Boog City is a community newspaper from an extended community.
Category: Anne Waldman
by Meredith Monk
Anne Waldman is our bard, our Cassandra and fearless warrior who tells the unvarnished truth as she weaves the earth plane with the celestial, the particular with the universal, her visions of past, present, and future. I have known her since I came to New York in the 1960s and our lives have intertwined over the years in myriad and delicious ways. We have called each other “Dharma sister,” “partner in crime and art,” “dear sister in the wild cosmos beyond the binaries.” Anne is a force of nature whose energy is unstoppable. Her generosity and buoyant spirit have resounded throughout the world. May the beauty and passion of her life and work continue to soar on and on!
Meredith Monk (https://www.meredithmonk.org/) is a composer, singer, director/choreographer, and creator of new opera, music-theater works, films, and installations. Recognized as one of the most unique and influential artists of our time, she is a pioneer in what is now called “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance.” Celebrated internationally, Monk’s work has been presented at major venues throughout the world. In conjunction with her 50th Season of creating and performing, she was appointed the 2014-15 Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall. Recently Monk received three of the highest honors bestowed to a living artist in the United States: induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2019), the 2017 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and a 2015 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.
Alystyre at Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church, Matt Kohn foto..
Alystyre Julian, Outrider film.
Deep gratitude
Deep gratitude to you Anne for your vibrant encouragement of artistic expression and community over this half-century. A joyous throng reaches up to celebrate your many branches that overhang and protect us with moving light and shade. —Reed Bye
“Singing while we light the candles” Happy Birthday Anne ! Love, Nathaniel
by Kristin Prevallet
This video presents my poem/performance of “Cruelty and Conquest (OilOilOil),” which was one of many poetic interventions into the GBII years and the War on Iraq. This poem and my subsequent performance of it at Naropa University in 2006, is presented here with gratitude to Anne Waldman for the many years of energy and inspiration.
Context: In January of 2001, I, along with poets Anne Waldman, Alan Gilbert, Anselm Berrigan, and Magdalena Zurawski made unique signs and marched in protest of GBII’s inauguration in Washington, D.C. From 2001-2006, I took Waldman’s vow to poetry seriously as I composed many conceptual and performative texts and interventions designed to expose the lies and deceit that led to the U.S.’s fatal war on Iraq. (Collected in Shadow Evidence Intelligence from Factory School, 2006).
In 2006, Anne invited me to Naropa, and I translated the poem into a performance. The full documentation of that performance is being shown here, in tribute to Anne’s 75th birthday, for the first time. I am delighted that David Kirschenbaum’s Boog City is synthesizing this history—it was in Boog City where I and so many other poets were able to publish GBII and Gulf War protest poems, articles, and rants.
Waldman’s arrow-like prose and femanifestos were a huge inspiration to me, especially her imperative in Vow to Poetry that a woman poet ”explore and dance with everything in the culture which is unsung, mute, and controversial so that she may subvert the existing systems that repress and misunderstand feminine ‘difference’…turn the language of the body upside down.”
It is indeed the “turning of the body upside down” that I am attempting in this piece, as well as paying a deep homage to feminist performance art, which I also absorbed from Anne’s teachings: collaborate, collaborate, collaborate! (Here’s an essay I wrote on Anne’s collaborations with visual artists: http://www.poetspath.com/Scholarship_Project/prevallet.html)
Anne, your inspiration to generations upon generations of women poets is the birth of neutron, pulsar, and kali yuga stars over and over again in this galaxy of language we call poetry. It is an honor and a privilege to be among your expansive field of apprentices!
Kristin Prevallet (trancepoetics.com) a Denver native, is a poet who is the author of five books including I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time(Essay Press) and Everywhere Here and in Brooklyn (Belladonna Collaborative). Between 1998 and 2006, she was an intermittent guest of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where she taught with the Summer Writing Program as well as for the online M.F.A. program. Since 2010, she has held the Creative Entrepreneurial Oracle (CEO) of the ever-expanding mindbodystudies.com, a resource of outlier mental health practices including the Trance Poetics homestudy course, her manuscript doulah coaching service, a hypnotherapy certification program, and books that integrate medicines of imagination and language.
Kristin Prevallet with Anne Waldman at the Alchemist’s Kitchen, May 19, 2017. Alystyre Julian, Outrider film.
In putting together this feature on our teacher and friend Anne Waldman, I would mention to potential contributors that in my editorial budget I had slugged the description of what I was looking for from everyone as “My Anne.” What came to mind when you thought of Anne Waldman and her impact upon your life.
For me it was how accepting she was, how forgiving she’s been. Anne has entrusted me, entrusted Boog with her words from soon after we met. The first work of hers that we published was back in 1993 when we did a short-run broadside of her poem cutting up Colorado’s anti-gay rights Amendment 2.
But I remember the missteps just as much as the successes. We were supposed to publish our first perfect-bound book ever, Anne’s Suffer the Mysterium, back around the same time, and I just could never get it together so the book didn’t happen. Years later, when attempting to relaunch boogcity.com, I asked Anne for a poem that we could serialize to get people to keep coming back to the website. Again, a false start, and the site with Anne’s work never materialized.
And what I remember most through all of this, is that the next time I would go to her asking for work she would always say yes. She never brought up the things that hadn’t happened, but instead would give me her latest words to get out into the world. I guess that’s My Anne, forgiving, trusting, understanding.
•
Welcome to the new boogcity.com. We’ll be publishing the paper at the same schedule of about every six weeks, and we’ll also be updating the website with new work and great content from our archives.
Much love to HR Hegnauer for her production assist. But the biggest shout-out goes to Christina Strong, constant sounding board and webmistress to the stars. Without her this is all just a bunch of text and images on my MacBook Pro.
We’d love to hear what you think of the site. Email me to editor@boogcity.com with any feedback.
Much Thanks to HR Hegnauer for helping make this happen
Paper is copyright Boog City, all rights revert to contributors upon publication. Boog City is published eight times annually. Boog always reads work for Boog City or other consideration. (Email editor@boogcity.com or applicable editor and put Boog City sub in subject line.) Letters to the editor should go to editor@boogcity.com.
Boog City 3062 Brower Ave. Oceanside, NY 11572 212-842-BOOG (2664) http://www.boogcity.com @boogcity
(l-r.) Anne Waldman in an unidentified Greenwich Village backyard, 1971, Gerard Malanga photo, and Alystyre Julian, Outrider film.
Interview by Nathaniel Siegel
At the invitation of poet, friend, and Boog City Editor David Kirschenbaum, I was entrusted to interview poet and teacher Anne Waldman. Here are my questions. Here are Anne’s answers. On behalf of David and myself, I invite you kind reader, to read on.
Boog City: “Cherish spiritual teachers Even more than your own body – This is the practice of Bodhisattvas”
(Togmay Sangpo The Thirty-Seven Practices of Bodhisattvas)
Anne, who have been, who are your most cherished spiritual teachers?
Anne Waldman:
I have had some generous spiritual teachers, primarily in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition if that is what you are referring too. And many poets and other kinds of mentors and kalyanamitras, or spiritual friends. Books are trembling radiant teachers as well. Songs of Milarepa, The Therigatha and Theragatha, and the Heart Sutra and Ecclesiastes, The I Ching, and Rig Veda, Kalvala, Mahabrharta, other epics, and poems of great Chinese and Japanese sages. Pound’s Cathay was a poetic eye and ear opener, the scent of China: Li Po. The Transcendentalists. Ragas, shakuhachi, gamelan. Of course, the Modernists: Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and H.D. Contemporary elders: Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde. And in contemporary poetry the books of Alice Notley including Descent of Alette and Bernadette Mayer’s Studying Hunger and Joanne Kyger’s Big Moon, and Diane di Prima’s Loba. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s new book, A Treatise on Stars. And the performances of Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson and Meredith Monk. Visual art of Pat Steir and Kiki Smith. I enjoy following these women cohorts of my generation. Often in relationships your compañeras are teachers, sharing their worlds. What a generation. It became Our Time.
Alystyre Julian, Outrider film
My first encounter with a Lama, however, was with the Mongolian Geshe Wangyal whose mind was a crystal clear mirror and who threw some notion of theism back at me. He reflected back my doubts and aspirations. What is existence? I know nothing! What about the atom bomb? Why so much suffering? It had to be about one’s own mind and experience, and study and gnosis, not some salvation and remedy outside my own consciousness. We met in the early 1960s, I was still in my teens and working at an arts project in Philadelphia with Percy Heath, a great jazz artist, and his brother and the poet/editor Harvey Brown who had studied with Charles Olson. It was the summer of the so-called Philadelphia riots, 1964, which was a distressing time. Conflict on the streets, the cops were terrible.
Rinpoche was living in a pink suburban house in nearby New Jersey and a retinue of young monks—when we sat for tea—were gnawing on chicken bones. The mantel was adorned with vibrant thangkas of various peaceful and wrathful deities, including a red skinned Vajra Yogini hanging over the mantelpiece. The renowned Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, 20 years old at the time, and his cohorts from Harvard had started translating sutras, and suggested I not wear lipstick when I went for my darshan (a Zen term meaning an occasion of seeing a holy person) with the lama. They probably had a point, as the lama was a monk, but I found their male uptight conservatism irritating.
The lama was unusually still and quiet. I was curious about the vivid imagery in his shrine room (yoginis with animal heads). Something he said made it clear that they were energies/aspects of one’s mind and might be allies. They weren’t external saviours or gods, but psychological states of mind. Wrathful, peaceful, pacifying, destroying. I am probably projecting too much here. Geshe Wangyal was like a rock. Gary Snyder thought tantric Buddhism must be more appealing to female practitioners than Zen with its cool interiors, but it’s ultimately the same view of impermanence, letting go of attachments, mindfulness practice, concentrating on the breath, Basic Buddhism. I wrote a later poem “Makeup On Empty Space” with that in mind. But there is something magnetizing about the starkness and clarity of the Zendo with your own mind. Staring at a white wall, staring into the void. The power of aloneness. The Tibetan atmosphere but also the performative aspects of practice seemed less restrained but also just as strict.
Anne Waldman, 2004 Poetry Project New Year’s Day Marathon. Greg Fuchs photo.
Other teachers included the great Kalu Rinpoche whom I first visited in India, His Holiness Karmapa and my root teacher Chatral or Jadtral Rinpoche (not a tulku but a yogin who had a weathered craggy face like Anthony Quinn’s) and of course Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder of Naropa, whom I first met in 1970.
I went with Michael Brownstein to pick Trungpa up at the airport in Montpelier, Vt. Trungpa had started the Tail of the Tiger meditation center with students, close by in Barnet, Vt.
He got off the plane a bit inebriated and was talking about the holograms at Disney he had just been “visiting with,” especially the one of Casper the friendly ghost. Casper was like sambhogakaya (“body of light”) realm, an emanation. That was quite charming. I thought to go live in the country for a while, but he recommended I stick it out in NYC which was, as he said, “a holy city.” Certain elder poets were kalyanamitras. You watched the way they spoke and taught. Edwin Denby, Allen Ginsberg, even Burroughs in a strange way. What they pointed to and pointed out in the phenomenal world, what they illuminated for you, as when Edwin at the ballet once pointed out the muscles of Suzanne Farrell’s long neck. Its taut tremor, and I felt the animalia of ballet: a pagan trancelike twitching rite.
Burroughs gave me my one and only artillery lesson at a shooting range in the Rockies. I was nervous. He had accidentally shot his own wife, Joan Vollmer. He spoke in The Job about eliminating women! How could he dare hold a gun? It was these kinds of odd almost risky combinations of energy. Edgy. Trungpa once said Burroughs was a candidate for a tantric adept role. Padmasambhava had blood on his hands. But I was more interested in prajna, feminine energy. Womb-like energy, nourishing energy, as I mused on all this path, practice, and possibility.
Anne, you are the grandmother of a newborn Kora Bye Anaya, congratulations to you, Ed, Ambrose, Natalia, Jesus, and Ana! In your essay Sikelianos’ Delphic Idea: Site & Poetic Legacy In Memoriam, Mark Sikelianos, 1930-2000, you state:
“I am a great-step-granddaughter of Anghelos and Eva Sikelianos, and the imaginative Utopian attempt.
(Vow to Poetry Essays, Interviews, & Manifestos 2001 Coffee House Press)
Anne, what words, stories, myths, and songs will you be most eager to share with and convey to Kora?
Alystyre Julian, Outrider film.
And I am also the daughter of Frances LeFevre Sikelianos Waldman, translator of Cesar Moro, Anghelos Sikelianos, and author of Dearest Annie, You wanted a report on Berkson’s class: Letters from Frances LeFevre to Anne Waldman (Hanging Loose Press).
Ambrose has just asked me to start reading poetry to little Kora on FaceTime. Beautiful Kora Bye Anaya, beloved Bebe just a few months old. I think he’s getting tired of listening to me cooing and singing “She’ll Be Comin’ Round The Mountain,” “The Green Grass Grows all Around,” and “If I Had A Hammer.” They are living and sequestered in Mexico City (her wonderful mother, Natalia, is Mexican). It’s been so hard not meeting Kora as yet, I ache to hold her. This pandemic is like war, too many separations.
I’m reading her all that you would expect, the great kid books, Mother Goose, folk tales from all over the world, fairy tales, fables, poetry, Peter Rabbit, Oz. And first off the myth of Demeter and Kora (Persephone), princess of darkness who goes to the underworld and returns to bring light and knowledge of what’s down under. Kora was born at the vernal equinox.
Anne, in Allen Ginsberg’s book Death & Fame: Last Poems 1993-1997, he begins with the poem New Democracy Wish List for President Clinton White House. What is on your new democracy wish list?
We are talking about fighting a white supremacist fascist takeover here in the US of A. The antithesis of this fetid psychopathic racist plan. Now they are abolishing the Voice of America? Trying to kill the post office to muck with voting?
Start the chant: Systemic racism end! Total reform of all syndicates of samsara! Bring back poetry and arts to the schools! Poverty, war, all harm, nukes be banned! Everything be undone that this last vile admin has sanctioned, all crimes of robber barons and criminals, land grabs, sexism, homophobia. Trump has the stink of covid death on his hands. He has to be, puppet that he is, one of the most hideous abominations to humanity. A perfect gang of Rudras, his shadowmasters. And please spare us robocops and AI running the show. Total surveillance, can the plugs be pulled on that? The military inverted the internet. We need to hold our imaginations, original mind. Get out of the media traps. Work on telepathy.
Anne, do you remember Joe Brainard making you laugh?
Alystyre Julian, Outrider film.
He always made me laugh with his generosity, tenderness, shyness, his smile, his work, his spelling, the three volumes of I Remember, the Nancy series. So much more. There’s a book of letters in the works. I can’t wait.
Anne, where is your sanctuary, your home, your respite?
Several homes. Perhaps most central to my psyche, Macdougal Street where I’ve lived the longest in my dreamlife. That neighborhood—now transformed—growing up in the 1950s was a playground for the senses. What I was born into. Lots of sacred ghosts on the premises: father John, mother Frances waiting for me to come home from nights out so we could talk all night, older brother Mark Sikelianos. All the creative collaboration and poetry and music and celebration in that space, like an alchemical laboratory.
Boulder has also been a sanctuary and haven and scriptorium and a library and where I’ve been in retreat much of the pandemic. This is where my son Ambrose was born and close to where my stepdaughter Althea was raised and now lives close by. And Ambrose’s father Reed Bye and his wife Jill who are family. All the years at Naropa like a happy ghost realm with the conversation that goes on continuously in poet heaven. Ted Berrigan egging me on to be more like Mayakovsky.
And gratitude to long time partner Ed Bowes and his sanctuary on West 27th Street.
Anne, what would you like to see more of and less of in poetry communities? Where do you see the most need for change, for assistance, for improvements to the places and publications we have now?
With the pandemic and uprising for social justice and climate change we have to stay on the case more than ever. Be alert, informed. We are in the middle of an extraordinary time of both pandemic and uprising. Racism has been the wound at the heart of this nation, and the battle is with the systemic white supremacy that poisons everywhere. The suffering that black people have to endure daily with the legion of micro-aggressions, all the inequities, lethal abuse is so horrifying. And the karma of years of genocide of indigenous peoples and the cruelty and bestiality of slavery is almost too much to hold.
Anne, what ideas, what practices best foster expansion of thought and expansion of imagination?
Meditation, study, constant reading in all directions of time and space.
“How you living?” (channeling from Akilah Oliver)
Here in my sequester in Boulder having escaped New York at the end of March, I think a lot about friendships. And a lot about poetry and then, impetuously, I want to send messages to the world.
Everyone: stay friends! We’re living in the Great Reckoning. We need to wake up and struggle for a better planet and do all those things we do for love and sanity and radically shift the social fabric of humanity with our empathy for the suffering of others. We need to defang and eradicate the evils of Capital (which is literally killing us!) and racism (murdering too), or we will succumb to a totally fascist state in the U.S.A. And go dumb. We have to keep on with climate awareness, get back the environmental measures eviscerated by Trump. Get land back, animal rights, endless: pick your battles, pick your animal. Keep guard against nuclear annihilation. Treaties! A massive amount of work to do, and we’re on borrowed time. Don’t forget to vote wisely. Some young poets going into law, into politics, health fields. and back to ancient gnosis, ur-wisdoms. And continuing to teach in whatever form. And keep poetry in hearts. Friends, do this all with friends, or in your hut, with your mind, make friends with your mind, dedicate the merit, and keep close with your intergenerational friends.
Anne, Ambrose and his wife Natalia Gaia.
I adore and am obsessed with collaboration kinetics. We have to stay with that, take care of our bodies, these precious vehicles of spirit and poetry and work together in communities of trust and mutual support. Don’t disappear, go remote. Honor ancestors, honor elders, honor the dead. Count blessings as we can. Think about children, their needs, how wrecked their education has been, so much child poverty in the U.S. it’s shocking. Be wary of surveillance and AI takeover. Don’t buy into all the tech loops and versions of reality and don’t go down every rabbit hole. Be skillful, spiritual about the plot to save humanity. Stay engaged and living and contemplative as well. Times of stillness, we like those. I’m preaching. And keep poetry close.
Arts of magic and love and having new insight with words, imagination’s other tongue.
Sun Ra. Break down and cry. There’s little outside work right now in any case to be so careerist. But to help others. Layli Long Soldier spoke in her Naropa class of co-founding an arts school at Dakota Ridge, hands on for future beings. Start little schools O poets! Teaching useful knowledge. Maybe not teach poetry so much but how to read. Study.
I need to get to Mexico City while alive!, while I can—as soon as things get safer and are open—(a difficult President López Obrador there who thinks his country will be saved by an amulet he wears) to meet grandchild Kora and continue projects in collaboration. A growing group of international musicians, artists, poets forming called Rhizoma. Cross the border, swap knowledge.
So how living? Living in the uncertainty, the pain of separation and mourning friends who have died, of covid, such as Hal Willner who passed in April. Worked with filmmaker/poet No Land on a short film “Evening of the Day,” an homage for Hal. Michael McClure’s passing, Susan Rothenberg, Michael Friedman all give fuel and pulse to the work. Mourning. So many doing harm. Celebrating comradeship on the streets.
Missing autonomous zones like Abolition Park. Left for Boulder in late March and have been working on a number of fronts. Have been able to feel grounded here with Naropa close by (and the negative ions that clear the head).
Recently I have been part of a translation seminar and working with some native tongued Persian and Arabic writers/translators to work with Persian Talisman traditions. Astrology, geomancy, charms, curses. Nice syncretics: Hinduism, Kabbala, Koran. Wonderfully generative in these times. A whole passage about locusts. Have been appreciating the work I’ve done with the Buddhist Therigatha, Buddhist female mendicants going back to the time of Buddha, some of the earliest poems by women anywhere. And the expanded book is just out: Songs of the Sons & Daughters of Buddha (Shambhala). Finding ways to make poetry sing through centuries, as here in the Therigatha. So much hardship getting to the notion of impermanence and liberation.
Also got through our June “Carrier Waves” Zoom Summer Writing Program at Naropa, designed with Jeffrey Pethybridge, for our core students. Alice Notley, Cecilia Vicuna, Lisa Jarnot, CA Conrad, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Asiya Wadud, Jos Charles, others beamed in to help us. Transmissions with all our emanations still possible. A koan about space, time, bodies, carrier waves, boxes within boxes. Along with the development of Center for Activist Study and Writing as a Social Practice at Naropa. Surveillance, lock down, nun’s cell.
Students are doing projects out of the extensive Kerouac School Archive which is exciting. Texts of Akilah Oliver, Amiri Baraka. Also a Naropa essay anthology in the works—New Weathers—for Nightboat Books with co-editor Emma Gomis. Out in two years, worth waiting for. CA doing an additional benefit soon for our Kevin Killian summer scholarship. We had a fire in our Harry Smith Print Shop two weeks ago and the response has been wonderful and supportive. Adelante. (The printing presses and type survived.)
Other book projects in works and recordings and collaboration with Janice Lowe, possibly another Sciamachy (Part 2) with Fast Speaking Music and helping my partner Ed Bowes with a hypnogogic movie. My nephew Devin Brahja Waldman just finished production of Cait O’Kane’s album, Notable Deaths.
And Lewis Warsh and I are planning a book of letters around our magazine and press Angel Hair, which ran from 1968-74, back when poets wrote in more voluminous epistolary modes. Ted Berrigan, Lorenzo Thomas, Joanne Kyger, Jim Brodey, Tom Clark, Bill Berkson, Barbara Guest, Diane di Prima, and more.
“dear anne, I was really happy to get your letter at the fireplace rebuilding a very hot old fire in the middle of a snowstorm car buried stream running & it’s still warm out but I can’t see what I’m typing, your letter with coffee at the stream, in the garage and with Ed who sings.” —Bernadette Mayer
How you living? is Akilah’s question. Culling, grasping, waiting, inventing, remembering too late to drink the water of forgetfulness. We’re all in the oracular chamber. What is the future? It’s an encounter, a trance, a struggle perhaps. And we are touching it, a world turned upside down, end of an empire. Breakdown of a social order that is necessary. Uprising for a better life. Things going out of this world. Glowing embers. Could you be the lyre of another? How is a poet a caretaker? That is the question, the protection. “Earthshine” is the glow on the part of the moon that is not fully lit. Let’s not fracture our music in this existence of urgency.
Nathaniel A. Siegel is a GAY POET, curator, photographer, and artist who loves the in-person conversational interview as a form of immediate historical exchange of ideas, ideals, memories, and dreams!
Nathaniel is a board member of Howl! Arts, Inc. (https://www.howlarts.org/). He is an active participant in the Poetry Project, Naropa, Bowery Poetry Club and New York City artist/poet collectives.
•(On Buddhism Poetics) Structure Of The World Compared To A Bubble Penguin Poets 2004. •Jaguar Harmonics: Person Woven of Tesserae Post-Apollo Press, 2014. •Sanctuary (Addenda) with collages by t thilleman. Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2020 •Songs of the Sons & Daughters of Buddha (Shambhala). Enlightenment Poems from the Theragatha and Therigatha Translated by Andrew Schelling and Anne Waldman. Shambahla Publications, 2020. •Extinction Aria. Pied Oxen Printers, 2017.
Anne Waldman at KTD Monastery in Woodstock, NY, January 2020. We meditated in the shrine room for half an hour and visited the bookstore. It was a warm foggy day on Overlook Mountain.
(from l.) Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola, Raymond Foye, Anne Waldman, Diego Gerard Morrison. Kingston, N.Y. January 2020Seeing Anne off on the bus back to New York City. Anne is always moving, keeping the lines of communication open. I admire her, endlessly.
Raymond Foye (https://raymondfoye.info) is a writer, editor, publisher, and curator, based in New York. He is a consulting editor at The Brooklyn Rail.
copyright 2018
The Great Wall of China
This morning I am striding among the Chinese on their way to work or school I’m on my way to breakfast They don’t seem unhappy the streets are clean and they’re in black more than I am in New York City black Everything is ok the way it is
The rain on the Great Wall today makes it look sad not because rain is sad but because it makes the Wall seem even more useless The Wall that was built to keep people out now brings people in I was thinking this this morning in bed happy to be imagining the Wall and my being there later today a place I’ve wanted to be ever since the moment I learned it existed But now Anne Waldman walks up and says Ni hao bowing slightly at the waist with a smile How does she go on being Anne Waldman? The same way the Great Wall goes on going on —the great bonus of life— but look out I am becoming too grand not great and I haven’t even seen the Wall yet I have hit a wall the wall of seeing my old friend in the street so I walk along the top of her head the view on one side is New York on the other is the thing the incredibly big and old thing the thing that is secretly smiling it is what we call China a large vase that shatters and reassembles itself time and again like a clock that goes tick and then tock
Chinese air in my lungs I am lighter than usual and the wall even the little part of it I am standing on at Badaling is suddenly heavier than it was because it is connected to my feet those of a millipede rolling its 4,000-mile-long body into the past and back, I am thrilled at Badaling I am thrilled by the very sound of the word Badaling and what is useless in my life has taken wing into the aether that protects the human race
Am I great yet? No I am smaller and smaller and happier to be so, soon I will be only one chopstick tall and though they say that the journey of a thousand li begins with a single step what they don’t say is that the single step is a thousand li long and it is joyous because you don’t know what a li is and you don’t care for there are li everywhere and they’re fine where they are
The Wall of course has nothing to say It used to groan and growl but now it’s like a very old man you think is grumpy but no he’s not Perhaps at a certain age holiness slips in automatically and says Just sit there and don’t say anything it’s alright But what did I hear was it the holiness of the Wall veering into the distance? Then I come back standing there atop it and above me the clouds on their way to New York one of them shaped like the Wall and I am on it too
1) Anne Waldman and Ron Padgett at Huang Shan (Yellow Mountain), China, October 24, 2008. This photo was taken in an astounding location when Anne and Ron were taking part in a conference of poets from China, the U.S., Canada, Slovenia, and Spain, funded by the Pamirs Academy and organized by the Chinese poets Xi Chuan and Wang Jiaxin.
Anne in China with poets taking part in the 2008 Pamirs Academy international poetry conference. Back row (from l.): Zhang Ziching (professor and translator of Allen Ginsberg), Robert Hass, Liang Li-zhen (interpreter), Tomaž Šalamun, Song Lin, Tim Lilburn, Lan Lan, Wang Jiaxin; front row: unnamed artist girlfriend of Xi Chuan, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Ouyang Jianghe, Brenda Hillman, Xi Chuan. Missing: Juan Carlos Mestre and Yu Jian, who possibly took the photo.
Anne Waldman, Kenward Elmslie, and Ann Lauterbach, circa 1981, at Kenward’s house in rural Vermont, where Anne was a guest on multiple occasions. Probably Joe Brainard photo.
Anne Waldman, Larry Fagin, and Ron Padgett, probably when the three were making a poets-in-the-schools presentation in Wilmington, Del., circa 1974. Possibly Ron Shapiro photo.
Joe Brainard and Anne Waldman running along Westhampton Beach, N.Y., where Kenward Elmslie had a house. Circa 1972.
Anne Waldman and Ron Padgett in Jianshui, China, Sept. 2015, during a side tour after a poetry conference organized at Kunming Normal University by the poet (and their friend) Yu Jian.
Anne Waldman, Ron Padgett, and Pat Padgett in the Padgetts’ NYC apartment after lunch there, Dec. 10, 2019. Art work by Trevor Winkfield. Teresa Mitchell photo.
“The Great Wall of China” from Ron Padgett’s Collected Poems is used by permission of the author and Coffee House Press.
by Katie Yates
I met Anne at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. when Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche passed into Parinirvana in April of 1987. She invited us out to Karme Choling in Vermont for his sukhaviti. Had I attended as she suggested I might have circumvented my life as a Naropa student by taking a reasonable path as a translator for the U.S. Department of State. My own mother had recently passed away so Anne became mother Anne to me, as I know she is to many, offering sound advice for most things Vajrayana, fashionable, and/or intellectual, always sensible, adamant, and straight forward. Without her my life might have been richer in simplicity and paychecks. With her it is diverse: Premier League as this now Connecticut soccer mom calls it.
I have eternal gratitude for Anne’s classy wisdom, honesty, work ethic, and style, which I’ve emulated more as a Shambhala Buddhist than as a writer perhaps because meditation is truly easier than writing, though the politics of the dharma, it turns out, are so much worse. Anne reconnected me to India where I lived as a child via the magnificent tent culture holding the summer programs at Naropa as well as the summer seminaries at Shambhala Mountain Center, not to mention the gorgeous Great Stupa of Dharmakaya in Red Feather Lakes, where I lived for many years chaotically, mindfully happy working in meditation center finance.
Again, it was as though my life were poetic or magical and that Anne led me to a place in North America which embraced the wisdom traditions I’d been immersed in as a child growing up in the Foreign Service: Anne was and has been one of the greatest gifts of my life. Her vision and generosity entered me into a family of practitioners which became home. She helped me pay some bills following graduate school by giving me an editing job or hiring my boyfriend to mow her lawn in Boulder. I did many dishes with her and Andrew late into nights following excellent Summer Writing Program picnics with luminaries of the best kind.
From Anne I learned to write a proper New York School list poem, the only poetry I can teach to perfection really and truly a multi age group form everyone can benefit from. The last time I saw Anne at Yale she met my daughter Juliette. She praised her as my mother would have and gave her a bag of chips from her hotel room. I love Anne, she’s quite simply the best.
Katie Yates (We and Stockport Flats Press) lives with her family in New Haven, Conn. She teaches Drala Camp in East Rock Park. Follow her on Instagram: katieyates108.
Kristin Prevallet (
Nathaniel A. Siegel is a GAY POET, curator, photographer, and artist who loves the in-person conversational interview as a form of immediate historical exchange of ideas, ideals, memories, and dreams!
Katie Yates (We and Stockport Flats Press) lives with her family in New Haven, Conn. She teaches Drala Camp in East Rock Park. Follow her on Instagram: katieyates108.