"Her work ranges, with equal power and feeling, from the personal love lyric and deep moral contemplation to protest against the infernal industry and mindless destructiveness represented by nuclear weapons factories.”
It is probably safe to say that Anne Waldman is one of the
most important poets of her generation. She started her career as a poet after
attending the 1965 Berkeley Poetry conference, where she attended reading by
Charles Olsen, Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg. It was particularly the latter
who proved an important influence in her life. Yet it would be foolish to call
Waldman simply a Beat poet. Hers is instead a very unique style, strongly influenced
by Tibetan Buddhism, and its form and presentation are much closer to oral
poetics and performance-related poetry.
Waldman founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied
Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado together with Ginsberg in
1974. A year later, she was “poet in residence” with Bob Dylan’s
famed concert tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue. From 1966 until 1978 she ran the
St. Mark’s Poetry Project and has published a total of more than forty books of
poetry.
My below piece is based upon her famous “Fast Speaking
Woman” (1974) part of which can be heard on PennSound
Links:
http://jacketmagazine.com/27/index.shtml
(Mainly dedicated to Anne Waldman’s work)
OPEN // DARING
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