Anne Waldman

Anne Waldman: Triple Aries, April 2, 1945. Father fought Nazis in WWII in Germany. Mother, Frances LeFevre Sikelianos Waldman, spent a decade in Greece in the Delphi Ideal community of Greek poet Angelo Sikelianos. Was living alone on MacDougal Street, Greenwich Village, NYC, husband at war in Germany. Grew up in New York City's "bohemian" Village. Anne sat on great singer Lead Belly's knee as a baby. She grew up with books of poetry, first poetry reading at Izzy Young's Folklore Center, fell...See more

Anne Waldman: Triple Aries, April 2, 1945. Father fought Nazis in WWII in Germany. Mother, Frances LeFevre Sikelianos Waldman, spent a decade in Greece in the Delphi Ideal community of Greek poet Angelo Sikelianos. Was living alone on MacDougal Street, Greenwich Village, NYC, husband at war in Germany. Grew up in New York City's "bohemian" Village. Anne sat on great singer Lead Belly's knee as a baby. She grew up with books of poetry, first poetry reading at Izzy Young's Folklore Center, fell in love with jazz and progressive politics. Blake, Rimbaud, Steve Lacy in her extended family. Started writing seriously as teenager with Beat generation and New York School outside her door. College education of literature, performance, loved Blake, Romantics, psychology studies, but more engaged with reach of world literatures, oral world epics, litany, chant, trance, shamanism, entheogens. Modernists, Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Franz Fanon, James Baldwin, open form New American Poetry of Beats and New York School and Black Mountain. Was a decade's-working founder and director of The Poetry Project in 1968 at the historic Dutch Reformed St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, home to poets, dancers, artists, filmmakers, painters, activists. Has always championed the bringing of poetry, as well as cultural activism, into public space. Co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics program at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, on the spine of the North American continent, with Allen Ginsberg and with Diane di Prima in active early years. Waldman continues to work during summers as Artistic Director of the Summer Writing program and guardian of its audio/video literary archive. She was arrested at Rocky Flats with Daniel Ellsberg and Allen Ginsberg in the 1970s, reading poems that challenged deliveries of plutonium for the manufacturing of pits for nuclear warheads. She was part of protests during the Vietnam War, the Chicago Seven trial, and all the doings of counter-cultural intervention in subsequent times--Occupy Wall Street and so on. She works with the Rizoma Collective in Mexico City. Author of over 60 volumes of poetry, poetics, and anthologies including the 1,000-page epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in The Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press), which won the Pen Center Literary Prize for Poetry. Penguin has published her books over many years, including Trickster Feminism, Manatee/Humanity, and Marriage: A Sentence. Her album SCIAMACHY, which Patti Smith has called "exquisitely potent, a psychic shield for our times," was released in 2020 by Fast Speaking Music in NYC. Recent publications: "Para ser estrella a medianoche," Become a Midnight Star (Arrebato Libros, bilingual, Madrid, 2022); anthology NEW WEATHERS: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (with Emma Gomis, Nightboat, 2022); and Bard, Kinetic, (Coffee House, 2023). Grammy-nominated opera BLACK LODGE, with music by composer David T. Little, premiered at Opera Philadelphia Oct 1 & 2, 2022. See less