, otherwise comprised only of incomplete sentences and notes to self without an “I,” there is finally a confession: “I am exhausted, exhaling.” We feel the burden of the myth, erosion over time—and yet, Waldman cannot settle here. The book culminates with a call to action in the poem’s final line: “still keep emotion / intone it.” The resilience of the final poem is enhanced by this honesty. Though we can become numbed by the incessant documentation and dissemination of atrocity in the news and on our feeds, we can chant and recite our way back toward feeling. In the face of loneliness, weariness, climate death, and genocide, we must cling to word’s ceremonial and ritualistic power, curative and reconstructive, turning charnel ground into a place of rebirth.

Ultimately, your life is your art is your ritual is your language is your life. Less important than the interpretation of language is the doing of it. “Doing, make what you are, not interpreting,” Waldman writes in an ekphrastic/ars poetica/love poem for Meredith Monk. We come away from Archivist Scissors with an imperative for integration.