Anne Waldman

Writer, Editor, Teacher
Former Director of The Poetry Project
Co-Founder of Naropa University, Summer Writing Program

Readings &
Lecture Topics
  • Outrider Poethics
  • Lineages of the New American Poetry and Beyond
  • Infrastructure Poetics
  • The Dharma Gaze: Poetry as a Spiritual Path
  • An Evening with Anne Waldman

Biography

“Anne Waldman has tirelessly cleared the path for many of us for decades. She is our epitome of the word ‘onward,’ which means to move forward in a continuous motion, never stopping because surrender is out of the question! She writes, ‘Feeling everyone’s kinetics in that zone. But also all together swimming in a database. Imagine.’” —CA Conrad

“To read her is to be humbled by the breadth of her vocation, to be jolted into alertness.” —Mónica de la Torre

“A counter-cultural giant.” —Publishers Weekly

Internationally recognized and acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineages of the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry.

“Anne Waldman is one of the most important and irreducible living American poets.” —Nick Sturm, Poetry Foundation

Waldman is the author of more than 60 books, including Fast Speaking Woman (1996), published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books in San Francisco; a collection of essays, interviews, letters, and poems entitled Bard, Kinetic (2022); as well as the classic, Vow to Poetry (2001), about which Peter Gizzi said: “Here is a voice from the frontlines of poetry’s improvisational traditions. Waldman is a wild doctor of generative structures. This is an important book for anyone interested in the intersection of political, performative and spiritual practices.”

Waldman is also the author of many selected poetry editions including Helping the Dreamer, Kill or Cure and In the Room of Never Grieve. She has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of The World Compared to a Bubble, and Manatee/Humanity, which is a book-length rhizomic meditation on evolution and endangered species, and Gossamurmur, a meditation on Archive. Her monumental anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment—a 25 year project—won the Pen Center Award for Poetry. Other recent books include Sanctuary (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), Songs of the Sons and Daughters of Buddha: Enlightenment Poems from the Theragatha and Therigatha (translated by Andrew Schelling and Anne Waldman, Shambhala Publications, 2020), Trickster Feminism (Penguin Books, 2018), Extinction Aria (Pied Oxen, 2017), and Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born (2016), which, as Lyn Hejinian says, “brings Waldman’s work into the more intimate paradoxical folds of poetic (and prophetic) knowledge.”

She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Marks’s Church In-the-Bowery, and worked there for twelve years. Waldman also co-founded with—Allen Ginsberg and Diane diPrima—the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired University in the western hemisphere, in 1974. She is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics at Naropa and continues to work to preserve the school’s substantial literary and oral archives and curate the celebrated Summer Writing Program.

An accomplished editor, Waldman’s New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (edited with Emma Gomis) is a collection of lectures, transcribed from the audio archives of Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program, that represent a continuing lineage of experimental literary movements. She has edited and co-edited many collections based on the holdings of the Kerouac School including Civil Disobediences, Beats at Naropa, and Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics. She is also the editor of Nice to See You, an homage to poet Ted Berrigan, The Beat Book, and co-editor with Lewis Warsh of The Angel Hair Anthology.

Black Lodge, an opera for which Waldman wrote the libretto, premiered in Philadelphia in 2022. Part film screening and part industrial rock opera concert, the world premiere event featured glam opera band Timur & the Dime Museum alongside musicians from the Opera Philadelphia Orchestra, with music by David T. Little. In 2010, her play Red Noir was produced by the Living Theatre. She has collaborated with Meredith Monk, her husband, Ed Bowes, and with the Fast Speaking Music label on multimedia productions and live performances.

Waldman is a recipient of the Before Columbus Foundation for Lifetime Achievement, bestowed on her by Ishmael Reed, American Book Award’s Lifetime Achievement, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and has served six years as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, a fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, and has held the Emily Harvey residency in Venice. She has worked at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and at the Women’s Christian College in Tokyo, She has presented her work at conferences and festivals around the world, most recently in Jaipur, Bratislava, Wuhan, Beijing, Berlin, Nicaragua, Prague, Kerala, Mumbai, Calcutta, Marrakech, and Madrid. Her work has been translated into numerous languages.

Waldman has read in the streets as well as numerous larger venues such as the Dodge Literary Festival in the USA and the Jaipur Literature Festival in India and continues to teach poetics all over the world. She remains a highly original “open field investigator” of consciousness, committed to the possibilities of radical shifts of language and states of mind to create new modal structures and montages of attention. Her work is prophetic, multidisciplinary, energetic, passionate, panoramic, fierce at times.

Waldman divides her time between New York City and Boulder, Colorado.

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