The work of the American poet Rosmarie Waldrop bespeaks an acute awareness of the modernist tradition of poetry as praxis, whereby writing is construed as a material process grounded in action. In a parodical turn of phrase, a narrator in Waldrop’s writing can find herself deferring to the agency of language, as a small child might submit to the authority of an older and wiser parent: “I don’t even have thoughts, I say, I have methods that make language think, take over and me by the hand” (A Form/of Taking/It All 74). The historicized theoretical positions that may be appended to Rosmarie Waldrop’s writing underscore attempts such as this to reflect upon the constructedness of language. To some extent, they pertain to models of an “action aesthetic” that can be observed in the work of poets such as Charles Olson or Robert Creeley, where the poem is a “high energy” construct privileging the processes of writing. Waldrop also demonstrates a keen awareness of lessons learned from the modernist poet George Oppen. In particular, the notion that the poet, at her typewriter or with pen in hand, is working within the scope of a “compositional field,” provides a historical premise for poetry concerned with the physical dimension of the page and of language itself. The praxis that Waldrop engages in takes up the model of “field verse” in so far as it conspicuously ties poetry to the materials of the writer, ranging from varieties of typeface and characters to bibliographical references and iconic documents. Unfailingly, the reader comes to encounter poetry from the perspective of its composition, out of a spring of material causes.

Rosmarie Waldrop’s Key offers a multi-layered body of prose and poetry derived from a book documenting Narragansett Indian language and customs that was published in 1643 under the following title: A Key into the Language of America or an Help to the Language of the Natives in that Part of America called New England. Written by the Rhode Island founder and clergyman Roger Williams, the original seventeenth century Key is comprised of thirty-two chapters designed to provide, as Williams explains in his introduction, unprecedented information and comment on the Native Indians: “This Key, respects the native language of it, and happily may unlocke some Rarities concerning the natives themselves, not yet discovered.” (17) The affinities Waldrop shares with Williams’s pre-anthropological study are brought to light in the preface she provides for her 1994 book. In contrast with some of the first readers of the Key, who construed it as “an Help,” namely a means to further colonial aims of territorial usurpation and religious conversion, the poet is drawn to the Key as a testimony to a language and a culture that have almost completely vanished. Indeed, Rosmarie Waldrop’s introductory remarks stress her work’s proximity with the scholarship and the linguistic mainspring of Roger Williams’s study. Apart from locating Williams outside the biased perspective of colonial politics that fostered the prevailing notion of “savage otherness” (xiv), the poet offers up information and clues as to the extent of her interaction with the original Key from the perspective of its material status and the nature of her implication in Williams’s legacy as a writer.

As her proclivity for experiment may suggest, the poet’s interest in Roger Williams lies elsewhere than in his sole capacity as a provider of historical record. Specifically, the encounter between Williams’s linguistic testimony and the remnants of a language that has all but disappeared fuel Waldrop’s editorial comments and suggest a willingness to expand on the essentially juxtapositional structure of the original Key. As she explains, Williams’s keen interest in the Narragansett language has retroactively come to strengthen the linguistic and broader cultural heritage of the remaining members of the tribe: “We have come full circle. Now, Roger Williams’s book is for the Indians.” (xxii) Basing this statement on research completed on the recovery of the Narragansett language, beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, Waldrop underlines the fact that Indians have ironically worked to piece together their language by drawing examples from the 1643 Key. The interaction between the present-day Narragansetts and the language of their ancestors is enlarged upon by the German-born poet in her attempts to provide a textual site of her own device. For example, a fascination for the interrelatedness of languages is relayed in the first chapter of her Key through contrasting narrative styles and patterning of words. Entitled “Salutations,” the chapter begins with a truncated reminder of the doubleness of the author’s stance and of the comparatist perspective in which her source text was written: “Are of two sorts and come immediately before the body” (3; cf. fig. 3). The prose passage which unfolds similarly highlights dichotomies by using conjunctions suggesting either oppositions (“but”) or alternatives (“or”). Following this first cluster of sentences, an example of a Narrangansett greeting is centered on the page, along with a word list:

Rosmarie Waldrop has defined the architecture of poetry in terms that recall her efforts to collapse contextual and material frames only to build new ones through juxtaposition: “Juxtaposing, rather than isolation, minimal units of meaning” (“Thinking of Follows”). In her Key Waldrop portrays textual encounters in dissonant, hostile terms that mirror records of discord between communities in early North American history: “In parallel to Roger Williams’s anthropological passages, the initial prose section of each of my chapters tries to get at the clash of Indian and European cultures by a violent collage of phrases from Williams with elements from anywhere in my Western heritage.” (xxii) Chapter eight, entitled “OF DISCOURSE AND NEWES,” is one example of how the poet not only investigates the historical foundations of conflict between cultures but attempts to incorporate elements of that violence in strategies of textual presentation. This chapter grows out of the poet’s response to Roger Williams’s tale of his own encounter with the Narragansett chief, or “Sachim,” as he is called. In particular, when documenting the relationship between the European settlers and the Native Indians in the original Key, Williams foregrounds the latter’s virtuousness, which is implicitly held up against the colonist’s duplicity. Take for example the following extract from one of the Sachim’s orations, as it is quoted by Williams: “I have never suffered any wrong to be offered to the English since they landed: nor never will: […] if the Englishman speake true, if he mean truly, than I shall go to my grave in peace, and hope that the English and my posteritie shall live in love and peace together.” (Key [1643] 64) At the beginning of chapter eight, the poet experiments with a dialectical stance through the juxtaposition of phrases and fragments in bold borrowed from the 1643 edition: “Echo off yore, their preoccupation: if white men speake true or only to disturb the air. Even living in translation they deliver themselves at arm’s length with emphatic purpose according to stress and position and sometimes alongside it.” (17) Belonging to days of “yore,” the Sachim’s words, as reported by Williams, resound from the past and yet appear to struggle in Waldrop’s poetry to engage in a semantic dialogue. For if words interact on the page, they create an effect that recalls the fragile relations between the two historic parties. Setting aside the prospect of harmonious syntactical arrangement, Waldrop’s poetry draws attention instead to the incongruity of relations defining communication. To this effect, the Sachim’s “yore” prompts associations with the closely resembling “yarn” one imagines the settlers’ spinning, along with the wordless, empty gestures of those acting out thoughts with raised arms, “only to disturb the air.” Ultimately, there is no allowance made for the possibility that the Native Indians and the English are able to reach an understanding outside the performance of pantomime expressed in these lines. Similarly, the Sachim’s optimism is defeated by the poet’s retrospective irony, what she calls an “immigrant’s take” on early American history (xxiii). The last two lines of prose in this section follow suit to the extent that they are shaped by the knowledge of circumstance and of the crimes of history: “The message, slowed down by change of climate, becomes obsolete. And understand not that a tongue must be kept in consonant motion to cover up its fork.” (17) The anomaly of the first sentence, combined with the blunt positioning of the conjunction “and” at the start of the next forestalls coordination and ultimately obstructs meaning. Here, one might argue, Waldrop is writing in the manner of the carefully disguised “double-talk” of the conquering Europeans. By having sentences assume disguises that mimic a faulty and fraudulent tongue, poetry sets out to break up the continuity of historical record; it pits words from the past, and in this case, those of the Narragansett Sachim, against the deceit of history: