Reviews

iteration

Reviewed by Judith Roche

iteration
by margareta waterman
Nine Muses Books, ISBN 1-878888-45-5
3541 Kent Creek Road, Winston, Or 97496
2005, paper, 231 pages, $27.00

These poems clearly exist in a state of desire. There are moments of orgasm and ecstasy that become a momentary lifting of the veil between worlds – and the cosmos posed by these poems recognize living in high desire as the natural state and the very point of existence. There seems to be no mundaneness in margareta waterman’s world. I am not confusing the poet’s life with the poet’s work, a common mistake of reviewers. This poet’s life is her poems, and visa versa.

margareta waterman has worked tirelessly for poetry in the Northwest for the last thirty years, publishing poets. Her poetry press, nine muses books, publishes a cadre of the dispossessed-by-academia, all beautifully done. She also publishes herself, twenty books in all. Her work, and that of the poets she selects to publish, is written by those who opt out of the po-biz game to go it on their own. It’s outsider work by serious life-long poets who are die-hard believers in poetry as a calling, a sacred mission and a whole life rather than a civilized career. waterman has lived back and forth between rural Oregon and Seattle for years, punctuated by frequent on-the-road performance tours. She has drawn a community to her of kindred souls, all artists of various ilk.

iteration is a selected collection after a lifetime of writing. Jack Spicer said the poet writes one long poem in his/her lifetime, just in many parts. If that is true, it may be that they don’t come out in the best order, life being as messy as it is. waterman has selected poems from her many books and strung them together, regardless of where they first appeared, to tell the story. Drawn from such a body of work, they are sometimes a bit uneven, but all necessary to her purpose. It is, she says, “a general survey of my characteristic landscapes. I have tried not to leave out essential elements of the fractal image I seem to have drawn.” The book begins with a mathematical expression of fractals.

iteration draws deeply from myth and female experience and is profoundly sexual. The poems reference astronomy, physics, and history and are erudite and cerebral as well as emotional, that rare combination. They tell the story of Everywoman who embraces the goddess archetype and contemporizes it. The poems find a logic in nature and language but strive to go beyond to that place where language itself melts into mystery and flesh becomes spirit. “epistem-ology” she names it. From the section titled “songs from the primordial alphabet,” the poem “the code”:

waterman, in her seventies, is going strong and performing vigorously, barefoot, with candlelight, and in gauzy robes. A margareta waterman performance is a whole evening’s experience, often accompanied by musicians, props, visual art and song as well as spoken word, all offered with a decided “feminine flounce,” her term. “Singing is the heart of the matter” — and by this I don’t take “matter” to mean subject, but material, as in flesh. “utterance ringed with meaning” and the question, “what is the substance of mystery,” are the central issues in the collection. These poems are as joyful and as painful as living.

This collection is beautifully produced with a profusion of graphics and drawings from the community of artists who are friends of waterman and nine muses books, many of whom have either been published by waterman or have been an integral and collaborative part of her frequent performances. The paper is flecked with gold and the ink is cinnamon-colored, for both text and drawings. There is a thoughtful introduction by writer Doug Nufer that helps contextualize the work. Nufer points out, “From the computer lexicon, an iteration is a new and different version of something, such as a new version of some software. By presenting her work again in this format, outside of earlier contexts, waterman gives it a new and different look, particularly since she has, to cite the mathematics definition of iteration, applied herself to achieving a desired result by repeating a sequence of steps, always getting closer, in a quest that never ends.”

Judith Roche is the author of three collections of poetry, Myrrh/My Life as a Screamer, Ghost and recently, Wisdom of the Body. She is also co-editor of First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim, which won an American Book Award, and has edited a number of poetry anthologies. She has worked in collaboration with visual artists on several public art projects which are installed in the Seattle area. She is Literary Arts Director Emeritus for One Reel, an arts producing company, and teaches poetry workshops. She has conducted poetry workshops for adults and youth in prisons and is a fellow of Black Earth Institute. She is the 2007 Distinguished Writer at Seattle University.