Monday April 2nd and it’s Anne Waldman‘s birthday. Each year we try to keep up (somewhat) with her astonishing energy (“making the world safe for poetry”) and productivity (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here and here – and don’t miss this posting) – but it’s no use! – we can’t keep up with her! Still, from this past year, a few highlights:
Here she is, back in September of last year, at Emory University (in conversation with poet, Kevin Young (now director of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture).
And here she is at Emory, the previous day, (introduced by Rosemary Magee, director of the Stuart A Rose Manuscript Archives and Rare Book Library, and Aaron Goldsman, co-curator of Emory’s extraordinary “The Dream Machine: The Beat Generation & the Counterculture, 1940–1975” exhibition), giving one of her typically-electrifying high-energy performances/readings.
Keeping some track on her recent work. Coffee House Press brought out in 2016 her Voices Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born
and in 2017, (from Pied Oxen, New Jersey), there appeared this stunningly beautiful limited edition
and coming out this year – (just in time for Naropa’s 44th Annual Summer Writing Program!) – from Penguin Random House, a brand new book of poems, Trickster Feminism
From the publisher’s web-page:
“In her new collection, Trickster Feminism, Anne Waldman looks to the imagination of mercurial possibility, to the spirits of the doorway and of crossroads, and to language that jolts the status quo of how one troubles gender and outwits patriarchy. Waldman summons Tarot’s Force Arcana, the passion of the suffragettes, and various messengers and heroines of historical, hermetic, and heretical stance. Mythopoetics, shape shifting, quantum entanglement, and chance operation play inside the field of these intertwined poems, which coalesced out of a year of protest with some texts penned in the streets.”
Yes, Anne, not only as poet and performer, but as teacher, provoker, tireless cultural activist (never more urgent than the present).
We wish her a very happy seventy-third birthday.