The Brooklyn Rail

On May 5, 1971, a freshly twenty-six-year-old Anne Waldman stands at the Poetry Project podium to read “Memorial Day,” a long collaborative poem with Ted Berrigan, for the very first time. She reads, and as she reads, you can hear her rocking back and forth into the words:

If it don’t come across
FUCK IT
& if your heart ain’t in it
ditto

On March 29, 2023, just four days shy of her seventy-eighth birthday, Anne Waldman stands at the Poetry Project podium, buzzing with kinetic energy, intensified. Her orange scarf patient around her neck, she moves her glasses swiftly from her hair to her nose—if they’re up, she is telling a story. If they’re down, she’s reading from the page in her right hand, her file folder of excerpts from Bard, Kinetic, sing-speaking with a vibrato that calls the room to attention: “Some of the story will never be told. … How many times could you fall in love? How many times could you have your heart broken, reading after reading, event after event? I bow under the task of this description.”

Anne Waldman is breathlessly encyclopedic. Her breadth is exhaustive, at times exhausting—the whole of a life filling, spilling over pages with the urgency of a woman who knows too well how things get lost. She is called on by her elders, as we (readers, poets, artists) feel called on by her; again and again she invokes Amiri Baraka’s call to action, the instruction she carries with her: “Don’t let this stuff get buried.” Waldman has written more than sixty books; she has been an educator, a poet-emissary, and a student around the world. Her efforts touch the lives of every poet in New York and throughout, every one of the innumerable artists who have graced the podium at the Poetry Project’s New Year’s Day Marathon, inaugurated by Waldman on January 2, 1974, the same year she co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, which will each celebrate their fiftieth anniversary in 2024. In the last two years she has launched two books, both cosmic tomes with a deep attention to the archive. New Weathers, published by Nightboat Books in 2022, is a collection of lectures selected and coalesced by Anne Waldman and co-editor Emma Gomis from the audio archives of the School of Disembodied Poetics, with contributions from powerhouses like Amiri Baraka, Eileen Myles, Fred Moten, Alice Notley, Cecilia Vicuña, and Waldman herself, among many, many others. Bard, Kinetic, published by Coffee House Press in 2023, with cover art by the poet-artist No Land, is an expansive part-autobiography, part-memoir, part-anthology of Waldman’s life and work, told through writings from her archive, new work, essays, poems, photos, letters, and, and, and. These texts are monumental, both in their scope and in their representation of an archive and a life much larger than is possible to fit between the covers of one book (or sixty).

***

“I exist because of the dissipative structure of Archive,” writes Anne Waldman in the afterword to New Weathers. And Waldman with Gomis, in the introduction: “An archive is a place where the contemporary confronts the past.” And Edwin Torres, at Naropa in 2019: “how do you organize an avalanche of ability”? This collection is an avalanche of ability, of attention, care, poetics, ecological concern, dreams for the future; this book is a “monolith of try,” as the poet TC Tolbert (also a guest teacher at Naropa in 2016) wrote in his poem “What Space Faith Can Occupy.” Tolbert is talking about love in that poem—the concrete attention that makes love felt. This is a book of love, of try.

One of the true powers of the poetry world is this: poets do not get airlifted to a more exclusive or more sanitized echelon as they become more prolific—in poetry, you succeed into, not out of. To become an elder poet is to become a poet who teaches, who gives readings, who gives talks, participates in or creates residencies; to “make it” is to burrow even deeper within your community, engaging with the next generation, cracking open for others the doors that you had to hack into yourself. New Weathers extends this openness—it makes available years of information exchange to an even wider audience. As Gomis and Waldman note in their introduction, “This tome invites you to ask … questions, to enter a temporarily suspended world where change is possible.” The lectures compiled here range from poem to storytelling to information-share to monologue, but all have at least two (and certainly many more) things in common: first, that they are concerned with the construction of a livable future for the world, for poetry, for art, for life; and second, that they owe their existence to the archive and to the work of Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, those founders of the School of Disembodied Poetics who were tasked with the building of a “hundred-year project” by Buddhist lama and Naropa Institute founder Chögyam Trungpa.

New Weathers is composed in five parts: “Sanctuary and Apocalypse,” “Ecopoetic Attentions,” “Communal Action,” “Identity in the Capitalocene,” and “Against Atrocity,” all titles taken from panels hosted at the Summer Writing Program over the years, and explored by the writers from myriad angles. Amiri Baraka, in his 2012 lecture, “Poetry, Politics, and the Real World,” explains that these (poetry, politics, reality) are “three vectors of the same thing,” and that “Poetry … cannot just come from your head.…. You have to be able to reflect on the real world, real life.” He goes on to discuss the revolutionary forces in art, the importance of reading and knowing your history, the Harlem Renaissance, and the divide between Black poets and white poets and the downtown scene after the murder of Malcolm X, when many Black poets went uptown and set up the Black Arts Repertory Theatre. Cecilia Vicuña, in her 2021 conversation with Waldman, discusses the poetics of the land, Indigenous knowledge, and the power of stopping: “Perhaps something so simple that looks really idiotic and silly, like stopping, is really a practice that we can do at any time.” In 2013, Eileen Myles performs their presidential candidacy renouncement in a commencement address titled “Let’s Start Stopping.” In 2020, Asiya Wadud talks about fault lines, the “bad logic” in atrocity, her fourth grade students, the advance and retreat of the human in our constant naming, bordering, blaming. In 2010, writing into “the torques of the mother tongue” Waldman says, “Archive is a practice. And through Archive we show humanity … the consciousness of the future … we were not just slaughtering one another.” She returns to this statement again and again in New Weathers, in Bard, Kinetic, in conversation, at readings. It feels something like a wish, too.

The study of an archive gifts its reader familiarity with its subjects and their interests, their ramblings. In PennSound’s recording of that first reading of “Memorial Day,” I hear Waldman rebut Berrigan’s joke and laugh in 1971; in New Weathers I read M. NourbeSe Philip speak to the complicated love for an abusive language in 2014; in the ellipses of Kevin Killian’s instructions for touching pavement during a San Francisco earthquake I read the lack of a gesture where a room falls onto a page. In these moments, and in every line detailed above, I feel the grace of the archive like a guiding hand.

***

“What is urgent to know about? I ask myself this every day and get extremely dizzy.”

–Anne Waldman, in a letter to Karen Weiser, 2005

In 2022, Anne Waldman participated in a reading in honor of Etel Adnan at the Brooklyn Rail’s Singing in Unison exhibition. She read from a set of writings that were then published in Bard, Kinetic: “Sunken Suns & The Tyger (for Etel Adnan)” and a letter from Adnan to Waldman from Beirut, also published in Waldman’s Iovis Trilogy in 2011. The first is a recounting of an in depth body action/performance of Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse: “I put my whole body into the codes and lingual soundings … I lay down … I splayed myself on the floor … I stamped … I danced and swirled … I held my belly … I groaned…” Waldman reads these words like a song; she follows with the letter, feels Adnan’s words and wishes from her abdomen, and they travel up, her left foot tapping insistently, keeping rhythm, her shoulders curving into every line. Anne Waldman puts her entire body into everything; every word that she feels she feels deeply and demonstrates this for others so that they may find it in themselves, carry it on into their own generation, a gift to the ones who will come. She is guttural in her care, her anger, her word, her song, sprechstimme.

For seemingly her entire life, Waldman has made work that carries that same urgency, from Fast Speaking Woman to her monumental Iovis Trilogy (which according to Waldman was published one hundred pages short of what she had originally intended, as Coffee House insisted they “would not have been able to bind the book”), her and Lewis Warsh’s Angel Hair, her constant work at the Poetry Project, her endless collaborations, teachings, performances, and, and, and.

In 1965, at twenty years old, Anne Waldman made a vow to poetry. A vow that she “would spend [her] life developing and maintaining … poetry and its poets.” This life and its dedications are detailed in Bard, Kinetic. The book opens with a “Sketch”: a densely packed forty-four page tour of a life, beginning at the poet’s conception on July 4, 1944, and tumbling through a family history, a child’s envy of her father’s writing desk (a cigarette at the table, a typewriter), her poet-mother, her vow, her education at Friends Seminary and Bennington College, the early rumblings of her life in the “Outrider tradition,” the founding of the School of Disembodied Poetics, the births of children (her own and extended family, friends, the next generation), her marriage to the poet Lewis Warsh at the St. Mark’s Church in 1967, and, and, and. These events are narrated not entirely inside of time; threads are pulled from behind the curtain, the reader led by the hand, gently, but with quick feet, arms stretched.

The body of the book is broken up into four parts, each nearly one hundred pages long: “Arche (beginning—the sense of first things, as mind, as larynx),” “Techne (craft, operative, episteme),” “Feminafesto,” and “Contemporary with Our Time.” Each of these parts comes with their own set of epigraphs: Lyn Hejinian, Bob Dylan, Bernadette Mayer, Paul Celan, and Jack Spicer; Clark Coolidge and Lisa Jarnot; Meredith Monk, Akilah Oliver, and Carolee Schneeman; William Burroughs and Waldman herself. A long list; a miniscule drop in the ocean of the poet’s friends and influences.

In the first piece of “Arche,” titled “Prelusion,” Waldman opens a number of questions and notes to self and to the reader, outlining her compulsion to create this text, do this work: “‘What is a thousand-year plan for the spirit?’ [Donna Haraway] asks. And, I ask, for poetry and its libraries?” She carries this question of the archive with her throughout the book—the reason for its existence, the reason for the urgency she feels to collect and preserve; an urgency that often, both in speech and in writing, has her boiling her language down to only its most potent parts, discarding the pleasantries of introductions, articles, transitions. “Bard, Kinetic as field of possibility, with selected texts from parts and measures of my life interconnectedly. A book of memory. And I want the field strewn with poems.” And it is. The poems here are autobiographical, spiritual, investigative, weaving. In one favorite, “Let Go,” a poem for Lewis Warsh detailing the inception of Angel Hair—“Talking in a car is a magazine I suppose,” and “You never just fall in love with a person / And make love with them / That we make something that’s the whole point”—even her loving is towards the poem, towards the craft. To be in love, for Waldman it seems, is to be in poetry, to be in the midst of an archive as it comes into being.

In a segment on William Burroughs, Waldman recalls him taunting her, “playfully”: “Do you realize you are the only woman in the room?” This, she notes, was often true, and she considers the inherent precarities carefully throughout Bard, Kinetic. She speaks about her complicated relationship to both the current youth of the poetry scene, who sometimes have a “burn it all down” feeling towards many of the elder and dead men of poetry, and her own inspirations from these poets, trying to parse the art from the artist, the artist from the person, the person from the poetry. She seems to find herself constantly attempting to cohere multiple truths: the importance of accountability, the importance of the archive, the preservation of work and its undoubted effect on culture.

In the opening piece of “Contemporary with Our Time,” Waldman, remembering the “Occupy fall of 2011,” pays tribute to dead friends, artists, poets, letting the prose collapse into a page-long list of attention as she looks up at the stars and names one for each of them, listing their names by year of passing. Tributes like this one are not alone in these pages. In a piece titled “dear Bernadette,” she confesses: “wanted to finally tell you it was me sent those red roses so many moons ago / wanted you to think another stranger loved you too, I was that stranger,” signing the letter, “O lucky stars, / A”.

In another exchange of letters with the poet Karen Weiser from late 2004 and early 2005, in “Feminafesto,” Waldman is curious about the life of a younger poet, about careerism; she writes from Kyoto, goes on about Kagerō Nikki, Noh plays, death, “What is it to love a fox?,” the Hall of the 1,001 Kannon bodhisattvas. She signs off:

What are you studying? What does your world look like?

I wish I had a thousand arms.

LOVE

Before there is a response, another letter from Waldman. Then, Weiser’s reply. A long letter broken into small paragraphs, catching up. Tagging in and out of Waldman’s myriad threads. “I don’t know what it is to love a fox, but I imagine it is no different from loving a person.” Then, signing off:

You DO have a thousand arms!

Love,

Karen

One thousand arms for one thousand years. Anne Waldman, her vow to catch the archive, to keep it afloat, ceaseless in her catching, molding, holding. Anne Waldman speaks and her speech is an immense wall crafted entirely from tiny doors, behind each of which is an entire world.