Nonfiction by Anne Waldman
March 1, 2022 • 6 x 9 • 320 pages • 978-1-56689-623-8
The expansive, countercultural, and wildly prolific life of celebrated poet Anne Waldman, in her own words.
In Bard, Kinetic, Anne Waldman assembles a layered compendium of essays, letters, poems, and interviews that form a panoramic portrait of life and praxis as a groundbreaking poet. Waldman charts her journey through a maelstrom of radical artistic activity, from growing up in Greenwich Village, to her creative partnership with Allen Ginsberg and touring with Bob Dylan. She recalls founding the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and later the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and discusses the political and artistic philosophy that guides her activities as writer, activist, performer, instigator, and Buddhist practitioner. Throughout Bard, Kinetic, Waldman pays homage to friends and collaborators, many of whom are no longer with us, including Amiri Baraka, Lou Reed, John Ashbery, and Diane di Prima. Waldman’s experiences serve as a guide for others committed to making the world a more conscious and conscientious place that soars with poetry.
About the Author
Anne Waldman is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including the feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy, Colors in The Mechanism of Concealment, which won the Pen Center USA Award for Poetry in 2012. Other recent books include Manatee/Humanity, Gossamurmur, Jaguar Harmonics, and the anthology Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics (Coffee House Press 2014, coedited with Laura Wright). She is a recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award and the Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She has been at the forefront of cultural activism, and is one of the founders of the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and a cofounder with Allen Ginsberg of the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired university in the west. Her work has been published in translation in many languages, most recently French and Finnish.
Praise for Anne Waldman
Praise for Trickster Feminism
“Reading Waldman is like being in the world today, neither inured to the news nor lacerated by our own empathy. . . . It’s easy to feel drawn to this poet’s idealism and generosity of spirit; hard, as well, not to be grateful for moments when she indulges in a little self-puncturing. Hints of the trickster, indeed, that most intelligent subversive.” —The New York Times
“Anne Waldman’s very apropos and very prescient / omni-present and very true latest, Trickster Feminism, lays philo-sophic poetry at the feet of sleep as well the very wakeful performance aspect of our current oligarchical moment. What’s reeling and alive is the freshness of topicality, personal and public, in this collection.” —The Brooklyn Rail
Praise for Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born
“With one foot in the otherworldly and another planted firmly in reality, Waldman artfully places Thel’s quandary in the context of war, terrorism, police brutality, and the devastating consequences of capitalism.” —Publishers Weekly
“Waldman, a major force with more than 40 books of poetry and poetics, has roots in beat poetry and remains committed to experiment, cross-cultural and countercultural engagement, and verse that simply sings.” —Library Journal
Praise for The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment
“Begun in the 1980s, this mammoth work may be the summit of [Waldman’s] career. . . . An attempt at a new world history, a radical re-creation myth, an homage to Blake’s epics and Pound’s cantos, and a mystic or matriarchal answer to the male-dominated civilization . . . that we have known. . . . A book to admire, to pay homage to, to get lost in, Waldman’s epic goes splendidly on and on, mixing the shamanistic with the diaristic, the topical with the prayerful, incorporating almost everything.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“This Virgilian epic song, a vast written performance that must be acknowledged for its ‘orality of intention,’ is an expression of knowledge—embodied and disembodied, material and transcendental, violent and pacifist, visionary and starkly realist, present and transhistorical. To read it, to move across its many pages, is to invite a demand for and a belief in freedom that is platonic and phonemic. The three books collected in The Iovis Trilogy . . . together show the force of Waldman’s galloping collection of forms as a vibration of knowledge through ceaseless experiment, a sensorium through which the roundness of self burrows in to win the furthest circumference.” —The Poetry Project Newsletter