Anne Waldman
Anne Waldman is the author most recently of Mesopotopia (Penguin 2025) and Archivist Scissors, (Staircase Books, 2025). Her album Astral Omens with Devin Brahja Waldman and Georgia Wartel Collins is out from Earliest Morning, 2025. Waldman is a founder and Artistic Director of the Jack Kerouac School and its Summer Writing Program (June 8–27). The summer 2026 theme is Metabolic Thrum. Outrider, the film of and about Anne Waldman by Alystyre Julian is traveling the world. Website: annewaldman.org
It was a cold night lost you in the heat
A hymn of mourning that day that day’s
Lasting light, holding you though a far away form
All the long day long week …..body closer, come
far
The Video Work of Ed Bowes: Language and Light, a retrospective of Ed Bowes’s films on video from Romance (1976) to the world premiere of A Punch in the Gut of a Star (2024), played at Anthology Film Archives in December 2024, co-curated by Alystyre Julian and Anne Waldman, programmed by Jed Rapfogel. Bowes is working on his video cine-archive, a unique collection of scripts, films, and collaborations.
We talked for hours—surrounded by his books and objects—about language and its origins, about technology, US-Mexican politics, and primordial societies, themes we were pursuing in the translation of his texts.
Anne Waldman is the author most recently of Trickster Feminism (Penguin), Sanctuary (Spuyten Duyvil) , co-translator of The Songs of the Sons & Daughter Of Buddha (Shambhala) and the album SCIAMACHY (Levy Gorvy).
Anne Waldman is the author, most recently of Trickster Feminism, Penguin 2018, and Sanctuary, Spuyten Duyvil 2020, and her vinyl album SCIAMACHY was just released by Fast Speaking Music with support from the Levy Gorvy Gallery in NYC.
Anne Waldman is the author of the forthcoming Trickster Feminine (from Penguin) Voice’s Daughter of A Heart Yet To Be Born (Coffee House Press) and Extinction Aria. (Pied Oxen). She is the Artistic Director of the Jack Kerouac School’s Summer Writing Program at Naropa Boulder, June 10-30, whose theme this year is The Capitalocene.
ANNE WALDMAN has been a prolific and active poet and performer many years, creating radical new hybrid forms for the long poem, both serial and narrative, as with Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and Manatee/Humanity, and most recently Gossamurmur, all published by Penguin Poets. She is also the author of the magnum opus The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press 2011), a feminist "cultural intervention" taking on war and patriarchy which won the PENCenter 2012 Award for Poetry. Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born, a prose poem meditation on William Blake's Book of Thel, was published by Coffee House Press, 2016.
ANNE WALDMAN has been a prolific and active poet and performer many years, creating radical new hybrid forms for the long poem, both serial and narrative, as with Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and Manatee/Humanity, and most recently Gossamurmur, all published by Penguin Poets. She is also the author of the magnum opus The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment ( Coffee House Press 2011), a feminist "cultural intervention" taking on war and patriarchy which won the PENCenter 2012 Award for Poetry. Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born, a prose poem meditation on William Blake's Book of Thel, was published by Coffee House Press, 2016.
I felt akin to John Giorno’s kinetics from the start. A generally calm person, John is a torrent of purpose, an “activity demon.” His unique style on stage as preacher/hipster, radical dharma-wit-yogin, and more increasingly the lone poet with cowboy-inflected voice, feels like vital transmission.
Love this title of yours, Bill. But never silently, as the subtext is a great adhesive roar to what counts, what sounds, what listens, what lights up the cortex in relation to Bill Berkson.
Anne Waldman has been a prolific and active poet and performer many years, creating radical new hybrid forms for the long poem, both serial and narrative, as with Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and Manatee/Humanity, and most recently Gossamurmur, all published by Penguin Poets. She is also the author of the magnum opus The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment ( Coffee House Press 2011), a feminist “cultural intervention” taking on war and patriarchy which won the PEN Center 2012 Award for Poetry. Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born, a prose poem meditation on William Blake's Book of Thel.
I live in poetry and this is some of my world. I’ve been repeatedly asking the question how is one contemporary with one’s time? And what does it mean to look unto the darkness of one’s time? Here are some of the results from a range of poets, artists, thinkers, as well as radical projects of innovation and archive.
It seems like you were mightily prepared and inspired to this task of directorship at The Poetry Project, in addition to being a very dedicated and prodigious poet.
On the occasion of Alexis Myre’s first solo show in New York (The Power of Limits, La MaMa Galleria, February 4 – 21, 2016), the artist spoke with Anne Waldman about her about the structure—and potential—of working with limits.
It’s weird how lineage works, all forms of it. As you know I am a person who worries and bothers and has been worried and bothered by poetry, teaching, photography and––in my own way––performance.
Our mission is fairly specific: to publish translations, performance texts, “forgotten” literature, investigative writing, books by artists, and contemporary poetry that would have a hard time being placed at another publishing house.
I dig Agamben and his theories of lawlessness. I want more than lawlessness; I want recklessness, fury, spatial and dimensional disregard, and linguistic spatter. Disorder for the sake of good.
As a poet, how are you contemporary with your time?
To you, muse who / rocked the brains of / so many of my heroes / You a hero too / for wise quip bon mot and / panoramic eye
Anne Waldman is the author most recently of Gossamurmur (Penguin Poets 2013) is a Guggenheim 2013-14 recipient, and her magnum opus The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment won the PEN USA Literary Award for 2012. She co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg in 1974 and directs its celebrated Summer Writing Program. "Jaguar Harmonics", her "serial" yage poem, will be published by Post-Apollo Press in 2014.
By Anne Waldman
Alexis Myre builds a box of light with flowers, other natural objects, fragile and tenacious, and metaphors and correspondences. Alexis Myre begins “using a compass” to master a world within. What plays out in the Orchid theatre? Am I her Situationist? Her poet? We will see.
Anne Waldman is the author most recently of Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets 2009), Matriot Acts (CHAX Press 2010) and the co-editor of Beats at Naropa (Coffee House Press, 2009). Her play RED NOIR was recently produced by The Living Theatre, directed by Judith Malina and had a two and a half month run in New York City. She is the Artistic Director of the Jack Kerouac School's Summer Writing Program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She has collaborated with artists Donna Dennis on Nine Nights Meditation, and with Pat Steir on Cry Stall Gaze.
the manatee is found in shallow slow moving rivers
A Tribute read at the Brad Will Memorial at
St Marks Church In-the-Bowery,
New York City November 11, 2006.
New York City November 11, 2006.
She dreams herself the mystic lover of Che Guevara (a corpse) indoctrinated in anti-imperialismo and is roused to write an alturistic manifesto for the good of all humanity.
& that the staying be prolonged of his staying/in the writing, the sounding & rasp & glee…