Anne Waldman

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Anne Waldman (born April 2, 1945) is an American poet. Waldman has been active in the Outrider experimental poetry group as a writer, performer, researcher, editor, and cultural/political activist since the 1960s.

She has also been linked to Beat writers.

Life and work

Waldman, a native of Millville, New Jersey, was born on MacDougal Street in New York City's Greenwich Village, where she obtained her B.A. In 1966, Bennington College was founded. Waldman became involved in the East Coast poetry scene in part thanks in part to her connections with the poets and artists who characterized the Second Generation of the New York School. Waldman also established many friendships with earlier generations of writers, including Allen Ginsberg, who once referred to Waldman as his "spiritual wife." She served as assistant director of St. Mark's Poetry Project from 1966 to 1978, and then as the Project's Director from 1968 to 1978.

Waldman became a Buddhist scholar in the early 1960s. She began to study with the Tibetan Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in the 1970s, as with Allen Ginsberg. Waldman, poet Lewis Warsh, was inspired to find Angel Hair, a small press that published a journal with the same name and a number of smaller books when attending the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965. It was while she was attending this conference that she first committed to poetry after hearing the Outrider poets.

Waldman founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado (now Naropa University), where she continues to serve as a Distinguished Professor of Poetics and the Director of Naropa's prestigious Summer Writing Program.

Waldman and Ginsberg appeared in Bob Dylan's film Renaldo and Clara in 1976. While traveling through New England and Canada with the Rolling Thunder Revue, a concert tour that made impromptu stops, enthralling audiences with poetry and music, they were on the film. Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Eric Anderson, and Joe Cocker were among the tourists on these caravans by Waldman, Ginsberg, and Dylan. Waldman revelled in the experience, and she often dreamt of returning to the poetry caravan.

In 1980, Waldman married Reed Bye and their son, Edwin Ambrose Bye, was born on October 21, 1980. Waldman's son's birth was a "inspiring turning point" for her, and she became interested in and committed to the planet's survival. She said her child, not her teacher, became her tutor. Waldman and Ambrose Bye appear on stage often, and the two musicians have released Fast Speaking Music and released multiple albums together, as well as their collaboration.

Waldman has been a ardent advocate for social reform. She appeared with the Rocky Flats Truth Force, an anti-nuclear group ten miles south of Boulder, Colorado, during the 1970s. She was arrested by Daniel Ellsberg and Allen Ginsberg for protesting outside the building. She has been a vocal supporter of feminist, environmental, and human rights causes, and she has been instrumental in Poets Against the War, as a writer in New York and Washington, D.C. Waldman says her life has been to "keep the world safe for poetry."

Waldman has never been, strictly speaking, a "Beat" poet, though her career is often linked to the Beat Generation. Her writing, as well as the writing of her contemporaries in the 1970s New York milieu in which she was a central figure — writers like Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer to name just two — is more diverse in terms of influence and aspirations. Waldman is particularly interested in her poetry's performance: she considers it a "vital event in time" and evokes her poetry's ferocity through exuberant breathing, chanting, singing, and movement. Waldman cites her poem, Fast Speaking Women, as the seminal work that sparked her interest in poetry as performance. Ginsberg, Kenneth Koch, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, all encouraged her to continue writing her poetry.

Waldman referred to the fact that growing up in Greenwich Village in the early sixties as “we benefited from the trials of young women who had fought to be innovative and assertive before us,” and that despite this, many of us fell into the same retrograde traps. Following their example, we could see addicts for their own sakes, painful abortions, alienation from family and friends, and even depreciated their bodies. I knew women who lived in secrecy or double lives due to passion and sexual attraction to another woman, which was anathema. Women in daily therapy were abused by their parents, or women who were sent away from mental hospitals or special schools because of a black lover. Any of them ran away from home. Anybody committed suicide.

Waldman has published more than forty books of poetry. Her career has been widely published, with work in Breaking the Cool (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1996), Poetry of the Beat Generation (W.W. Norton, Berkeley, CA, 1996), and Up Late (Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 1988) among others. Her poems have been translated into French, Italian, German, Turkish, Spanish, and Chinese. Waldman is also the editor of several books relating to modern, postmodern, and contemporary poetry. Waldman has been a tireless collaborator throughout her career, collaborating with artists Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle, Meredith Monk, George Schneeman, Donna Dennis, Laurie Anderson, and Steve Lacy; dancer Douglas Dunn; and composer Ambrose Bye.

Waldman has been a Fellow at the Emily Harvey Foundation (Winter 2008) and the Bellagio Center in Italy (Spring 2006). She has taught residencies at the Christian Women's University of Tokyo (Fall 2004); the Schule for Dichtung in Vienna (where she has also worked as Curriculum Director in 1989); and the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey (1984). She has been a mentor for the Prazska Skola Projekt in Prague, the Study Abroad on the Bowery (since 2004), and a New England College Low Residency MFA Program faculty member (since 2003). She has been given grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Contemporary Artists Foundation (NEA) and the Poetry Foundation. Ammiel Alcalay, a writer and scholar, formed the Poetry Is News Alliance in 2002. Waldman has also won the International Poetry Championship Bout in Taos, New Mexico twice. Waldman was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2011.

She lives at the University of Michigan's Special Collections Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a collection of historical, literary, art, tape, and extensive correspondence material spanning many well-known literary correspondents, including William S. Burroughs, Robert Creeley, Diane Di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Ken Kesey. The University of Michigan's opening of the Anne Waldman Collection includes a 55-minute film titled "Anne Waldman: Makeup on Empty Space."

Waldman was asked about the way her poetry takes form and incorporates songs and chants, as well as how she creates this kind of poem in an interview with "The Wire" from the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2017. "I've always been interested in a larger version, one that doesn't stick to the paper." The performative quality is present because there needs to be more emphasis. Rather than reading quietly, I get the feeling that you should do something more important. I don't walk around being an outraged person all the time, but there are different states of mind. The gods and goddesses represent various states of being and experience, as in Hinduism. That's the plan. Then, some things are written for resistance. They have the ability to arise."

Source

Awards and grants

• American Book Award, Lifetime Achievement Award, 2015.
• Guggenheim Fellowship Award in Poetry, 2013.
• PEN Center Literary Award in Poetry, 2012.
• Fellow, The Emily Harvey Foundation, Venice, winter 2007.
• Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency, 2002.
• Civitella Ranieri Center Fellow, 2001.
• Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant Recipient, 2001.
• Vermont Studio School Residency, 2001.
• The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award, 1996.
• National Endowment for the Arts Grant, 1979–80.
• The National Literary Anthology Award, 1970.
• The Poets Foundation Award, 1969.
• The Dylan Thomas Memorial Award, 1967.
• Two-time winner of the International Poetry Championship Bout in Taos, New Mexico