"Great poetry, we have been subtly or grossly reminded over the last millennium or so, concerns itself with the "human experience." We learn from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and so on what it is to be human, and how humans suffer or thrive. It seems to me, however, that poetry at its greatest concerns itself with the nature of mind-with the actual Experiencer of all those experiences we so admire when we find them represented in big poems. The poetry that sails out into the sea of sheer knowing is what takes us furthest, and leads us to islands and continents we are not likely ever to reach following the meek descriptions in genres obedient to the already experienced. Stevens, Stein, Olson, Spicer, Celan, Coleridge, guide us by the perilous and thank god inconclusive journeys of their craft.

I had reached that far in my thinking about KeithWaldrop's beautiful new book Haunt when a young woman happened to ask me what sort of poets I liked. I mentioned a few of the names I just recited, and she said, Ah, the thoughty poets. I suppose that is so, the ones who want to know. Al-arif, the knowers, the Gnostic heroes, the faithful ones of Love that Dante tells about, for whom passion and intellection are the same power.

Waldrop is a knower, and knows by language, and language can say more than we can think. Haunt is at once profound and light-hearted-a combination characteristic of all his work for 40 years, always something surprising in the way of technical solution, formal device, or home truth, lighting up some area I never knew was there, with a flash of lightning between the sedulous vernaculars of everyday experience and the intuited maybes a finger's breadth beyond the world. There is a magical cogency to his rhythms, a sort of wizardly knowing when to let the lines speak and when to hold silence.

The back cover (where precious blurbs by cognoscenti are usually laid out like hothouse tomatoes) of this book is saved for thoughtful comments about the three cycles of poems that comprise Haunt. Here is cited, evidently from Whitehead: "the primary function of a proposition is to be relevant as a lure for feeling." This amazing statement provides a proper vademecum for a traveler through Waldrop's text.

There are three series: "Indication" is a rich, almost symphonic array of the most varied line lengths and registral moves, from sly asides to a high formal eloquence. "Between the Straits" wields short-lined stanzas, while "Potential Random" feels at times almost like a slow, cadenced narrative of the sort Theodore Enslin has enriched our practice with. Imagistically as well as by fable, the three series seem by turn narrative, abstract, conversational.

Waldrop's brilliance of wit and device, the serenity of judgement, the articulation of research and reflection (Kant's theory on the Saturn-like ring that once adorned the earth)--all these delight, and convince anew that poetry is a vast, holistic science, a science of sciences, from which an adept like Waldrop brings results we've never heard before."

Robert Kelly in Rain Taxi VI, 2 (Summer 2001)

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[The Silhouette of the Bridge]

"Waldrop, not as well known as he should be, is among the most important writers, translators and publishers of avant-garde literature in our time. Like his "fictional memoir," Light While There Is Light (1993), Waldrop's latest book is for the most part autobiographical. His general subject-memory, the mother of the muses-is classical, while the form, mixing poetry and prose fragments, is more experimental. The result is a highly engaging and eclectic exploration of the follies of memory. There are short anecdotes involving Waldrop's kooky elderly neighbors; asides concerning violins, friends and teeth; and aphoristic phrases such as "isolated, the most casual scene becomes formal." Although there is little sense of progression (narrative or otherwise), Waldrop's light touch and understated humor cast a sustained spell. [...] Perhaps in explanation of his project, he writes: "I'm trying to remember what I will be"; we are privileged to listen in as he does so."

Publishers Weekly July 28, 1997

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[The Silhouette of the Bridge]

"Keith Waldrop's The Silhouette of the Bridge is a sustained meditation upon the relationship of knowledge, experience, memory, and spirituality, and especially how that relationship is sometimes reconciled and sometimes troubled by the act of writing. As Waldrop writes,

We capture what we can by rendering it in words, but then, whether we speak or write or think, it remains words, never restored, never un- or re-translated except into other words. A one-way code, unbroken.

In essence Waldrop reformulates Susan Howe's question posed in "Thorow," "And what is left when spirits have fled from holy places?" For Waldrop, though, the issue is "what is left when memory has fled from familiar places?" Memory is the anchor in an otherwise fluid universe, and when it slips or is shown to be faulty, the tenuous webbing of one's world is slowly unravelled. Waldrop brings into relief the "memory palace in / decay but // before the final / darkening" through juxtaposing verse and prose; the result is a texture of contingent parts that unfold through the shifting of text and context, while the book as a whole achieves momentum through the constant reconsideration of the nature of memory.

"The Silhouette of the Bridge echoes aspects of Waldrop's 1993 novel, Light While There is Light, where he explores the relationship between familial history, memory, and identity. But whereas Light proposes a multi-layered image of Waldrop's subjectivity, Silhouette yields a more intro-spective and metaphysical exploration of the self. The mode of investigation and writing of Silhouette is more fluid and philosophical than that of Light, resembling the writings of Simone Weil and Saint Augustine (both of whom Waldrop mentions); subsequently, the book is rigorous, intelligent, and relentless in its ruminations upon spirituality, experience, and meaning. Most of all, it captures the urgency that drives most spiritual writing-the desire to come to terms with consciousness and time, the finite and infinite. The task Waldrop has established for himself in this book is immense but, as The Silhouette of the Bridge demonstrates, it is one that he is more than capable of tackling."

David Clippinger, Rain Taxi II: 3 (Fall 1997)

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[The Opposite of Letting the Mind Wander: Selected Poems]

"Keith Waldrop claims that his work of 25 years is The Opposite of Letting the Mind Wander, by which he means not that he makes the mind stand at attention, but rather that he prefers letting the world wander into the mind. ...Waldrop can say that his life is like 'a small provincial museum,' because it is the life of the mind, a capacious and airy abstract place... Waldrop's poetry teases out observations with a conversational rhetoric that makes a toy of thought [...] Waldrop invents new spaces as he talks, and opens up his poetic form more and more as he realizes Stevens' directive that it must be abstract.

Proposing 'To use words in / such a way that no / frontier closes on them,' Waldrop, who is often called an experimental poet, challenges our notions of what 'experiment' actually means. ...usefully defining experiment as a question of style.

'A Hatful of Flood' offers elliptical language fragments in a spirit of postmodernist syntactical experiment. ...Like the 'language poetry' this work resembles, the poem is fishing for the reader in a still pond. It dangles 'fetish' and 'history' and 'symptoms' on the line like juicy bait. It lets hints of subjective memory or sorrow glint like a lure. It assumes the patient philosophical self-consciousness... of a good angler. It's the kind of work that must be swallowed whole. [...]

In the more recent volumes from the eighties, Waldrop begins to reconcile his romantic tendencies with his experimental syntactical style, bringing the old purist enemies poetry and philosophy into a passionate embrace. Recently, Waldrop has revealed himself for what he is: a transcendentalist.
In the 'Sixth Transcendental Study' from Shipwreck in Haven (1989), Waldrop combines his conversational mode with his exploration of organic language, a combination worthy of Emerson or Thoreau.

[...In 'Water Marks'] The poem's argument recalls Frost at the well in 'For Once Then, Something,' but has turned a smooth and confident American lyricism into a hesitating indeterminacy of thought and speech...

Throughout 'Watermarks' Waldrop writes at the height (depth) of his powers. ...has truly stepped off into the highly charged void of language..."

Susan Lasher in Parnassus (1993)

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[A Century in Two Decades, A Ceremony Somewhere Else, The Space of Half an Hour]

"Keith Waldrop is a legendary bibliophile and poet-editor presiding over the Burning Deck Press. He seldom is seen outside Providence, seldom gives readings in the usual places and series, and, though no recluse, is sufficiently modest that it is difficult to focus upon his work, so thoroughly has he hidden its personal matrix. [...] Waldrop has a number of distinct and original styles...

[...] One can usually gain some insight into where a poet stands by seeing what he has chosen to publish, since publication is the ultimate critical act of affirmation. Burning Deck Press has, since 1961, published, in incredibly inexpensive paper editions, an awesome array of poets who were relatively unknown at the time but whose work is of true excellence-Ray DiPalma, Jackson MacLow, Stephen Sandy, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, etc., as well as fine works by well-known poets such as Robert Creeley, Christopher Middleton, Rochelle Owens, Robert Kelly, and others, sometimes fine and sometimes not, who have remained thus far known only to some select few. Most of the books have been printed on Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop's letterpress, and, to date, there are just over a hundred of them. The main thing that one can note, other than the overall excellence of the selections in A Century in Two Decades, is its eclecticism, which makes it hard to discuss. Perhaps this is the insight which should be fed back into Keith Waldrop's own books-that it is, first and foremost, excellent eclectic poetry, following no particular line, evoking pretty much the entire world of good contemporary poetry but meandering now here, now there, more or less like a horse who browses on whatever is available as he walks along. So it is with the reader of A Century in Two Decades. He is not going to get any particular view of the nature of poetry. What will, instead, strike him is that Waldrop's selections are excellent ones each of its kind, whatever that kind might happen to be. As such, the book is not really like a partisan anthology so much as it resembles a panorama that a good teacher might use to show his students the best, if least pretentious, of American poetry in the past twenty years. [...]

We are lucky to live in a time when a Keith Waldrop is possible-as an editor and publisher, and as a poet."

Dick Higgins in Contact II #41/42/43 (Fall 1986/Winter 1987)

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[The Ruins of Providence, The Quest for Mount Misery, and A Ceremony Somewhere Else]

"Keith Waldrop has concerned himself with the topology of the world of writing more consistently and valuably than any poet I can think of since the late Paul Celan. There is, in Waldrop's work, a steady thought directed to the way that we make our way in the world by thinking and speaking. Where Wallace Stevens gave us the portrait of a man bothered by the march of ants through his shadow, Waldrop gives us the disturbances of the world in its representations:

It's not troubling to me to
think the world to its
end, but I'm
deeply disturbed at
the edge of a map.

These lines, from "Chromatic Study," in The Ruins of Providence, are dizzying because they allow a reading in which we think land's end, and in which our thinking ends the world But, as Waldrop indicates, this is not as troublesome as thinking the boundaries of our representations of the world to ourselves. The piece additionally looks forward to "Interval"'s declaration in the same volume of the constant and subtle alterations of time and place: "I would like to deny that from / here to here is always the same / distance." This is, at least to some extent, the reason that "You are at least a second / person." As soon as we have become aware of ourselves we become aware of our removal from our former selves. We are not perfectly stable structures inhabiting an easily mapped universe, and this is the source of some of the disturbance. To make sense at all requires that, as Stevens said, we assent to the fictions we spin out of ourselves, keeping in mind always their provisional nature. Or, as Waldrop says, "A larger structure, however / specious, helps keep [us] going."

It is this in Waldrop that is so much akin, in the best of ways, to Paul Celan. [...] Waldrop offers, possibly without meaning to, a delightful response to our society's clichéd ways of talking about space. If you find too many yuppies offering to share their space with you, you might feel a greater sympathy for "The Master of the Providence Crucifixion": "He lives in a space severely limited, and has a tendency to deny any other space. Still, if there were another place--some place he could know nothing of--he would wish it well." I do a terrible injustice to this work to quote from it in this context, or out of its own. This prose piece is an eloquent and useful meditation upon a 15th-century painting known as "The Providence Crucifixion" (housed in the Rhode Island School of Design's Museum of Art), one which easily takes a place alongside Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," and Williams' "Pictures from Brueghel." [...]

That prose work is profitably read on the way to the studies that comprise The Quest for Mount Misery, a series that, along with the earlier Wind Scales, marks Waldrop as one of the few real masters of this difficult form of poetic narrative. [...] "As for meaning," the voice says in part VI, "I was prepared to be disturbed," and we must be as prepared for disturbances of meaning as Waldrop has shown himself prepared for the disturbances of representation as we glide off the edge of the map into terra, or whatever, incognita. The close of part IX asks "How shall we rank these lucid lines, projecting so distinctly from a background vital and confusing?" We might wax Biblical and complain these days, Clarity, Clarity, all is Clarity! Of these lucid lines which will not stand in rank I will say, taking the risk of one who invariably answers rhetorical questions, that they are art of the first order. They suffer clarity without suffering from it. They summon interest like farm loans. They pay up, and off."

A.L. Nielsen in Gargoyle #27 (1985)

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see also:
Janet McCann in Parnassus XIII, 2 (Spring, Summer 1986)