Reconfiguring the epic space in Anne Waldman's The Iovis Trilogy

© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2017. All rights reserved.Anne Waldman's The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (2011) is a twenty- five-year-long project self-styled as a feminist epic. With the original premise 'to shoulder/abdicate patriarchy' (2011: XX), the three tomes that comprise the epic - 'All is full of Jove', 'Guardian and Scribe', and 'Eternal War' - seize upon positive and negative forms of masculine energy through the deeds of the archetypical patriarch Jove. Tracing or tracking Jove down becomes in Iovis a quest with a marked spatial dimension. On the one hand, movement and travel delineate the heroine's investigation, and the poem becomes a remapping of the world - a cartographic effort through which she complicates hegemonic representations. On the other hand, and closely linked to this idea, the epic text itself is approached in Iovis as an available space to study and contest the subordination of women in history and literature. To explore these intersections, this chapter accesses Anne Waldman's use of space in The Iovis Trilogy through two main points of entrance: the literary and literal movement delineated by an 'investigative poetics', and the exploration of genre and gender through the space of the epic text itself.