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Category: Anne Waldman
by Devin Brahja Waldman
Aunt Anne and Devin Waldman
It’s all but impossible to envision what my life would be without my aunt Anne Waldman. I remember when I was a little kid she would bring trinkets from around the world. They’d be hung on walls and ceilings, emanating colorful subliminal messages, configuring a child’s mind toward new directions.
At a reading of hers in Albany, N.Y. in ‘95 when I was 10-years-old she noticed I had my saxophone with me. She told me to join her onstage after her first poem. This was the beginning of what continues to be my longest standing collaboration—a collaboration, along with her son Ambrose, that has brought us to Mexico; to Europe; to Naropa University; to the bookstores, clubs, galleries, and legendary halls of New York.
How many friendships have come into my life through Anne, directly or indirectly? More than I could count. How many late nights with the poets, the musicians, the painters, the dreamers? How many words of hers have I absorbed? How many of her perceptions, thought-patterns, phrases, argumentations, emotionally charged electrons, encouragements, admonishments? How many whispers, cackles, chants, lamentations from the stage? Over and over again, I have been called upon by Anne to bind sound to word, to go and grab tonal counterpoint from ethereal sources, and in a hurry. To find the notes and frequencies, to place them there, in the right sequence, circling around the thought-world. To stand beside the poet. How many times have I played too loud, too softly? When have I said too much, too little?
How many cherished friendships have come into my life through Anne, either directly or indirectly? How many late nights with the poets, the musicians, the painters, the dreamers?
Last fall, when I was working on Sciamachy, I was finally able to sit with all this arithmetic over weeks and months, to fast-forward and rewind the words, to adjust the sonic ornamentations decibel by decibel, to dress them up to my heart’s content, to bring them into balance with the word. For me, collaborating with Anne is almost as innate as the words I use to uncover that thing contained within the word. Perhaps if I say the right word it will nudge the word over and reveal what is hidden beneath the word. If I could strike the correct tone it will dislodge that very same thing, for all of us to feel. Call it love. Anne’s influence on my life has been immeasurable. How can I account for all these atoms she’s left behind with me? A trail she leaves wherever she goes.
Devin Brahja Waldman is a New York instrumentalist, composer, and producer. He has performed with his aunt, Anne Waldman, since the age of 10. Waldman has also performed with William Parker, Patti Smith, Nadah El Shazly, Malcolm Mooney, Thurston Moore, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Yoshiko Chuma. He leads the ensemble BRAHJA and is a co-founder of Notable Deaths and a member of Heroes Are Gang Leaders, MoE, and Land of Kush. As a youngster, he was taken under the wing of Paul Bley. Isaac Rosenthal photo.
by Edwin Torres
Rubio Castagna-Torres, circa 2007.
One memory I have of Anne is the first time my son ever saw me perform in front of other people. At home, he was my audience, now, he’d be seeing Dadah be Dadah with everyone watching! He was 10 months old, we were at The Poetry Project’s New Years Day Marathon, 2007, a glorious start to every year. He was a good listener, with a bold shock of hair, a bolt of energy, right down the center of his head. He was a sight.
I imagine Anne must have sensed the warrior in the room and wanted to say hi, so she sidled up to him and my wife. She was so sweet with him, saying, daddy’s going to be right up there isn’t that something. He was captivated by her gaze. Anne has that piercing there-and-back-again exoskeletal cosmos lurking within, welcoming you into her zeitgeist fraught with human knowing, as if constantly marveling, “can you believe where we are.”
Edwin and Rubio, Father’s Day 2020.
Anyway, my turn is coming up soon, I excuse myself for inner yoni breath work, and go stand across the room. As I get ready to be announced, I look back and see Anne’s gestures grow more pronounced. Pointing at me, looking incredulously back at his face, back to me, back to him. This continued throughout my performance. It was just for a few minutes, but it was the first time he’d seen me in this context, my natural realm, of stage and language. And Anne was there, at points guiding him, at points letting the visitor unfold in visitation. I wonder, no doubt, if he was guiding her as well. Mutual beings, aware of a gift being passed.
Edwin Torres’ poetry collections include The Animal’s Perception of Earth (forthcoming from DoubleCross Press), XoeteoX: the infinite word object (Wave Books), and is editor of the inter-genre anthology The Body In Language: An Anthology (Counterpath Press). He has performed his multi-disciplinary bodylingo poetics worldwide.
Alystyre Julian, Outrider film
by Eleni Sikelianos
We’re eating steaks in the dusk in a grove of aspen trees. We’ve cooked them in a frying pan over the fire. We’ve hauled all our things through the dry high grasses—tents, pillows, sleeping bags, blankets, ice cooler, wine, these steaks, and the frying pan we cooked them in. My daughter puts her hand on the hot grill, burns it, cries. Now it’s dark, and Anne is lying in the grass looking at the stars. I think she may have just smoked a bit of pot. “Traveling out to these places, tiny glass atomic cities, speaking to the beings there…” I don’t remember exactly what she was saying but it was like being inside an Anne Waldman poem with Anne Waldman.
Anne is traveling through the interstitial spaces, through membranes, thinking of beings she’ll speak to there, politicians she’ll scold along the way … in that moment I know that if anyone will be able to speak to aliens it will be Anne. With her “mind that holds all galaxies of poetry,” she will be “[e]ntering a chat room with other galaxies” as soon as that possibility arrives (“entanglement,” in Trickster Feminism). It’s real.
This scene, camping in Colorado with Anne in about 2009, came to me as I was trying to give shape in my mind to Anne’s deep essence. Restless traveler. When you read the poems, you have a sense of all the worldly places this sleepless, engaged poet has brushed through or landed in, but you also have a sense of all the extraterrestrial loci, and the places on earth that require more or less than a physical body to inhabit: let’s call it celestial jaguar optics.
When I was a child, we lived next to Julia (“j” pronounced in the Spanish way), who was, her husband told us, a Yaqui witch. She kept us tied to the deep maps of the neighborhood (which houses were still inhabited by the dead), and she kept a strict soft order in her own home that felt like a net of sanity compared to what happened elsewhere. She also told us one of the enduring possibilities and truths of my life: that the woman who lived in our house before us was a jaguar lady. She changed into a cat each night, and was no longer able to place her paws on the ground. In her nocturnal manifestation, she had to leap from counter to chair. Julia told us so without judgement, and I never thought to ask what the jaguar woman did in this form. (It’s possible that it was, besides being real, also a metaphor for my mother’s past and present life.)
Anne is, obviously, not a curandéra or a bruja, but her mind and her work occupy some parallel territory. She has always manifested the poem as a vehicle not just for mind-tracking or state-of-the-world tracking, but for spiritual and physical change. It has never been a tightly controlled little universe with few breathing holes, but has always been a place of drift and event. Here’s all that could happen in 1970 (when I was five, and living next to Julia, in fact) in a “Split Second”:
a person is one self at home another on vacation one in a windstorm 2 in a pinch one with his best friend another in Peru jumps in a taxi hops on a bus 2 in the community 50 in the commune 20 in the hospital 8 at the movies all on acid 16 at the top happy with his shirt on cast an I Ching ready to dive in heads for Bolinas driving to Taos has a history another heartfelt thanks is in love with am in danger of pollution’s tired vendetta an angry policemen[policeman?] a wrathful billy club a head hassling for change 12 in a package another on “politics” 3 at the most 2 enraptured shoes one victimized radio freak another with the TV on has a future in carpets takes a trip to Tibet a trip on the stairs crossing at 2nd & 12th streaks closing the window as it starts to rain reading a melancholy Keats on the phone with you pissed off again in the faraway distance a phonebooth sings: “a girl of 13 again caught by the best made camera in the world!” A restless energy starts & starting thus, coat on, she’s gone.
(from Baby Breakdown)
It’s always been a case of simultaneity in Anne Waldman’s poetry head. She can travel by magic window and by syntax, not cutting corners so much as leaping worlds on a pivoting toe of language.
Maybe she had to stay nimble? She was in the middle of all those boys. (Baby Breakdown thanks Lewis Warsh, Tom Clark, John Giorno, Ed Sanders, Larry Fagin, and is “for Mike,” presumably Michael Brownstein.)
Anne, my father (Jon), and my uncle Chris, teens, circa 1962.
I first met Anne when she was 20 and I was a few weeks old and she was on her way to the Berkeley Poetry Conference, about to take a vow to poetry. But I didn’t see her again till I was 23, not long after I had just taken my own vows. Little did I know how much that rekindling of connection would anchor and shape my life. As a loosely linked member of my family, she took a more solid form as poetry mother, life mother, than many in my family were able to do.
I turn to her poems when I need calming and I turn to them when I need riling up. I turn to her when I need encouragement, and I turn to her when I want to hear and share righteous anger. I turn to her when the sharp, weary machinery of Western capital feels like it will shred me and everything I love, because her work and her presence on earth are those touchstones that remind me that poetry and art are what make the world worth living.
World safe, world safe, world safe.
Eleni Sikelianos (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2020/04/nothing-in-evolution-makes-sense-except-in-the-light-of-phylogeny) is the author of nine books of poetry (most recently What I Knew) and two hybrid (anti)memoirs. Sikelianos has received many awards for her poetry, nonfiction, and translations, including from the National Endowment for the Arts, The National Poetry Series, and the Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing. She has collaborated with musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists (she performed parts of The California Poem with composer Philip Glass, and has acted in films by Ed Bowes), and her work has been widely anthologized and translated. At 19, she left the U.S, and spent the next year-and-a-half traveling, often by thumb through Europe, Turkey, and across Africa, landing in Paris, where she lived and worked for a year. Dedicated to the many ways poetry can manifest in communities, she joined the literary art faculty at Brown University in 2017.
Edward Sanders and Anne Waldman in Woodstock, N.Y. Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola photo.
by Edward Sanders
I guess I met Anne about 1965 when she brought Angel Hair books into the Peace Eye Bookstore.
A year or so later, when I was an official record producer for Reprise Records, she came to Miriam’s and my apartment on Avenue A & 12th to discuss her doing an album for Reprise
(I produced The Fugs for Reprise, a label which included Jimi Hendrix, the early Joni Mitchell, & many others.)
In the end Anne decided to focus on poetry, encouraged to do so by Ted Berrigan and others.
I have followed her marvelous career decade ’pon decade, and have read with her many many times in many many venues,. And I salute her vast and prolific sequence of poems & books!
And now she has celebrated her 75th. All hail to Anne Waldman on her luminescent voyage!
Edward Sanders is a poet, historian, and composer. His recently published book, illustrated by Rick Veitch, is Broken Glory, the Final Years of Robert Kennedy (Arcade Publishers). A paperback edition, with an updated chapter, will be come out in 2021, after corona.
His Glyphic History, A Life of Charles Olson in Text and Glyphs, has very recently been published by Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil. He is completing a biography of the historian Alf Evers, for whom Sanders served as typist and secretary during the latter part of his life.
His manifesto, Investigative Poetry, has inspired several book-length biographies in verse, including Chekhov, a Biography in Verse, and The Poetry & Life of Allen Ginsberg.
Sanders was the founder of the satiric folk/rock group, The Fugs, which has released many albums and CDs during its nearly 50-year history.
He lives in Woodstock, N.Y. with his wife, the essayist and painter Miriam Sanders, and both are active in environmental and other social issues.
Bernadette Mayer and Anne Waldman, Boulder, Colo, 1985.
by Bernadette Mayer and Philip Good
Anne might Waldman irony wrote splashing about modern not intimate stopping by the dandelion listing snowing women winnowing poets willows mowing words. 17 pages reacting closely slithering one bluejay idea end-words into grass another never oyster ever wanting to not new progress you me filling dimmer silhouetting empty fairgrounds space scrabble with may I verb speaking degausser sexy color points paying physiology tribute to the interim female violet voice of peace the rise rest and yellow the blue, the big blue struggle the herbal blade never harbinger giving strawberry up recalling raspberry what was once contemporary popped now knowing here how there seeing rests unchanged the sea city red to blue yellow be confused rose the corn exact harvest for the love of beautiful scarves
Anne Waldman wrote about not stopping listing women poets making words, words reacting reaction one idea into another never ever wanting to not progress filling in empty space with verbs speaking sexy talking points paying tribute to the female voice the rise and the fall, the big struggle not giving up never giving up recalling what was once contemporary now knowing how seeing was changed not to be confused with exact change for the love of colorful scarves
Bernadette Mayer (https://www.bernadettemayer.com/) is the author of over 27 collections, including, most recently Memory, available from Siglio Press; Works and Days; Eating The Colors Of A Lineup Of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer; and The Helens of Troy, as well as countless chapbooks and artist-books. She has received grants from The Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She is also the recipient of the 2014 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. From 1980-1984, she served as the director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. She has also edited and founded 0 to 9 journal and United Artists books and magazines. She has taught at the New School for Social Research, Naropa University, Long Island University, The College of Saint Rose, Miami University, and at University of Pennsylvania as a Kelly Writers House Fellow. Her influence in the contemporary avant-garde is felt widely.
Composed and Performed by Janice A. Lowe, piano, voice, percussion
Melanie Dyer, Janice Lowe, and Anne Waldman. No Land photo.
Janice A. Lowe (https://www.janicelowe.com/), composer, poet, is the author of Leaving CLE and Swam. A recent Creative Capital awardee, Lowe was commissioned to compose a song cycle in collaboration with Tyehimba Jess and has composed music for numerous plays, including Liza Jessie Peterson’s Chiron’s Homegurl Healer Howls and 12th and Clairmount by Jenni Lamb. Lowe’s musical collaborations with poets has led to performances with Anne Waldman and Fast Speaking Music, Julie Ezelle Patton, Tracie Morris, and Sheila Maldonado. Lowe’s latest album, Leaving CLE/Songs of Nomadic Dispersal, will be released this fall. A co-founder of The Dark Room Collective, she performs and records with her band Janice Lowe & Namaroon.
Anne Waldman and Vincent Katz recording “Fantastic Caryatids” fall 2014. Alystyre Julian, Outrider film
by Vincent Katz
At the opening, at the gallery, at the poetry reading, at the concert, at the meeting for the avant-garde theater company, at yet another fantastic party at her place where everyone mingles in a way they couldn’t anywhere else, at a million readings in diverse settings from spirit centers to political armies of like minds, houses of poetry, bastions of culture, classrooms, radio stations, from city to mountains, to beach, to desert, to the tip of the island that extends perpendicularly from the other island, the one you grew up on and still frequent,
Through galaxies of poetic ferment, “revolution in the air,” experimentation at frontiers
I always thought of you as a wise child of intellectual social physical
Development, which is also engagement
From MacDougal Street to Washington Square, downtown and up, all of it accessible, Friends, The East Village
Howard Nemerov – a name not often cited these days – a teacher at Bennington, who used, as epigraph to a poem of his, a quote from St. Augustine:
Insaniebam salubriter et moriebar vitaliter
I was losing my mind healthily, and I was dying vitally
You kept your sanity through all, now, lead us onward
Where/How must we go?
All is confusion, all is bliss
Where bliss comprehends the act of suffering, of dying, of being completely confused, out of sorts
We honor you, we celebrate you!
And we ask, what should we do?
We are terrified, confused —
As with your dear partner in poetry, Allen, we look to you for guidance
Now, and always
LOVE,
V
Northport/Lincolnville, Maine, June 30-July 5, 2020
Vincent Katz (http://vincentkatz.net/) is a poet and translator. He has published translations of the Roman poet Sextus Propertius and is working on a translation of Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days. He is the author of the poetry collections Swimming Home (Nightboat Books) and Southness (Lunar Chandelier Press). His most recent publication is a book of poems, Broadway for Paul (Alfred A. Knopf).
by Karin Kaminker
IIn April 1994, I had the pleasure and honor to throw an informal party for Anne Waldman at my home outside of Vienna, Austria, to celebrate her birthday. This happy event took place one evening during the 1994 spring academy of the Vienna Poetry School (Schüle für Dichtung in Wien -Sfd), at which Anne inspired her students to continue writing and performing their poetry though her workshop, “experiments and digression for performance.”
Among the guests at the birthday dinner were fellow Schüle für Dichtung guest teachers and poets Jack Collom, Anne Tardos, and Esteban Moore. Before our festive meal, Anne offered the Buddhist prayer of thanks to the animals and vegetables for their nourishment. I found that moment of thanksgiving to be so moving and important that I have continued to give thanks for such nourishment, silently or aloud, ever since.
In Vienna, we have considered Anne Waldman to be the Godmother of the poetry performance group that several of her students joined together to form after the first Academy of the SfD in 1992. Encouraged by Anne and by our other mentor, Allen Ginsberg, our association Labyrinth – The Association of English-Language Poets in Vienna continued to meet, to write together, and to perform our poetry in various literary cafés and other venues for more than 25 years.
I join with the rest of the poet community to send Anne my heartfelt gratitude, love and respect.
Karin Kaminker, who has been active as a writer, translator, and United Nations staff member, currently lives in Ferney-Voltaire, France, near the French-Swiss border. Kaminker is an active member of the Geneva Writers Group. She was the co-founder in 1993 of Labyrinth, the Association of English-Language Poets in Vienna, and the poetry magazine Subdream. Her poetry productions include The Coppersmith, performed at the 2001 Finnfest in Philadelphia and subsequently released on CD; Homeless Art, a one-act play to benefit Vienna’s homeless; and Turning Points, a medley of dance poems. She has given solo or group readings in Vienna, Geneva, Prague, the U.K., and U.S.A.
Fast Speaking Woman Tribute for Anne Waldman, on her 70th birthday, April 2015.
by Alystyre Julian
An “Outrider” film outtake (2015) for Boog tribute to Anne Waldman (2020). In March 2015, Alystyre Julian requested poets to each film themselves (pre-covid!) using their iPhones, reading a page (runs in order of actual text) of “Fast Speaking Woman” by Anne Waldman (City Lights Publishers). Cover photograph by Sheyla Baykal, 1974.
This video was projected as a surprise at Anne Waldman’s 70th birthday, in her backyard. (She was surprised!)
The Fast Speaking Woman Collective (in order of appearance):
1-Reed Bye: “let me try you with my magic power”
2.-Pat Steir: “the artist dreaming inside her house”
3-Vincent Katz: “I’m a fast speaking woman”
Interludes: Eva Hunt: “flowers that clean”
4-Alexis Myre: “I’m a sapphire woman”
5-Lee Ann Brown: “I’m a Southern-Cross woman”
6-Sarah Riggs and Layla Mae: “I’m a bird woman”
7-Omar Berrada and Safira: “I’m a nervous woman”
8-Laird Hunt and Eva: “I’m the doe-eyed woman”
9-Steven Taylor: “I’m the cataloguing woman”
10-Grazia Della-Terza: “I’m the woman with colorful threads”
11-Douglas Dunn: “I’m the woman with scales”
12-Jules Bakshi: “I’m the jaguar woman”
13-Bob Holman: “I’m the big-hearted woman”
14-Nicole Peyrafitte and Kush: ”I’m the pink dawn woman”
15-Pierre Joris and Kush: “I’m the resonating woman”
16-Cecilia Vicuña: “I’M THE POET DREAMING INSIDE HER HOUSE”
17- Selah Saterstrom and HR Hegenaur: “I’m the Infanta, I’ll get my way”/”I’m the Shakti
18-Karl Leone: “I’m the raised-on-jazz woman”
19- Rachel Levitsky: “I’m the visceral woman”
20-Tracie Morris: “they say it’s like softness there”
21-Kristin and Sophie Prevallet with Andy Indiana Spears, JenMarie MacDonald and Travis McDonald: “I’m the woman with the keys”/”I’m a fast-rolling woman”
22-Alystyre Julian: “I’m a rolling-speech woman”
23-Alystyre Julian: “I’m the citti-patti woman”
24-Eileen Myles: “I’m the celebrity woman”
25-CA Conrad and Melissa Buzzeo: “Mincy, mincy, mincy, mincy she cried”
26-Brenda Coultas: “the Woman-Who-Does-Things”
27-Max Davies: “I’m the woman traveling inside her head”
27-Thurston Moore: “busy woman to light up the day!”
28-Eva Prinz: “I’m the woman who walked to Nepal”
28-Toni Oswald: “I’m the woman over the next peak”
29-Nicolas Van Egten: “I thrive on passion”
29-Ambrose Bye: “I can out-boast all of you”
30-Marcella Durand and Ishmael: “with me it’s pleasure weather style”
31-Eleni Sikelianos: “I’m the woman who dreams”
Last line-Eva Hunt: “I’M THE ARTIST INSIDE HER MAGIC HOUSE”
Steven Taylor: outro beats
Alystyre Julian (https://www.facebook.com/outriderfilm) has documented Anne Waldman’s work-in-action for over a decade, and is currently in post-production for Outrider film. She is also a writer, photographer, and yoga teacher in New York City.
With Anne Waldman and at St. Mark’s Books, 2014. No Land photo.
by HR Hegnauer
I first met Anne Waldman in 2005 during my first week at Naropa when I was 21 years old. I was in the print shop learning how to set a poem in metal type, fingers grubby. I remember I was wearing a red t-shirt from my favorite band in high school. There was a small group of us—maybe seven students—and our instructor, Julia Seko, who is a marvelous printer.
When Anne walked into the little shop, students eagerly went up to her, but I held back, watching her grace the room in her signature scarves. I picked up more dirty bits of type and set them in my tray, trying to arrange them upside-down and backwards. Anne walked up to me and held out her hand, “Hi, I’m Anne.” I about froze in the warm evening shop, hardly knowing how to shake her hand.
A genuine curiosity excites Anne to meet and collaborate and uplift young poets, not to mention artists and musicians of all stripes.
Anne Waldman is one of the most generous people I’ve ever met. With over 50 books and countless other collaborations, chapbooks, albums, movies, and a worldwide reputation, a less embodied poet might forget that we’re all still human. But this is not Anne.
A genuine curiosity excites Anne to meet and collaborate and uplift young poets, not to mention artists and musicians of all stripes. I am always humbled in her presence, eager to co-exist and create with her, and keen to receive her teachings, however they present themselves.
Anne and five-month-old Monette Hegnauer, April 2019 at Anne’s home in Boulder, Colo.
Anne always talks about our interconnectedness, our symbiosis as a species. How one person’s actions ripple through the shared conscience of all beings. How the times, regardless of how dire or daunting, always require our collective responsibility to imagine and create. Again and again, we must always imagine, reimagine, create, and then create again. There is no point in time where we have done this enough and the job is complete. The task at hand is always to create. Indeed, the very root of poetry—poesis—is to make, to form, to create.
A great teacher teaches by doing, by embodying what they teach. I’ve always admired this in Anne. To watch her inquiring mind at work is a treasure I hold dearly. I once asked Anne, “What are the limits of the body?” and she responded by saying that it was “limitless.” And then continued, “As long as my consciousness is awake, my body is right there.”
Anne would often ask us students how we are contemporary with our times? This question would always trip me up. Isn’t being here now the same thing as being contemporary? And that’s the point. Being here now—being contemporary—is the hard part. Seeing the suffering and the injustice, and then doing the work. Anne does this work every day.
This world should thank Anne Waldman every day. But this world doesn’t often thank its poets or teachers, even its greatest ones. Perhaps in one small gesture though, in one small ripple outwards through all the pandemics of our time, we can extend our collective appreciation via all the ways we imagine a brighter ethos, and then we must enact this brightness.
Anne Waldman, we bow to you.
HR Hegnauer (https://www.hrhegnauer.com) is the author of When the Bird is Not a Human and Sir. She is a book designer specializing in working with independent publishers as well as individual artists and writers. She received an M.F.A. in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University, and an M.B.A. in Business from the University of Denver.
Devin Brahja Waldman is a New York instrumentalist, composer, and producer. He has performed with his aunt, Anne Waldman, since the age of 10. Waldman has also performed with William Parker, Patti Smith, Nadah El Shazly, Malcolm Mooney, Thurston Moore, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Yoshiko Chuma. He leads the ensemble BRAHJA and is a co-founder of Notable Deaths and a member of Heroes Are Gang Leaders, MoE, and Land of Kush. As a youngster, he was taken under the wing of Paul Bley. Isaac Rosenthal photo.
