Anne’s son Ambrose reads to his daughter Kora, Anne’s first grandchild, “Assent,” from First Baby Poems (Blazevox [books]), one of the poems his mom wrote for him when he was a baby.
by Natalia Gaia
In the fall of 2018 a group of poets, including Anne Waldman, and musicians visited El Centro de Capacitación Musical y Desarrollo de la Cultura Mixe (CECAM) in Santa María Tlahuitoltepec, Oaxaca, for a two-day poetry and music collaboration. This Natalia Gaia film documents the meeting of the minds.
Natalia Gaia is a photographer living in Mexico City. She has worked for El Economista, Casa del Lago UNAM, and currently at the Secretaría de Salud. She also works as a freelance videographer.
Anne and Alice in Florence, 1979.
by Alice Notley
I met Anne in 1969, I was with Ted we’d traveled from the Midwest
We climbed the stairs at 33 St Marks Place to the first floor she answered the door
wearing a blue mohair cap She said Hello Boss to Ted
He told me afterwards they’d all started calling each other Boss, after seeing Cool Hand Luke
She never took the cap off! I said and Ted said She’s always got something on her head.
She comes to visit us in Wivenhoe, Essex, England in oh 1973 . . . 4? She and I go
for a walk through the village of Wivenhoe. At an open-air stall she buys
a bunch of watercress, holds it like a bouquet and then begins eating it voraciously –
watercress? Watercress! Walking and eating watercress.
Around 1978 I’m at Naropa She invites me to meet her to be interviewed
one evening, where? I arrive in the room first and wait She bursts through the door
and leaps at me like a dancer making a roaring noise — there were a lot of dancers
at Naropa then Jim Cohn comes in, conducts the interview, my first ever. I mean she
came through the door like a fast lion.
She Ted and I go to Florence together in ‘79 and stay at a hotel on the
Arno, full of murals mosquitoes noise We awaken and check out, hail a cab don’t
speak Italian but Ted tells the cabbie, we need a quieter hotel because Anne is pregnant –
a lie. He drives us to a sanatorium on the outskirts of town. A medical institution
white buildings and restful green grounds . . . We have to tell him to take us back to
Florence.
A few years later she and I trade Buddhas Ted is no longer among us and I give her
a Buddha that Joe’d given Ted so she gives me one back, her tiny traveling Buddha.
Once in the 90s in Boulder Anne needs to buy a car I go with her to the used-car
lot, she already has a car in mind afraid it’s an old-lady car I say something like,
Just buy it, it’s just a car And she does And is grateful I said that and tells me so often.
That time in 1969, there was a dress shop below her apartment, on St. Mark’s wife of a
painter was the proprietress An outfit in the window – blue skirt long with red
roses and silky black top Ted bought for me . . . Recently Anne and I were trying to remember the proprietress’s name Howie Kanowitz’s wife, she’d said, she was an artist.
Mary Kanowitz, Anne! I have since remembered and take this opportunity to tell you.
I’m turning 75 soon myself but we’re the youngest people I know! That’s the most
important thing I have to say, Who really is younger than us? We both have so much to do that no one else can . . . It doesn’t matter. It’s just a car. I myself don’t even drive.
Is it a car or a Buddha? Does the poem name it? maybe. Happy Birthday, Anne!
Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Ariz. in 1945 and grew up in Needles, Calif. in the Mojave Desert. She was educated in the Needles public schools, Barnard College, and The Writers Workshop, University of Iowa. She has lived most extensively in Needles, in New York, and since 1992 in Paris. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, and of essays and talks on poetry, and has edited and co-edited books by Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver. She edited the magazine Chicago in the ’70s and co-edited with Oliver the magazines Scarlet and Gare du Nord in the ’90s. She is the recipient of various prizes and awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Award (for Mysteries of Small Houses, which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), the Griffin Prize (for Disobedience), the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize (for Grave of Light, Selected Poems 1970-2005), and the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a collagist and cover artist. Her most recent books are For the Ride and Eurynome’s Sandals.
by Lee Ann Brown
Birthday scarf for Anne Waldman
Sun streams between leaves
of the big Oak
straight towards me at an angle
I change positions
to see the light pulse through again
the cat wants my attention
like all the details of the world
look at that river mist rise
farther off like a Chinese scroll
of rivers & mountains for women
or a Tibetan tanka
with Tara contorting, enlightened & writhing
You are writing by keyboard
Hand painted scrolling
When I think of you
I think of energy in motion
of mind heart moving in passion
Searching, researching, reaching
Spinning out your particular
Takes on the flame of word world
Dynamo Flowing Flower – Whitmanesque
in your language
Femme, familiar & fiercely new
lighting the fire of our hearts
of words – margins of books
Overflow with erudition song
Anne you stand for so much
in my heart as unrepeatable example
to go on playing your heart ray word
strings paisley linen tablet patterned
rising up over mountains
then walking down 6th avenue
only once do I remember
being with you on the subway
both of us surfing
holding onto the straps – coursing
& I saw how tall you stood
under the Village
one never to be contained
We are usually in rooms together
with others we know or will soon
or outside on the way to somewhere else
Gamine beauty always
Loved & loving so many
flowing steady in poetry’s material dress
I caress this particular diction
Your seasonal song
the world belongs to you
as cosmic bubbles
multiply again & again
a spherical song
spun out colors – rainbow!
somewhere on the mountain
Of your immense presence moving always
I bow to you
I tremble with how you’re
Telling it like it is
again & again
a spherical song
Anne you stand for so much
as cosmic bubble
being with you on the subway
both of us surfing
dynamo Flowing Flower – Whitmanesque
farther off like a Chinese scroll
femme, familiar & fiercely new
flowing steady in poetry’s material dress
gamine beauty always
hand painted scrolling
holding onto the straps – coursing
I bow to you
I caress this particular diction
I change positions
in my heart as unrepeatable example
In intellect investigative
In your language
I saw how tall you stood
I think of energy in motion
I tremble with how you’re
lighting the fires of our hearts
loved & loving so many
like all the details of the world
look at that river mist rise
multiply again & again
Of mind heart moving in passion
Of the big oak
Of rivers & mountains for women
Of your immense presence moving always
Of words – margins of books
Or outside on the way somewhere else
Overflowing with erudition song
One never to be contained
Only once do I remember
Or a tibetan tanka
Rising up over mountains
Searching, researching reaching
Somewhere on the mountain
Strings paisley linen tablet pattern
Straight towards me at an angle
Spinning out your particular
Spun out colors – rainbow!
Sun streams between leaves
(the cat wants my attention)
To see the light pulse through again
Telling like it is
Takes on the flame of word world
The world belongs to you
To go on playing your heart ray word
Then walking down 6th avenue
Under the village
You are writing by keyboard
Your seasonal song
We are usually in rooms together
With others we know or will soon
With Tara contorting, enlightened & writhing
When I think of you
Bill Berkson, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Westhampton, N.Y., fall 1968. Joe Brainard photo.
by Lewis Warsh
We met at the Berkeley Poetry Conference, summer of 1965. Robert Duncan’s reading. Anne was visiting her high-school friend Jonathan Cott, I was with my friend Michael Bernsohn, who knew Jonathan when they were both at Columbia. They introduced us. We sat together and after the reading we went to a party in the Berkeley hills, and talked into the night. People meet somewhere, if they meet at all, and that’s what happened to us. Then two nights later we met again at the Charles Olson reading. It was the reading where Olson interrupted himself every time he started a poem and went off on a tangent, insisting that it was more interesting to hear a poet talk than hear him read his poems. People started walking out, including Duncan, who was sitting in front of us.
Anne had an angelic, innocent, world-weary, always questioning expression on her face, attentive to everything. She had grown up in a brownstone on MacDougal Street in Manhattan; now she was entering her senior year at Bennington. I had grown up in a 3-1/2 room apartment in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx. I was entering my last semester at CCNY. It took me an hour by subway to get down to Washington Square Park, which was right around the corner from where she lived.
A few days later she visited me in San Francisco and we took LSD. It was her first time, second for me. Allen Ginsberg was reading at Berkeley that night, but there was no way we could get there. Instead we wandered around San Francisco. I could see the lines of her face melt in the sunset as we sat on a park bench. She looked like a child, crying and laughing all at once, but most of the time we both felt giddy just to be together.
She arrived a week later at my apartment with a suitcase and we decided to go to Mexico City. We didn’t really have a plan. We hitch-hiked from San Francisco to San Diego where we stayed a few nights with an old friend, Jon Walden. Then we boarded a rickety bus for the endless trip to Mexico City. We found a hotel in what turned out to be the red light district. There were always couples coming and going up and down the stairs day and night. We took LSD again. We looked out the hotel room window and the buildings were shaking in the distance. I thought we were hallucinating, but it was actually a minor earthquake. The buildings were shaking.
We stayed for two weeks, took a bus to Laredo, Texas, and hitch-hiked back to New York. Our longest ride was with a melancholy middle-aged man who reminded us that marriage was “a two-way proposition.” He was getting divorced. We stayed overnight in a motel in Indianapolis, just to get some rest, and eventually we rode in the cab of a truck into the city. We parted on the steps of Anne’s family house on MacDougal Street. I didn’t come inside to meet her parents. That would happen later.
A year later we were living in a four room floor-thru apartment on 33 St. Mark’s Place between Second and Third avenues, and in May 1967 we were married by Rev. Michael Allen at St. Mark’s Church, where the Poetry Project had just started. Anne looked beautiful in a shimmering white gown which trailed behind her as she walked up the aisle. Ted Berrigan was my best man. Anne was now the director of the Poetry Project, and we often stayed up all night at the church running off a new issue of The World on the Project’s mimeo machine. We were also publishing Angel Hair Magazine and Books, never moving at less than top speed through our days and nights.
Anne at 20. Older, wiser, perhaps, after all these years, but in many ways unchanged. We talked for an hour on the phone the other night—she was in Boulder, I was in New York—crying a bit over our various frailties, and the state of the world, and for a moment it was as if no time had passed at all.
Lewis Warsh’s (www.lewiswarsh.com) most recent books include Piece of Cake, in collaboration with Bernadette Mayer; A Free Man; Out of the Question: Selected Poems 1963-2003; Alien Abduction; and One Foot Out the Door: Collected Stories. He has taught at The Poetry Project, Naropa University, Bowery Poetry, and SUNY Albany. He was founding director of the M.F.A. in poetry at Long Island University (Brooklyn). He is editor and publisher of United Artists and Books.
by Devin Brahja 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
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.”
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.)
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.
by Janie Heath
Another day, Autumn 1977
Here comes the Student Punkette. Here limps the Student Punkette, actually. On my block. Uniformed in motorcycle jacket, leather mini, animal print fuck-me shoes with gold spikes.
“I’m limping ‘cause I just got fucked all night by Gator.”
The Student Punkette laughs a couple of jovial hucks. Gator refers to a ubiquitous lead singer of a ubiquitous band.
“Wanna come up to my place?”
Cool. Her place is that place with a big picture window and a green sort of a balcony just one story above the sidewalk on my own fabulous heavenly block. That’s her place! And here I am, going up the stairs. And here I am, listening to her story.
“I am from Locust Valley.”
“Wow. They’re like grasshoppers, right? We have a lot of those where I come from, too.”
She laughs her hucking laugh. Not a condescending laugh, just amused I don’t know. She has to explain that Locust Valley is a very wealthy conservative type place.
“You mean like Thurston Howell III kind of people?”
Huck huck.
“Yeah. They talk like this.”
She says that with that snotty lockjaw kind of talk I had only ever heard people on TV talk.
“You sound like that—a little—sometimes,” I say. “But you also have kind of a regular New York accent.”
“Yeah, I get that New York thing—y’know, y’know—from the guys I’ve been sleeping with.”
Huck, huck. She goes on.
“They’re kind of alike—I mean, the Locust Valley accent and the New York accent are both what they call non-rhotic.”
“Did you say ‘neurotic’?”
Huck, huck.
“I’m probably that, too, but ‘non-rhotic’ just means you don’t say the ‘r’ in words like ‘car’.”
“Oh, kind of like deep south Scarlett O’Hara talk.”
“Yeah, that too.”
‘Whatever way she talks is filtered through her gravel truck of a windpipe, a gutturality earned with hours of smoky screaming conversations over live rock music.’
Whatever way she talks is filtered through her gravel truck of a windpipe, a gutturality earned with hours of smoky screaming conversations over live rock music.
“It’s kind of hard to imagine you being anything like those country club types.”
Huck huck.
“Yeah, I know. I have changed. I was a cheerleader.”
I try to imagine her as a rich cheerleader type.
“I’ve gained weight, I know. . .”
Maybe I can see it. She does have big tits and a snub nose. Here I am looking at her and trying to imagine her bursting with all-American robust sexuality while we yack away, standing near the door inside her apartment.
Me, trying not to stare at the apartment—so many New York apartments are so odd. Like maybe this was some kind of shop once, the way it is laid out with the big window facing the street.
“You are not at all pretentious,” I say.
“Yeah, well, most people from Locust Valley are.”
“You mean like what they call a WASP?”
A lot was written about WASPs when I was growing up. I thought it meant people like me. After all, we were white, had an English last name, and when we went to church, it was not Catholic. The letters stand for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Don’t they? That’s what people like my family considered a regular person. But here in the northeast WASP means something more—definitely not just a regular type person. Not even just rich. Rich, and only from certain families.
“Well, my family is Irish and sort of Catholic, actually,” says Punkette. “But Locust Valley is a WASP-y kind of place. I never really fit in.”
I do not know much about Long Island but I keep meeting people in this city who are from there. Suburb of mystery to me. Unlike north Jersey, where I have been.
“It’s a really creepy place, with all sorts of things percolating under the surface. Like this secret, high class men’s club I used to work at when I was sixteen. I was a stripper there.”
“Is it legal to be a stripper at sixteen?”
“Of course not. I lied about my age.”
“Didn’t they ever ask you for proof?”
“Nope. One time I mentioned the name of it in front of my father and he was apoplectic that I had ever even heard of the place. And I was working there.”
Huck huck huck.
‘…the Locust Valley accent and the New York accent are both what they call non-rhotic.’
‘Did you say neurotic?’
“Weren’t you afraid he would go there and see you?”
“Nah, not his type of thing.”
“He wouldn’t have thought it was your type of thing.”
“Yeah, but he just wouldn’t. Go to a place like that. He’s a real nose to the grindstone, self-made type.”
“So what does he do?”
“He’s a lawyer. Real big in conservative politics there.”
Student Punkette, majoring in English, says she writes papers about that really great band where I think the lead singer looks like a Praying Mantis. About their songs and the dichotomy between sex and death.
“What dichotomy?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“No. Not to me.”
“Well, you know, sex is about creating more life and death is the end of it.”
“Oh. Yeah. I don’t even like to think about sex in terms of creating life. I try so hard NOT to get pregnant. I mean, I don’t like pregnancy or death. Does it have to have anything to do with those things?”
“Well, in a classic, metaphoric sense, that is what it is all about.”
Yuck, I think.
Clomp. Clomp. Stilettos on stairsteps. She has a roommate.
“Meet Sandra.”
Another punkette in a leather mini and gold stilletoes shakes my hand, corrects the introduction.
“Trikamona.”
“Oh, yeah, she calls herself Trikamona now.”
“Umm, do you know what that means?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. I just made it up. Sounds cool, huh?”
I remain silent. Ah, the lyrical names scientists give to microorganisms. I guess I read too much feminist health literature—I know these words.
The three of us still stand near the door. Everything is green. Medium green, not pale-yellow green like the description of trichomoniasis discharge in the feminist women’s health book. Medium green, same shade as the balcony. There are green steps on one of those funny little wind-y staircases you see in apartments in movies.
“Me and Trikamona met because we’re both in love with the same guy.”
The Praying Mantis guy!
“He’s so cute.” Trikamona, mooning over Praying Mantis. Germ in love with bug. A romance made in a petri dish.
“There wasn’t any conflict about that?”
“Oh, we were bitter enemies at first. Then we got to be friends.”
“So now you both see him?”
“No.”
“So you gave him up to be friends with each other?”
“No . . . I guess he just started hanging out with me more. Trikamona and I just stayed friends.”
“I have a new boyfriend now.” Trikamona squeaks up. “He’s in a band, too.”
“Great. Which band?”
“The Spirokeets. Don’t you just love them?”
Trikomona and the Spirokeets! I try not to laugh. I never heard of The Spirokeets. That bums her out.
“They’re from Montreal.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“We are in love. Me and Spiro. He’s taking me back with him.”
“You’re moving to Canada? Don’t you need a visa or something?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we’ll get married. But I am going back with him.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Two weeks.”
“And he asked you to marry him?”
“Well, no. But he might.”
“When are you going?”
“Next week.”
“Wow. I just met you and you are going to Canada.” Me, turning to the Student Punkette, “What are you going to do about a roommate?”
“We’ll see.” SP does not seem too concerned.
Anyway, what about her and Praying Mantis?
“So you can still see him and be with Gator?”
“No.”
Pause.
“I don’t see him anymore.” I can tell she means Praying Mantis.
“Well, what happened with that?”
“I don’t know. He just—he just became a rock star, I guess.”
Awkward wistfulness for an eternal millisecond.
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“So, uh, Trikamona, are you also from Long Island?”
Trikamona is kind of quiet and forlorn.
“Uh, no. My family is, um, really different.”
“Trikamona is the only one in her family who has never been in jail.”
Student Punkette says this like a bragging mom.
“Wow. Even your mother?”
Jeez, that was not tactful of me. I managed to keep shut about the trichomoniasis thing, now I go and blow it.
“Yeah, my mom too.”
“What did she do?”
Oh, yeah, that’s me. Soul of tact. But I am actually impressed. I mean, it’s her mom. What did she do to get arrested?
“I don’t know, maybe she wrote a bad check or something.”
“Oh.”
Maybe back in my hometown, when I ran with the local delinquents, this would have seemed more normal. But two college years with suburban brats has changed that. I am mildly shocked. I try to imagine my mother in prison.
“Once when we couldn’t pay the rent Trikamona wrote her father and asked for money. He wrote back, ‘you’re a girl, you can turn tricks.”
Huck, huck.
“We sent him back a bag with some dog shit in it.”
I am standing up and sitting down as much as I am when I am alone in my own apartment. Here in the Punkette pad I am up and down because the two of them stay near the door. The door is near the opening to the galley kitchen and also near the big picture window framing the ever-dimming night. You can see the rectangles of lighted storefronts now it is dark. All of these things are on the opposite side of the apartment from the one sofa which despite its shot springs is the most appealing place to sit. It is not the best place to hear the girls or see their faces and besides, I am a restless sort who paces my own small flat like a caged tigress and I am excited to be here.
Janie Heath (https://www.facebook.com/JanieHeathFiction/?modal=admin_todo_tour) has worked in the newspaper, film, and music industries. She grew up in a small town in Texas and now lives in New York City. Her work has been published in Big Bridge, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and Brink. An essay of hers is included in the liner notes for the box set, G Stands for Go-Betweens Volume II. She is currently writing a novel.
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.