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.
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