Anne Waldman

"I want [my poetry] to be the experience... a sustained experience, a voyage, a magnificent dream, something that would take you in myriad directions simultaneously, and you could draw on all of these other voices and you could pay homage to ancestors and other languages--a poem that would include everything and yet dwell in the interstices of imagination and action."

Anne Waldman is a poet & teacher, and with Allen Ginsberg co-founded of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado in 1974. She was born April 2, 1945 in Millville, New Jersey. During the late Sixties she ran the St. Mark's Church Poetry Project, and gave exuberant, highly physical readings of her own work. She was featured along with Ginsberg in Bob Dylan's experimental film 'Renaldo and Clara.'

Waldman is one of the most interesting, vibrant and unpredictable members of the post-Beat poetry community. Her confluence of Buddhist concerns and thought-paths with sources of physicality and anger is particularly impressive. Over the years,she has worked her magic on audiences throughout the United States and around the world, giving poetry readings in Germany, England, Italy, Scotland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, The Netherlands, Bali, India, Nicaragua and Canada. She has also worked and performed with a number of well-known musicians, composers and dancers. More recently, she has collaborated with many visual artists.

Her list of publications is voluminous. She has written more than 42 books, most recently Kill or Cure (Penguin Poets) and her book-length poem, Iovis (Coffee House Press). She is now working on Book III of Iovis.Throughout the poem, Waldman is trying to come to terms with her own male energy and impulses.

Waldman has been acknowledged as a major--and a mature--voice in American poetry. She delves deeply into the masculine soul and its sources of energy. Her goal: to speak against, about, around and through the all-pervasive forces of Western patriarchy and its many manifestations.

Waldman's goal for her poetry is simple, and yet anything but simple to achieve. She says, in effect, that what she is attempting to do on the page is to give readers not "a refined gist" or "an extrapolation" of feeling, thought and emotion, but an actual "experience" of "a high moment." In effect, Waldman is attempting to bring to poetry on the page the same kind of immediacy and sense of immersion that she brings to her poetry, in public performance.


Autobiography

Early Years

Bennington

Berkeley

St. Marks

Performance

Fast Speaking Woman

Kerouac School

Renaldo &Clara

Marriage and Motherhood

Iovis


Anne Waldman Online

Anne Waldman official website

Anne Waldman Facebook page

Anne Waldman Academy of American Poets page

Anne Waldman PennSound page

Anne Waldman Internet Archive

Anne Waldman Wikipedia page

Anne Waldman YouTube page


Photographs

Anne Waldman Gallery

Poetics

from "Feminafesto"


Interviews

Illuminati in the Void


Archives

Anne Waldman Papers

Anne Waldman
Symposium at UM

 

Anne Waldman: Makeup on Empty Space  
Buy the DVD

 

 

 

 

 

 

Museum of American Poetics

 

 
Cover art for expanded 25th anniversary millennial edition of Fast Speaking Woman, City Lights Books.


Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and Gregory Corso at Naropa, 1975. Allen Ginsberg Memorial Photo Gallery.


Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman,
and Michael Brownstein, n.d. Allen Ginsberg Memorial Photo Gallery.


Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Dick Gallup, Anne Waldman and Michael McClure, n.d. Allen Ginsberg Memorial Photo Gallery.