Anne Waldman

Anne Waldman reading last month (March 12) at the Lowell Centennial Celebration for Jack Kerouac – photo by Todd Prussman

Anne Waldman‘s birthday today. Anne Waldman turns 77.

Here’s Anne interviewed back in August 2019 by Kasper Bech Dyg in connection with the Louisiana Literature festival in Humlebæk, Denmark – “Poetry As A Performance” – “My allegiance”, she declares, ” was to this more experimental, open, wild mind poetics” – (she  speaks here of early inspiration from Charles Olson) – “In performance you never know where it’s going to go, if you feel like the energy is going down, you jump into something else.”

and here’s Anne, at the same event, giving her “advice to young writers” – “Read a lot read, read, read, go, you know, pick someone who you are drawn to and read all their work, read in that way, you know, read in that attentive way, rather than… And don’t read for the fashion, or what you think you should be doing…”

More talks and interviews and observations are available – here

Here’s Anne from a reading from November last year introduced by Charles Alexander

and, with sax accompaniment, that same month, at the Brooklyn Folk Festival – here

For more readings by Anne – check out  here and here and here and here

– and here – and  here

and the extraordinary gathering available on Anne’s PennSound page 

From her 2018 conversation with Stephanie LaCava for Harpers:

“Urgency I feel urgent about everything, right now. All the safety nets down… How much karmic trauma can this nation (America) hold, rise up from, and atone for?”

Yes, urgency and the activist drive of Anne remains paramount.

More of Anne from the Double Change interview (recorded in Paris in 2016)

& here‘s Anne last year, reading and read to, in a tribute put out by Vincent Katz and the DIA Foundation (featuring contributions from Emma Gomis, Patricia Spears Jones, Rachel Levitsky and Eleni Sikelianos)

Outrider, Alystyre Julian‘s documentary, some time in the making, is something we’re very much looking forward to – will we get to see it soon? – (a brief glimpse of it can be seen at the end of this gathering – here)

Looking to the future (always looking to the future) Anne will be appearing later this month at the Religion and Psychedelics Forum organized by Chacruna. Here is her announcement about that event:

“Greetings my name is Anne Waldman and as a practitioner of the long poem I am interested in trance states and the rhizome of time and kinetic ever-shifting personae, altered states of consciousness that shift to the comedy realm of elemental teaching and transition .. What are we doing to our world? Are we even a world yet? As Antonin Artaud asked, heart broken staring at the rubble of World War II, questions of love, of memory, of shelter, of cosmic reality, throes of future time.”

Birthday Greetings to the irreplaceable Anne Waldman!

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