Boog City is a community newspaper from an extended community.
Category: Anne Waldman
by Erika Hodges
I was always deeply desirous of poetry but only became a poet when I read Anne Waldman’s Fast Speaking Woman as a teenager. “Woman combs snakes out of her hair/ Woman combs demons out of her hair/ Woman lies down on the cobra/ Then meditates under cobra canopy…” I did not know you could write about something other than the world of men. I did not know someone would want to publish a wrathful poem written by a woman. “She was burning alright/ her house (the one she carried on her head) was afire….”
I was raised in the south, where gender enforcement was still very much the rule of the land. Anne was a portal to new possibilities of living. Years later, I was a writing student at Naropa, Anne’s school of disembodied poetics, and several times throughout the year she would appear, like a comet or a flashbang, brilliant and constantly in motion. Like so many hundreds of her students, I was drawn to her luminosity. In that program and in her classroom I found a place of belonging for the first time; a way of being that celebrated fire and renewal and work. The work always came first.
Anne transforms poetry orphans who look for answers and solace in line breaks and language into poetry warriors and holders of a sacred lineage.
And then when I left that home for New York City, Anne told me she was proud, that I belonged to a lineage now and the pilgrimage to St. Marks, to The Bowery, to the basement readings of the stacked up city were a part of that lineage. I remember that moment very clearly. She said, “If you ever need anything, come by. I hope you will think of this (her apartment in the village) as a kind of home.”
The most remarkable part of this story is that there are dozens just like mine. Her poetry children are scattered over the earth, and when we meet one another there is an immediate kinship because we recognize that the flame in each other is from the same source, one that Anne encouraged and stoked and helped us care for. Anne transforms poetry orphans who look for answers and solace in line breaks and language into poetry warriors and holders of a sacred lineage. She’s adopted so many into her family without second thought. She pushes and exclaims and proclaims in the service of us all. She will ask if you’ve eaten and if you have written in the same breath. To her they are the same.
When I was going through a breakup she asked again if I was writing. I said, Yes, I am leaning on poetry quite a bit these days, and in the middle of a quiet suburban street she shouted, “What Else Is There?!?!” That question still moves me. In Anne’s world of poetry there are full meals, tough and infinite kinds of love, there is justice and utter liberty. Anne’s poetry is a mother’s love, and aside from that, What Else Is There?
No Land photo.
Erika Hodges is a gender expansive poet and performance artist living and breathing in Brooklyn, N.Y. They are a graduate of Naropa University and an M.F.A. candidate at Pratt Institute where they are the current Leslie Scalapino Fellow. Their work and life is deeply devoted to queer love, troubling the dystopian values of borders and binaries and the ideas of poetry and lineage as a space of being together.
by John Godfrey
Files 996, 997, April 1973: Anne Waldman (b. 1945)
Waldman reads here in a low-key manner and in a voice that doesn’t project at you as she has done since then. Like one month later! (See below.) These poems are loose in the way a traveler’s poems will be. In ’72 she had travelled in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Her eyes are open to rustic subsistence and mysterious ways, but without the introspective depth she would mature into. She continues with a journal in the form of a letter home to Joe Brainard. The writing is conversational and flexible. She also reads an early version of “Fast Speaking Woman,” which she augmented over time into the full litany that was published as Fast Speaking Woman and Other Chants (City Lights Publishers). Her writings are well known, but I advise knowing well Fast Speaking, Helping the Dreamer: New and Selected Poems 1966–1980 (Coffee House Press), and, of course, The Iovis Trilogy (Coffee House Press). I recommend a close reading of “Book III: Eternal War” in that book, where Waldman’s compression, precision word jams, and structural sense are at a peak. In this century she has published civic-spirited books against ecological destruction, and her newest, beautifully written, is Trickster Feminism (Penguin Poets).
File 968, ca. 1973, likely May: Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan
The pair read a collaboration they planned in the spring of ’71 for the first reading they would give together after years of closeness, in May ’71 at the Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s. The poem is called “Memorial Day,” and it is an extraordinary success. They bring out the best in each other’s writing. Here Waldman exercises the force in her voice that she would refine onwards. She has in her parts of the poem introspective immediacy and sharp-sharp word decisions. She is the “woman in the Prime of Strife.” Berrigan plays the old warrior, the Irish sentiment of mortality and loss, the magnet of the moment, the beauty of memory. It is elevating to read the poem on the page, out of Berrigan’s Collected, while listening to and glancing up at their performance. They use all possible indentations and there is a lot of white page done very tastily. A laying out of the page passed from William Carlos Williams’ Paterson and O’Hara’s “Biotherm” and through Berrigan’s blockbuster “Tambourine Life,” (1965–66), also in the Collected. The collaboration was planned as a handout sheaf for their ’71 reading. It was published once, Memorial Day (Aloes Books) in the U.K. Collaborating before email required meetings and phone calls. They arranged the work on time.
Here Waldman exercises the force in her voice that she would refine onwards. She has in her parts of the poem introspective immediacy and sharp-sharp word decisions. She is the ‘woman in the Prime of Strife.’
The Smithsonian Institution has an Art and Culture blog, edited by Elizabeth Botten. She requested I write a piece on the “98 Greene Street Poetry Project,” what Holly Solomon called the pioneering arts space in Soho that was later renamed The Holly Solomon Gallery. Elizabeth sent me 21MB of several audio tapes and more than a dozen videos, a record of the series which was curated by Ted Greenwald between 1971 and 1973. The blog has been delayed for novel reasons but should appear this fall. I read along from the page and kept half of my eyes on the laptop screen at least three times during “Memorial Day.” One’s eyes mist up. The Smithsonian will post on the blog excerpts from the video.
Anne Waldman was not born to be anybody. In her youth there was a place that needed somebody, and she was.
Is there a way to combine “Anne Waldman leads because she is a leader” and “Anne Waldman is a leader because she leads”?
And I double down on what I say above about Book III of Iovis.
Somebody I know is forever.
John Godfrey is the same age as Anne Waldman—well, he’s four months behind at the start. In 2016 Wave Books published his The City Keeps: Selected and New Poems 1966-2014. Cuneiform Press recently published his A Torch for Orphans. He only lives in the East Village. Elizabeth Scholnick photo.
by Alan Gilbert
You and I have attended so many political protests and poetry readings together over the years that I can’t keep track of them all. And that is one of the things I most admire about you: your fusion of poetry and politics, from everyday life to the largest collective vision, including all species (and non-species too). I’m guessing that the photo of us here is from the Republican National Convention protests in New York City in the summer of 2004. I vividly remember the police on rooftops with both 35mm cameras and assault rifles as we marched past Madison Square Garden where George W. Bush was banging the patriotic drum of endless war as part of his reelection campaign. The police don’t have to take photographs of us anymore. They know what we’re doing the moment we pick up our smartphones or turn on our computers.
Only someone with your inexhaustible energy could remain vigilant for so many decades—as a poet, writer, performer, teacher, scholar, organizer, activist, and outrider. I met you when I was so young that I can’t quite imagine my life—or poetry—without you. You contain multitudes, and I’m grateful to be a part of the assembly.
Alan Gilbertis the author of two books of poetry, The Treatment of Monuments and Late in the Antenna Fields, as well as a collection of essays, articles, and reviews, Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight.
by Lucia Hinojosa Gaxiola
Emancipation is a work in progress how long how long? the travel to the Kali Yuga will anyone notice? this ignorance, kleshas what we’ve created
karma of this world age
our matrix needs to be stronger the underground relation turns, revolves out of the vortex
this antithesis vision is a big task big vow to face the reality of life on the ground we need world-wide limpias rituals with the saintchildren
Devin came into my room with sage smoke (just now) cheers and revolution from the Nueva York gang!
(for Kora)
During spring equinox a group of 12 women came with the elements & the four cardinal points
it’s the sisterhood they say it’s a seed they say wear it on your feet they said & disappear overnight as a form of exchange
to meet the warrior who’s first name is what? —— chant mantra for her OMETEOTL OMETEOTL OMETEOTL
the wildest earth poems come out in the spring
respite, delicate beauty!
Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola (Mexico City, 1987) is an artist working with poetry, sound, performance, and mixed media. She’s the artistic director and co-founder of diSONARE, an experimental press of art and literature. She has exhibited and performed in Mexico City and abroad at spaces like Centro de la Imagen, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Sonic Arts Research Unit, and Anthology Film Archives, among others. She recently started Rizoma, a series of poetry and performance workshops led by an international group of artists and poets for the imprisoned women of Santiaguito de Almoloya.
‘the hours we pass are horae, are stars.” The hours I have spent with you are a constellation (Mallarmé), a constellation out of the infinite spread of lights (time, hours), and I love experiencing the year shift while in the house of Anne. “write into/ only poetry.” And only poetry is everything in the house of Anne. “hematite or vermilion rubbed into/ incised lines of shell texts/ so they shine in poetry.” Your work, you, your work, your poem “trickster feminism” and so many other poems continue to talk with other poets here now and to come—”trying to remember role in late capital poet-life-vow-archive, a feminine principle, whatever gender.” The vow you took shows the seriousness of this vocation, to be poet. O pOets! Our roles have become clearer, but more complicated, our life work more urgent—hard to do all this hard work and harder still!—but we know we are needed, and you remind us every day that. “We are swimming in nuclear semen in which we are learning to breathe like mutant beasts.” Outriders in this glowing dangerous medium never more necessary. “ear to/ wicked heart, a metronome.” Do we keep the rhythm? Rhyme is perhaps the most mysterious of all the poetic arts—hiding great subtlety in obviousness. Everything we say (create) has a beat and a breath. “alert with conch alarum.” We stay alert to what the sounds tell us. You are a nuclear woman. The protest led you close to the spaces of atom dismemberment and release. You held the feet of great poets as they transformed upward. “did she breathe fire,” yes, she does. “did she walk on fire,” yes, she does. “did she battle the masculine wits to a pulp,” oh, yes she surely does. “did she overdose on testosterone,” yes, we are all overdosed on testosterone, but you search always and find the countervenom. “did we succumb to mere guise?” Some of us, but not all of us, thank you for the jaguar light to lead us out of the mists. “how clear a sound/ come all the way through her speaking.” Anne, you provide spaces for so many voices. And into those spaces your voice leading. “in love with all scale and wings of luminous birds.” “and my colors cling to you in weather.” “to fierce tenderness in new feminism.” Holding your hand together we sing out.
Marcella Durand’s most recent books include The Prospect (Delete Press) and her translation of Michèle Métail’s book-length poem, Earth’s Horizons (Black Square Editions). She is currently working on a new book forthcoming from Black Square Editions.
by Brenda Coultas
When David asked me to write something in honor of Anne’s birthday, my brain went haywire, how to address the various ways Anne has enriched my life? Since meeting Anne in the ’90s, I have watched her “vow to poetry” in action: the bold and brilliant evolution of her work and performance; the transmission of lineage while remaining open to change and welcoming of emerging poets into the space; In relationships, the necessity of repair; negotiations and forgiveness, and the cherishing of one’s peers, elders and poetry communities.
I am away from my books, so I am writing about listening to one of my favorite poems by Anne, “Hopes and Fears.”
In the online Naropa archives I found a recording of Marianne Faithfull’s Lyric Song Writing class from 1988. She’s a natural teacher of the art of songwriting. She knows where she wants to go and starts with a discussion of her own “fear of being judged” and “fear of waking up with a stranger” that she says happened often when she was using. Faithfull asks the class to collaborate on a list of fears, and then she talks about recording Anne’s “Hopes and Fears” for her next record. Faithfull reads the entire poem, about 20 minutes; she slows down the tempo, lets the words sink in. Her interpretation is profound.
For Anne’s 75th birthday, the artist and poet No Land, collaborated with Anne to make The Evening of the Day (https://allenginsberg.org/2020/05/67450/), a film poem, dedicated to Marianne Faithfull in memory of the beloved music producer Hal Willner who died of Covid 19 earlier this year. The film begins with an epigram from Keats, “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” and Faithfull reads from the beginning of “Hopes and Fears” as images of our turbulent times play. The film gathers archival photographs by Allen Ginsberg, along with other footage of these two outriders, Anne and Marianne, as kindred spirits, as sisters, as artists.
There is something about “Hopes and Fears” that reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s short story “Kew Gardens;” part disembodied voices, and characters, snippets of conversations floating in the air.More importantly, I love that “Hopes and Fears” assures us that we are not alone in our struggle against existential elements “Wake in the morning: the clock, the day, job” and that hope, the counter-balance to fear, propels us forward despite our fears. Hope to overcome the dread of loneliness, and even the nervously chattering friend, or hope to see a lover again, and “to be in a well heated place, a place with light.” Hope in the face of rubber bullets and tear gas. Hope to topple old monuments. “Hopes and fears,” we have them.
Brenda Coultas’ poetry can be found in Bomb and The Brooklyn Rail and the anthologies Readings in Contemporary Poetry published by the DIA art foundation; What is Poetry (Just Kidding, I Know You Know) Interviews from the Poetry Project newsletter, (1983-2009); and Symmetries Three years of Art and Poetry at Dominque Levy. This spring she completed an artist residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Fla.
On Anne Waldman’s Trilogy
by Bill Considine
The Iovis Trilogy Anne Waldman Coffee House Press
This extraordinary epic poem, published in portions over decades, and released in its entirety by Coffee House Press in 2011, is some 1,000 pages long. For this review, I have read closely the first-third of the poem, Book I – All Is Full of Jove, exploring the vivid language itself and specific events and discoveries in its narrative.
As Anne Waldman tells us at the very beginning, Iovis is a “mythopoetic epic.” It seeks to “rebuild a psyche – or world,” and to actualize “how women discover the unknown.” It will trace “how the woman poet-mind would fare and flow,” as she “speak[s] out from within her personal narrative.” It is “a woman’s poem made with urgency.”
“I honor and dance on the corpse of the poetry gone before me.”
Anne Waldman
“I honor and dance on the corpse of the poetry gone before me,” she says, acknowledging her debt and challenge in 20th century “masters” of the epic—Williams, Pound, Zukofsky, Olson, and H.D. But in Waldman’s epic, “unlike the men’s, my history and myths are personal ones.” It will require great poetic power, which she promises:
The poet invokes the familiar Judeo-Christian patriarch, who is seductive
in his humility. Her own magisterial power competes with his. … She gets out
of bed each day to greet & study the phenomenal world. And her investigation
is the highest art she imagines. … She will imitate, play prophet & tell allegories
on judgement day as only a woman might.
Iovis is a possessive form of Jove, of the foremost Roman God in the Aeneid, a foundational epic of war. Virgil uses it in the line, “Iovis omnia plena,” meaning “all is full of Jove.” Or put another way: our world is patriarchal.
The frontispiece is a photo of Waldman as an infant in the lap of her father, who is in an army uniform, just returned from the global cataclysm of World War II. Her father is a recurring character, and he may bear psychic wounds of that war that manifest as apparent depression. “Did you ever feel you couldn’t speak? This is why I write,” she says.
She has exposed and guarded her life; whatever poetry survives is the autobiography of a dreamer.
The impelled urgency of the heirs of that conflagration, as new dangers always loom in an age of nuclear weapons (and now in climate change and global pandemic), is fundamental to her quest.
we children of war gone further,
inherit the words, the earth
Stylistically, this is a modern or postmodern work, multifaceted, varied in diction and line, fragmented, elliptical, experimental. Many sections have the rhythm and repetition of oral performance of poetry, as is consistent with the origins of epic itself and with Anne Waldman’s longstanding practice. Its central themes, at least through Book I, are closest to Wordsworth’s Prelude, as an epic story of a mind finding itself—“the history of a Poet’s mind,” as Wordsworth wrote—through devotion to poetry and learning, spiritual search, communion with nature, exploratory travel, and political idealism.
She has both exposed & guarded her life; whatever poetry survives is the
autobiography of a dreamer.
Where Wordsworth had his dear friend Coleridge, Waldman is at the center of diverse generations of poets, who commune with her here in quoted letters and conversations. They are colleagues in what is not entirely a solitary journey.
& they are all the poets in my book
a big heart church
Waldman’s spiritual seeking is more radical than Wordsworth’s, franker and farther-reaching, and her language is unrestrained. We experience the effort and pain of that seeking, racing against world catastrophe. We encounter forgotten gods of distant ages, mere names, as well as gods and symbols of Buddhist traditions. They change form like demigods in fantastical tales of Blake. Another Romantic Idealist looms large here too—the figure of Holderlin that has been so extensively discussed in continental philosophy over the past century, the poet calling for the presence of the old gods in a world emptied of meaning.
The central, gendered, fact of a woman writing an epic, and it being an outcry against patriarchy and its war-state, is richly textured by the subtleties of the poet’s relationships with her father, brother, half-brother, male poets and friends, lovers and husbands. “I want to say to dear male lovers living & dead not anger made this…” Of particular importance is her son, Ambrose Bye, to whom Iovis is dedicated: “Her son, who is willing to grow up to her as she grows down to him, will be her guide. He is trickster, shape-shifter who both interrupts her and goads her on.” The reader sees Ambrose play as a child and inquire and grow in nearly every chapter. This helps ground the spiritual and artistic striving in the parental everyday with its joys and surprises.
“The boy teases her back from her role as sober Superwoman.”
There are pictograms on some pages, which look like archaic inscriptions and enhance the mythopoetic effect.
In Book 1, Waldman often identifies with male world aspects within and all around her, making them her own. At times the spiraling male and female attributes converge in the image of hermaphrodite. This sequence of excerpts suggests her coming into her own:
Dear Iovis:
…You are the sprawling male world today…
You are never the enemy…
A little girl is trapped inside trying to get out of you
and
The myths are alive or a time
I come out full-grown of my father’s split head
and am armed for the battle of love.
and
Iovis…Dear Father who made me so to be a poet on the battlefield of Mars
and
It is you, first of male
It is you I will salute again
& the man in me
and
I speak in a man’s voice wildly discordant
I don women’s clothes
& deny the old religion
With my ironic undercutting, my new haircut
I speak in a foolish tongue
with a bitter flavor of love of them, the men
Exhausted with them, calm is my madness
I spit on my enemy as I am a woman
& as I am chorus I pretend throughout the cycle
Iovis is not bisexual but is as
hermatia, missing the mark
I turn my essence into a myth of origin
& prepare chicken propellers at the stove
and
In order to make the crops grow
You men must change into women.
Other women poets share her complex journey among men. In a dream,
… Bernadette and I guard the life of John Ashbery in a hut
We take care of them, the men, the poet-men,
providing them all night with little plastic ink refills
we wear like charms around our necks
She thinks back to her apprenticeship in her craft. In Chapter VI, she recalls working “backstage quite young – a ‘gopher’ – at the Shakespeare festival in Stratford, Connecticut, observing night upon night Morris Carnovsky’s rendering of the mad Lear.” The play’s clashes among father and daughters, and her own mother’s surprising, tearful identification with an unloved parent, kindle strong emotions. “She goes back to this play again, again as it set her ear to a beautiful male cadence beyond gender & broke her heart.”
Robert Creeley gets special mention in Chapter VII as an influential “master poet, a youthful ‘elder’ whose own work has radicalized poetic thought & possibility. The scientific scrutiny he brings to line, syllable, provokes her own attention, which takes another direction ….He perhaps epitomizes the dangers of the sensuous poet-life. Like her, he wants it all and is frequently travelling.”
It was the love in poetry
& how to be a young woman in poetry
You can’t be sappy
You never touched me
but took love with all the syllables
& were a kind of tough place
for me to get to
A woman all over the place with her words.
What I learn
it is a tough world to be all over in
you love you lose
In Chapter VIII, she writes formally “to catch her breath.” She writes sonnets to stir more memories.
Never retreat from scrutinizing you who are deep
In the sentences although half-dreamed
What she remembers is crawling as a young woman in 1962 into an innermost chamber of the Cheops tomb, a vivid image of spiritual seeking. “You had to crawl through the corridors that held the sand as a death trap. You had to crawl like an animal, like the worm you had first been in your climb up the evolutionary ladder. You had to mix with the dirt and dust so they choked you. … You had to view yourself as witness, as barge, as eyes from another realm. You had to make your journey a sacred one toward the center of the past and toward death and rebirth in an old mythology. … You had to crawl as witness, as first woman, as first girl, as sacrificial victim….”
This presages a rebirth and an initiation into mysteries. As she matures in her craft and journey, many patriarchs at the top of the mountain demand, “Give us your heart!”
But now I’ve taken it out of my aching chest
& wrapped it in linen in the basket
It will be saved for the down-there people.
I will give it to them
I sew myself up
But in the meantime I am hollow woman
& fool them
& I give them a medium red stone
the size of my heart but all the time saying
No no! to excite them further.
A woman
spends a long
time
in the metaphoric water
After an interlude with young Ambrose in Chapter IX, the Cheops temple memories widen in Chapter X into one of my favorite sections, an extended metaphor of living in a parched and desolate desert as an old hag with a patriarchal male companion whom she follows. “She sees him as a foolish prophet.” He “resumes [his] monologue to the bewildered passing by.” Being his confidante “gave her an illusion of power but created further servitude.” She now sees him as a false tradition and does not spare her invective:
… My shelves sag under the weight of your
teachings. My cave is a repository of the
inconsequence of your individuation. …
…The world at large has no interest
in the hostage you’ve become. You are finally
an artifact of speech and dust.
This revelation has a freeing potential, but the old woman is still powerless in this desert.
The problem of darkness and light has not been
solved. I have the despair of a scientist and
am barely legible now on the page.
After this searing vision, the poet travels in Chapter XI with her son to Bali, to study “language, gamelan, religion & ritual.” She finds that, “the ‘male’ here is more dormant deity, integrated into a transcendent yet powerful hermaphrodite consciousness & the dust of her pencil.” The path is not always forward. “She moves in circles, not lines. Why would anyone think the contrary?”
I come into you from a great distance a penniless poetry.
and
I am merely a long rope bound in greencloth,
with a great mane of lalang grass, effigy of the
serpent, mere effigy woman becoming man becoming
woman becoming man again. Mercy!
and
…she writes as
woman-who-had-been-stretched-to-this-point
Her personal growth continues as she feels less competitive and sheds “the seductive submissive ingenue.” She awakens to the boy within her, who is being tested by rough, mocking men, and so becoming a maverick, a cowboy, a young soldier.
I keep up with the best of them. I don’t have to be an object of their desire.
I can feed tigers if I wish and ride on the backs of elephants. … I write to keep
myself pure. …
[I] establish the will of a man coming to life, just coming to life. Male poet on
the brink of his/her fortune … To come before all the goddesses of thunder and
song as a novice, stealing their power. They don’t recognize me. I’ve grown.
There are other quests and discoveries, including a visit to Neolithic caves in France that evokes images of a “hag Neanderthal” and a
… voice as
in a quarry
hieratic
“I, the Matriarch, did exist.”
There are nights writing until dawn, some leaving their mark in strangely punctuated, misspelled verses that trace ecstatic effort.
The price of literary dedication can be steep. In Chapter XV Dead Guts & Bone, a letter to her from an unnamed person states in part, “I sometimes think the Poetry Project ruined both my marriages because it created some adjunct world that had nothing to do with ‘our’ life but was just a weird volatile mix of business, pleasure, friendship & that it ultimately all got in the way.”
Some of the most passionate and compelling verses confront the break-ups of marriages. In Chapter IV, there’s a heart-breaking sonnet, “Break off sad kiss dearest husband,” written “after Donne in a kind of expiration mode.” Chapter XX, Ousted, is likewise devastating.
I see you. I see you. And stick in the blade.
and
It comes to naught but writing, writing.
She turns again to studying Buddhist thought in Chapter XXI, Self Other Both Neither. That thought challenges the idea of a solid existence and posits an ocean-like world where things come together through mutual communication, like ion exchanges in our neurons. As she continues in the next chapter, “There is no first cause, there is no final cause. All the factors we observe in any situation have arisen because of the subtle influence of many factors. Cause & effect when observed closely go back & back.”
‘I’ll lead you to the ocean. I know the way. You will be baptized in my ocean. In my fire.’
Anne Waldman
The final chapter of Book I, Chapter XXIII, is entitled “You Reduce Me to an Object of Desire.” Her struggle to be recognized as a poet has circled back again, to her “ultimate protest,” but now she sees the male godhead as “Fat Almighty” and feels “an acceptance of her power as twin of the male and perhaps the better artist because she does write down her unflinching vision. And is willing to love her enemy.”
From her hard-won vantage, she offers simple advice to cultural workers: “you are mere vessel for lion’s roar.” The real work requires discipline, attention, accuracy, investigation, not only for poetry but to write a citizen’s complaint.
[A]lways move gracefully with your subtle sense of humor to navigate
the dark passage. Seek out the like-minded. You will be a community
of eyes. And you will create the world in your heart.
It is a hope offered in humility. That hope has been earned, as she promised, in poetry of unflinching vision and love.
I’ll lead you to the ocean. I know the way. You will be baptized
in my ocean. In my fire.
Bill Considine (www.williamconsidine.com) is printed matter editor for Boog City. His books include The Furies and Strange Coherence (The Operating System), and The Other Myrtle (forthcoming, Finishing Line Press). His full-length plays include Moral Support and Women’s Mysteries. His latest short play Aunt Peg and the Comptometer was staged at The Bowery Poetry Club in February. A CD of his poems with music, An Early Spring, was produced by Ambrose Bye for Fast Speaking Music.
Anne Waldman photo by Lucia Hinojosa Gaxiola
by Ambrose Bye
Seems like forever ago or maybe just the other day when I began my first frequency recipe for alphabet soup first angel Akilah then mother Anne I always liked making recordings performance was never a destination but thats what/where people seem to like/go/do people who are compelled to stand in front of other people and speak what they write they seem to like having music around or something and it opened many doors and windows from the United Kingdom of Slovakian Morocco to New Belgian Mexico and Southern Spanish Canada cities of mind and states united festivals and fiestivals flights, lights, and fights essential, trivial, and irreplaceable and many a good people have gathered along the way Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed. “Ah yes” I remembered “that unbalanced force of impression” “Mom, why do you put on makeup before you go to bed?” “Because you never know who you will meet in your dreams”
(Mexico City, 2020)
Ambrose Bye (https://fastspeakingmusic.bandcamp.com) is a musician, engineer, and producer living in Mexico City, and is the co-founder of Fast Speaking Music with Anne Waldman. He has produced over 20 albums and frequently collaborates with poets. Recent 2020 productions are “Among the Poetry Stricken” (Clark Coolidge and Thurston Moore) and “Artificial Happiness Button” (Heroes are Gang Leaders). He has worked and performed at Masnaa and the Ecole de la Literature in Casablanca, Le Maison de Poesie in Paris, the fieEstival Maelstrom in Brussels, The Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, Pathway to Paris at Montreal POP 2015, and Casa Del Lago in Mexico City. He has also been involved in the recording studio and workshops at the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University since 2009.
No Land photo.
by Patricia Spears Jones
Anne Waldman makes me think of mothers. Mothers of poets. Her mother often came by the Poetry Project when I was working there. She was stylish in a traditional sort of way, but oh not her mind. Not traditional. And yet grounded.
That too is Anne, but she is traditional, or she holds many traditions in her heart and mind. The traditions of poetry: oracular, rhetorical, lyrical. The traditions of spirituality—her Buddhist practice. The traditions of pedagogy: she is always in many ways teaching with her poems, essays, interviews questioning the ways humans treat the planet, treat each other, treat other creatures. She wants us to find the answers and correct these massive injuries and injustices.
And there’s the tradition of festivity, hospitality—the welcomes she gives to all, no matter status. There are few poets on the planet who carry so may ways of being in one glamorous body, but Anne does it, intense, creative, disciplined, generous, compassionate and yet protective, enraged, engaged and demanding that we seek a just and loving world.—the Elder Woman, wise and wise cracking. The Elder Woman stylish and styling. It is grand to be in her presence for there will always be wine, cheer, music, and possibly gossip.
Patricia Spears Jones (www.psjones.com) is an African-American poet, playwight, cultural critic, educator, anthologist, and activist. She is the author of four collections, most recently A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems and five chapbooks. She is the 11th recipient of The Jackson Poetry Prize. She has taught at CUNY, Barnard College, Adelphi University, Hollins University, Naropa University, University of Rhode Island, and Rutgers University.
I was an M.F.A. student at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa Institute circa 1994.
The second year was very difficult, and I struggled to come up with a thesis and a build a coherent manuscript. Then my thesis advisor refused to work with me. Anne Waldman was my angel and agreed to read it all. How shocked I was, working odd jobs and living at my parents house in 1995, to get her dense and beautiful letter in response to this body of work, affirming the practice of writing. I last saw Anne in 1997 at Shambala Center in NYC. I told her I was pregnant. She said, “Oh my!” and started fanning herself. Then we did the meditation.
—Karin Falcone Krieger
Karin Falcone Krieger (karinfalconekrieger.com) lives and writes in Oyster Bay, N.Y. She is a staff writer at Able News, covering disability rights.
