In her new chapbook Empty Set (Overpass Press, 2016), a collaboration with visual artist Alexis Myre, Anne Waldman has proven yet again why she is one of our major poets. The writing is dense, intuitive, intelligent, and elegant. It is filled with science and math, secret doors, bossa novas, supernovas, and worlds that exist between the notes and the words. It soars beyond its own chemical and alchemical languages, enveloping, developing pure bell tones. At La Mama Galleria, to celebrate the opening for Myre’s magnificent sculptural, math-formulated work (which shares equal domain with the text), Waldman read the complete, quasi-epic, seventeen-page poem while accompanied by her nephew Devin Waldman on alto sax (he’s appeared in this column before). The younger Waldman, who has grown tremendously since I first encountered his playing, started out with an extended technique solo, bridging the gaps of inside/outside playing with multiple tones and sparse melodies, bringing the same impassioned and difficult ideas to play that Waldman brings to her work. When their universes collided, magic was made. We heard the sound of engines ringing as space opened, filled, emptied, and opened again, just as the science behind the words and magnificent visual art suggests. Buy this magnificent gem of a book. A “singing, / whistling” journey into “the domain of the extended reals.” Absorb its beauty and catch both Waldmans together and separately whenever you can.
—Steve Dalachinsky, Brooklyn Rail, June 2016