WALDMAN, Anne (Lesley)

---

Nationality: American. Born: Millville, New Jersey, 2 April 1945. Education: Bennington College, Vermont, B.A. in English 1966. Family: Married Reed Eyre Bye in 1980 (divorced); one son. Career: Assistant director, 1966–68, and director, 1968–78, St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery Poetry Project, New York. Since 1974, founding co-director, with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado. Associated with Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1981–82, New College of California, San Francisco, 1982, York University, Toronto, 1984, Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1985, University of Maine, Portland, summer 1986, and Naropa Institute of Halifax, Nova Scotia, summers 1986,1987. Co-director, Schule für Dichtung, Vienna, Austria, 1999. Member of the board of directors, Giorno Poetry Systems Institute, and Eye and Ear Theatre, both New York. Awards: Dylan Thomas award, 1967; Cultural Artists grant, 1976; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1980; Shelly Memorial award, 1996. Address: Naropa University, 2130 Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80302, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

On the Wing. New York, Boke, 1967.

Giant Night. New York, Angel Hair, 1968.

O My Life! New York, Angel Hair, 1969.

Baby Breakdown. Indianapolis, Bobbs Merrill, 1970.

Up Through the Years. New York, Angel Hair, 1970.

Giant Night: Selected Poems. New York, Corinth, 1970.

Icy Rose. New York, Angel Hair, 1971.

No Hassles. New York, Kulchur, 1971.

Memorial Day, with Ted Berrigan. New York, Poetry Project, 1971.

Holy City. Privately printed, 1971.

Goodies from Anne Waldman. London, Strange Faeces Press, 1971.

Light and Shadow. Privately printed, 1972.

The West Indies Poems. New York, Boke, 1972.

Spin Off. Bolinas, California, Big Sky, 1972.

Self Portrait, with Joe Brainard. New York, Siamese Banana Press, 1973.

Life Notes: Selected Poems. Indianapolis, Bobbs Merrill, 1973.

The Contemplative Life. Detroit, Alternative Press, n.d. Fast Speaking Woman. Detroit, Red Hanrahan Press, 1974.

Fast Speaking Woman and Other Chants. San Francisco, City Lights, 1975; revised edition, 1978.

Sun the Blond Out. Berkeley, California, Arif, 1975.

Journals and Dreams. New York, Stonehill, 1976.

Shaman. Boston, Munich, 1977.

4 Travels, with Reed Bye. New York, Sayonara, 1978.

To a Young Poet. Boston, White Raven, 1979.

Countries. West Branch, Iowa, Toothpaste Press, 1980.

Cabin. Calais, Vermont, Z Press, 1982.

First Baby Poems. Boulder, Colorado, Rocky Ledge, 1982; augmented edition, New York, Hyacinth Girls, 1983.

Make-Up on Empty Space. West Branch, Iowa, Toothpaste Press, 1984.

Skin Meat Bones. Minneapolis, Coffee House Press, 1985.

Invention. New York, Kulchur, 1985.

The Romance Thing. Flint, Michigan, Bamberger, 1987.

Blue Mosque. New York, United Artists, 1987.

Helping the Dreamer: Selected Poems 1966–1988. Minneapolis, Coffee House Press. 1989.

Not a Male Pseudonym. New York, Tender Buttons, 1990.

Lokapala. New York, Rocky Ledger, 1991.

Fait Accompli. N.p., Last Generation, 1992.

Iovis: All Is Full of Jove. Minneapolis, Coffee House Press, 1993.

Troubairitz. N.p., Fifth Planet Press, 1993.

Kill or Cure. New York, Penguin Poets, 1994.

Kin. New York, Granary Books, 1997.

Iovis II: All Is Full of Jove. Minneapolis, Minnesota, Coffee House Press, 1997.

Au Lit, Holy or Transgressions of the Maghreb, with Eleni Sikelianos and Laird Hunt. Erie, Colorado, Amokeproff Press, 1998.

Homage to Allen G. New York, Granary Books, 1998.

Young Manhattan, with Bill Berkson. Boulder, Colorado, Erudite Fangs, 1999.

Recordings: John Giorno and Anne Waldman, Giorno, 1978; Fast Speaking Woman, S Press Tapes, Uh-Oh Plutonium!, Hyacinth Girls, 1982; Crack in the World, Sounds True, 1986; Made Up in Texas, Paris, 1986.

Other

Editor, The World Anthology: Poems from the St. Mark's Poetry Project, and Another World. Indianapolis, Bobbs Merrill, 1969–71.

Editor, with Marilyn Webb, Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute. Boulder, Colorado, Shambala, 2 vols., 1978–79.

Editor, Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan. Minneapolis, Coffee House Press, 1988.

Editor, with Andrew Schelling, Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1994.

Editor, The Beat Book. Boston, Shambhala, 1996.

Translator, with Andrew Schelling, Songs of the Sons & Daughters of Buddha. Boston, Shambhala, 1996.

*

Critical Studies: By Alicia Ostriker, in Partisan Review (New Brunswick, New Jersey), spring-summer 1971, and Parnassus (New York), fall-winter, 1974; by Gerard Malanga, in Poetry (Chicago), January 1974; by Richard Morris, in Margins (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), October-November 1974; by Aram Saroyan, in New York Times Book Review, April 1976; The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America edited by Ann Charters, Detroit, Gale, 2 vols., 1983; "Shamanic Ritual As Poetic Model: The Case of Maria Sabine and Anne Waldman" by Daniel C. Noel, in Journal of Ritual Studies (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), 1(1), winter 1987; by Lee Bartlett in his Talking Poetry: Conversations in the Workshop with Contemporary Poets, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1987; Anne Waldman issue of Talisman (Jersey City, New Jersey), 13, fall 1994; "Gods and Heroes Revised: Mythological Concepts of Masculinity in Contemporary Women's Poetry" by Christa Buschendorf, in Amerikastudien (Mainz, Germany), 43(4), 1998; "Iovis Omnia Plena" by Alice Notley, in Chicago Review (Chicago), 44(1), 1998.

*  *  *

"Poetry should be a joy … a pleasure …. The whole thing ofthe suffering poet … it's so unnecessary. You can get so intense that you can't produce. There's work to be done." Whatever else it may or may not do, Anne Waldman's poetry keeps this promise. Most often her poems find their inspiration and shape in an implicitly celebratory display of the diverse pleasures of things—life in New York, world travel, sex and friendships, even her own fantasies and dreams. The high-spiritedness, rich humor, and eager openness that sustain her work derive less from the idealism than from the affluence of the 1960s. But then she cannot help it if she is lucky. What matters is that she improves upon her luck, for the imaginative persuasiveness of her best poems recalls Whitman's insight that "the most affluent man is he that confronts all the shows he sees by equivalents out of the stronger wealth of himself." For Waldman poetry justifies itself as the show of life, and the pleasures it offers are inherent in the process whereby the impulses of life are released into living forms.

If Waldman dismisses the "suffering poet," it is almost always in the spirit of one for whom suffering can properly show itself only indirectly, as the elusive and finally unappeasable passion that both nourishes and chastens the poet's creative play—"There is work to be done." Nowhere is this element in her work more crucial than in her best-known poem, "Fast Speaking Woman," which goes like this, with very little variation of pattern, for nearly six hundred lines:

I'm a witch woman
I'm a beggar woman
I'm a shade woman
I'm a shadow woman
I'm a leaf woman
I'm a leaping woman

This remarkable piece could never hold our attention for six lines, let alone six hundred, were it not for its creative recklessness, at once desperate and playful. This is chiefly a matter of Waldman's splendidly uninhibited aesthetic opportunism, so that each line seems generated by some underplayed excess of the matter and movement of preceding ones. The imaginative power of the poem inheres in the immediacy of its language yet remains apart, its freshness not just unharmed but actually enriched by any show it has made.

"Fast Speaking Woman" is something of a tour de force, but even in its extremity it is characteristic of the aims and methods of Waldman's work. She is committed to the classic American mode of open-form, or projective, verse, though, despite the idiomatic pungency and speed of her language, the music of her poetry is closer to that of song than of speech. This is especially true of the "chants" in the collection Fast Speaking Woman, but even her less regular pieces, the best of which, I think, are in Baby Breakdown ("I Am Not a Woman" and "Conversational Poem") and, especially, Journals and Dreams ("Blues Cadet," "Mirror Meditation," "My Lady," and "When the World Was Steady"), strike the ear not as speech but as snatches of song stitched into even more various musical patterns, a variousness in music that answers to and resolves a rich contradictoriness of feeling and perception.

From its beginnings the open-form tradition has rested on some form of belief in the correspondence between inner and outer worlds, but one must go back to Whitman to find precedent for Waldman's astonishingly unstudied practical faith that discoveries of the self are revelations of a world and vice versa. The epigraph to "Fast Speaking Woman" is "I is other," and what counts in her work is less the tenacity than the nonchalance of her exploration of the truth of this. She neither apologizes for her egotism nor worries about her otherness. Coming from any poet this is exhilarating, but coming from a woman it is truly revolutionary. The word "woman" appears in nearly every line of "Fast Speaking Woman," yet it receives little rhythmic or semantic stress. It is treated simply as the natural point of departure and return for each excursus of self, as if nothing better could or need be imagined than to create a world in terms of a woman's acts of self-realization. The form of the poem gives the game away more unmistakably than others, but it is far from the only one to play that game with extraordinary inventiveness and grace.

—John Hinchey