Waldman, Anne (1945–  )

Anne Waldman is a third-generation Beat poet
whose affiliations with the New York School and
the 1960s radical causes exemplify the hybrid
postmodern political and artistic legacies of Beatmovement culture and aesthetics. Encompassing
diverse literary schools and eras in her work, Waldman cites
allen ginsberg, gregory corso, and
william s. burroughs as early influences, draws
from Sappho, Gertrude Stein, and the Mazatec
shamaness Maria Sabina, and produces list-chant
poems, Poundian epics, and slam poetry. Waldman’s aesthetic advocates both personal expression and political activism, and she has frequently
collaborated with writers, musicians, and dancers
in works that were created to be performed. She is
the author of more than a dozen works, including
Giant Night (1968); Baby Breakdown (1970); fast
speakinG woman
(1975); Journals & Dreams
(1976); Talking Naropa Poetics, volumes I and II
(1978);
Helping the Dreamer: New and Selected
Poems, 1966–1988
(1989); Out of This World: An
Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966–
1991
(1991); Kill or Cure (1994); The Beat Book:
Poems & Fiction from the Beat Generation
(1996);
iovis, volumes I and II (1993, 1997); Vow to Poetry:
Essays, Interviews & Manifestos
(2001); The Angel
Hair Anthology
(with Lewis Warsh, 2002); and In
the Room of Never Grieve: New and Selected Poems,
1985–2003
(2003).
Waldman was born in 1945 in Millville, New
Jersey, grew up in Greenwich Village, and graduated from Bennington College in 1966, where
she was influenced by Howard Nemerov, Bernard
Malamud, and Stanley Edgar Hyman. She wrote
her senior thesis on Theodore Roethke and edited
the literary magazine
Silo. She met the poet Lewis
Warsh, with whom she founded the literary journal
and press
Angel Hair, at Robert Duncan’s reading
at the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference. The conference was a powerful germinating experience for
Waldman, who credits
charles olson’s wrenching extemporaneous performance with galvanizing her to dynamic public readings of her work,
for which she is renowned. Waldman became involved in grassroots poetry efforts throughout the
late 1960s and early 1970s, fraternizing with Ted
Berrigan,
ed sanders, and Ron Padget in the
Lower East Side community of younger New York
poets. Waldman met Frank O’Hara before he died
in 1966, and he famously welcomed her to poetry.
She also met Ginsberg in Berkeley that year and
became his protégée through a “mutual connection to dharma and politics,” as she says. She has
been acclaimed for her offices as director of the
Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery
from 1968 to 1977 and, since 1975, as founder and
director (until his death in 1997 with Allen Ginsberg) of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied
Poetics at Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colorado. A high-profile countercultural presence, Waldman was poet-in-residence
on Bob Dylan’s legendary Rolling Thunder Review
tour of 1975–76. She participated in the antiwar
movement of the 1960s and, through her poetry
and activism, has been an outspoken opponent of

nuclear energy, helping to close Colorado’s Rocky
Flats power plant. As spoken-word poetry has become more prominent in the last decades, Waldman has been part of this movement, too, which
is an obvious extension of her performance-based
work, and she has won twice the Taos (New Mexico) Poetry Circus slam.
Waldman brings to the Beat Generation’s antiestablishment impulses the challenges and the resistances of second-wave feminism. She embodies
Buddhist spirituality and Beat’s spontaneous confessional poetics, cut-up methods of composition,
and penchant for oration and public performance.
But she contributes a woman-centered sensibility to the Beat and New York school movements,
consciously taking the works of women poets as
models—among Beat movement writers she acknowledges
diane di prima, joanne kyger, and
lenore kandel—and enacting a belief that, in
spite of signs to the contrary, manifestations of
feminine energy can be felt in contemporary culture. Her seminal Beat-indebted work, the long list
poem “Fast Speaking Woman,” was published in
1975 by City Lights Books in
Fast Speaking Woman:
Chants and Essays
(number 33 of the Pocket Poet
Series) and came out in a revised edition in 1996.
It takes as its central subject the elucidation and
expression of female energy and identity.
Waldman’s masterwork,
Iovis, published in two
volumes with a third in progress, turns from Beat
poetics to the use of multiple voices and typographies that are more typically associated with late
high modernist and full-blown postmodern texts.
Although the look and substance of the epic seem
to deviate from Beat-movement writing, the poet
fills the numerous texts of
Iovis with political and
poetic concerns that are continuous with those
of her earlier works.
Iovis in some instances seems
destined to be sung/performed, as in Waldman’s
homage to John Cage; it demands action, as in the
numerous unanswered letters that were sent to the
poet and which she uses; it self-reflexively and selfconsciously erects and performs the consciousness
that it calls “poet.” In contrast, charting an alternative poetics direction, Waldman produced
Marriage: A Sentence (2000), which she “conceived
of as a ‘serial’ poem under one rubric” and whose
touchstones are Stein, Corso, and Denise Levertov,
with shamanic references drawn from Mircea Eliade. This work is erudite, provocative, and formally
innovative and is based on the traditional form of
the
haibun in which a proselike poem is coupled
with a condensed lyric poem of the same theme,
an experimental rendering that departs from the
improvisational conventions of the epic
Iovis.
Waldman is a national and international literary influence; she teaches in Boulder, Europe, and
Asia and gives readings widely. In 2002 her archive
was housed at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor and honored with a convocation. Recently
she resumed residence in New York City, site of her
first poetry community and salon.
Bibliography
Buschendorf, Christa. “Gods and Heroes Revised: Mythological Concepts of Masculinity in Contemporary
Women’s Poetry” Amerikastudien/American Studies
43. 4 (1998).
Johnson, Ronna C., and Nancy M. Grace. “Fast Speaking Woman: Anne Waldman.” In
Breaking the
Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat
Writers,
edited by Nancy M. Grace and Ronna C.
Johnson, 255–281. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2004.
McNeil, Helen. “The Archaeology of Gender in the Beat
Movement.”
The Beat Generation Writers. Edited by
A. Robert Lee, 178–99. East Haven, Conn.: Pluto
Press, 1996.
Puchek, Peter. “From Revolution to Creation: Beat Desire and Body Poetics in Anne Waldman’s Poetry.”
In
Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat
Generation,
edited by Ronna C. Johnson and Nancy
M. Grace, 227–250. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 2002.
Talisman: Anne Waldman Issue. 13 (Fall 1994/Winter
1995).
Ronna C. Johnson

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