ANNE WALDMAN, POET

“Everything about Waldman’s work runs counter to Auden’s dictum that poetry makes nothing happen; in fact, Waldman is trying to make a whole new world happen through her poems. . . .It is almost as if [she] wishes to conjure a kind of primordial chaos from which we may emerge seeing the world in a different way.”
—Robert Baker, Talisman

Anne Waldman has stood in the center of the American poetry scene since the late 1960’s when she became part of the latter-day Beat community. Her dictum through the decades: “It is the poet’s task to move the century forward a few inches, as William Carlos Williams reminds us. Keep the world safe for poetry.” She has spent a lifetime devoting herself to furthering the cause of American poetry, politically, aesthetically, and spiritually. She is the author of over forty collections of poetry and poetics, including Fast Speaking Woman, In the Room of Never Grieve, Vow to Poetry: Essays, Interviews & Manifestos and the newly released Structure Of the World Compared To A Bubble. Abounding in energy, she is a dynamic, exuberant performer and singer of her poetry. She has collaborated with many visual artists, musicians, and dancers on the world stage, and has been credited with influencing artists such as David Byrne and Laurie Anderson.

Waldman is a longtime student of Buddhism and one of the founders of the celebrated Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where she, Allen Ginsberg, and Diane DiPrima began the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 1974. “Waldman lets course through her music the mad joy of Buddhism, that determination to love everybody, every body,” wrote poet Robert Kelly. A distinguished professor and curator of poetry and poetics and a political/cultural activist, Waldman has been associated with the Beat Literary Movement and the New York School as a second-generation lineage holder as well as carrying forward the experimental strands of the New American Poetry. She ran the St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project for a decade. Currently, she is the Chair and Artistic Director for Naropa's Summer Writing Program and is on the faculty of the New England College MFA program, and an advisor to the new Study Abroad On the Bowery Project at The Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. She is the recipient of the Shelley Award, a former fellow the Civitella Ranieri Center, and a recipient of a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. She lives in Boulder, Colorado, and New York City, and travels extensively to other zones of poetry around the world.

In addition to poetry readings, Anne Waldman gives talks at Dharma centers nationwide.