ANNE WALDMAN
in conversation with SANDRA SIMONDS
Between September 29th and October 25th of 2023, writer and critic Sandra Simonds, Visiting Literature Faculty at Bennington College, had the following conversation over email with Anne Waldman ’66, Distinguished Professor of Poetics at Naropa University and the author of numerous books, most recently the nonfiction volume Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House Press, 2023).
SANDRA SIMONDS
In Bard, Kinetic you ask yourself how to “honor and describe the countless events, readings and performances with some of the most controversial and outrageous thinkers and writers.” Can you talk about what initially drew you to American poetry countercultures and how those countercultures formed in relation to poetry within academia (particularly in the 1960s-70s)?
ANNE WALDMAN
I was interested in the spiritual investigations into Buddhism and Sufism that Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen and Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac and others had made. Burroughs’s dream work and auspicious synchronicity and cut-up. I was part of the rage and protest against the Vietnam War. I was interested in entheogens. In performance, in music (jazz and John Cage and I studied Indian singing briefly with La Monte Young). The films of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage. Stan visited Bennington when I was a student there, traveling with poet Robert Kelly. I thought there was to be some huge welcoming response in academia for the sixties radical avant-garde, but no one was taking Gertrude Stein seriously, and Pound was controversial because of his antisemitism. Of course, Black Mountain—that great experiment in artistic practices and wild mind pedagogy—had a short-lived but radiant and generative history. It was an inspiration for Naropa. Visual art, performance, poetry all strong. Josef Albers, Franz Kline, de Kooning, Merce Cunningham, M. C. Richards, Rauschenberg, Charles Olson. And they were growing their own food! All-night discourse. More of a utopian project.
There were few other MFA literary programs outside Iowa Writers’ Workshop when we started Naropa. The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics didn’t sprout from an English department. Because of my work with The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church I was ready for the “hundred-year project” near the Continental Divide. Diane di Prima had edited The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka and founded the Poets Theatre. Allen was a cultural icon who had magnetized a whole youth culture with his breakthrough poem HOWL. I had already co-founded Angel Hair Magazine and Books, had edited SILO at Bennington College, and had worked at the Project for more than a decade. Published books, etc. We were all quite serious, and committed to the idea of cultural intervention.
SANDRA SIMONDS
Part of the initial spirit of Naropa is captured in the idea that it would be a place “in which poets could learn about meditation and meditation could learn about poetry.” I love how excited you and Allen Ginsberg were about this idea. I’m wondering, decades later, what do you think meditation learns from poetry? And in what ways is Naropa both a non-academic and academic project?
ANNE WALDMAN
Meditation can instruct one in the act of shaping mind, refreshed language, letting go of obsession and habit. Feeling more interest and compassion for “other.” Trusting original thought, not systematic, didactic, or clichéd. Or piety. Rewiring the aural logopoeia-mind. It seems to me we have a problem with contemporary interpretations of dharma when the descriptions for meditation seem to arise from a “new age” word bank, unless you are a serious scholar and know Sanskrit and Tibetan or Japanese and have an open experiential side, a more spontaneous side for how image and sound arise in poetry the world over. I try in Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble to explore some Buddhist concepts. It’s a long continuous poem in segments, seeing the stupa as a kind of memory vessel, reliquary, as it sits in its beckoning magnificence, and one circumambulates in a traditional manner. Borobudur teaches through imagery, through the narrative stone carvings of Jātaka Tales, for example, and the more lengthy Lalitavistara Sutra.
The Borobudur stupa in Java is a blueprint for the Mahayana—middle path. I travelled there as a pilgrim in 2000. And intended to “write it out”: the journey, the aspiration, in a new ambulatory form, drawing on teachings from Tibetan Buddhism that are reflected there. There’s a short piece “Dharma Gaze” in Bard, Kinetic which reflects on the psychology of identity and image from the point of view of impermanence, and “I Wanted to Tell You About My Meditations on Jupiter [Not all Celestial Bodies Revolve Around The Earth]” is a poem/prose hybrid piece also in the book that invokes the great “recitals” of Ibn Sina, as well. These heady “religions” love discourse.
We are “academic” at Naropa in that we give accredited degrees and expect inspired manuscripts of poetry and prose, and serious reading habits and mutual support of fellow students. Curiosity, shared knowledge. Discourse! Academia as “a grove of trees.” We are interested in original scholarly work, and also provide a non-competitive environment. At Naropa you are apt to meet writers you may work with for the rest of your lives. We talk about lineage as a blessing. What will we know of poetry and be able to practice passionately? It’s so good to have the company of our own AV archive, the palpable record. I have another long poem that investigates and goes to battle for archive: Gossamurmur. Wisps of melodious wisdom that breathe until the end of time.
SANDRA SIMONDS
When Vincent Katz was presenting his work on mimeo journals from the 1960s and 1970s (I believe that these were the decades that he showed us) at Naropa, one of the things that really struck me was that you were often one of a handful of women published in those magazines. I wonder what that was like, as a feminist? Was it a lonely experience to be the only woman or one of the only women published in the magazines? Obviously, a lot has changed since then, but this gender disparity was really striking to me.
ANNE WALDMAN
It was difficult and it was lonely at times. But I was fortunate to have the opportunity to curate and edit and publish at such an early age. And bring others along. Edit anthologies, and later publish more work by women and engage in ancillary and overlapping fields. I published Bernadette Mayer’s first book Moving, printed at the printer near Bennington (Ronnie Ballou?) who did menus, that sort of thing. Covers for magazines and books by women artists such as Yvonne Jacquette, Jane Freilicher, Donna Dennis, Mimi Gross. Friendships with artists Meredith Monk, Laurie Anderson, Patti Smith. And so on. All moving “it” forward. Appreciate all the progressive female and beyond-binary voices like Eileen Myles, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez. And Muriel Rukeyser, Denise Levertov, June Jordan. Patriarchy is still scary and the fascist enterprise is very much stalking the premises, and dominated by men who want to have power over women’s bodies and minds and imaginations and also destroy LGBTQ+ liberation. We have to make places for others and next generations. Armed with Sappho, and the Therigatha (Buddhist forest nuns) and HD whose book Trilogy inspired my Iovis Trilogy, and my mother’s own work and translations from French and Greek. Nelly Sachs. And all the wild surrealist femmes, and back to the author of Genji. And on and back and on.
SANDRA SIMONDS
I love the section of your book called “Feminafesto”, particularly your correspondence with the poet Karen Weiser. I love the line from Karen’s letter dated June 22, 2005, where she compares you to the Colorado River she is swimming in: “You are filled with this kind of will and… it has given you the momentum to write what you write and push aside accepted narratives like an arm against onwards water.” You have an extensive exchange about writing out of the “Bardo.” Can you talk about that a little for people who may not be familiar with Buddhist traditions? The idea of “flow” seems to be a point of connection to poetry (like a river).
ANNE WALDMAN
The word bardo is a translation into Tibetan from the Sanskrit “antarabhava”: “antara” is “between,” and “bhava” is “place of existence.” Bardo, as I like to (poetically) translate, is a journey, an aporia, an incubator, the space between thoughts. Between death and life. Becoming and becoming and becoming. All phenomena are continually becoming. It is a thread that is a kind of perception of that flow you mention. It’s an imagination; the word “tantra” actually means thread. Tibetan Buddhism talks about the intermediate stage of existence. After death. And the travel of the consciousness without a physical body, after death. Through that path, that corridor. And before it takes form again.
It’s traditionally a journey of forty-nine days. And can be dark and threatening based on your previous deeds, and so on (your karma, and also the karma of your time).
So it’s the stage of right before, or right after, that shift of the consciousness that continues, but between two stages. There can be hallucinations, impulses of past actions that dominate and frighten the floating mind. Or the purposeful mind. Time is suspended. You might have practiced meditation or perhaps you have already been preparing to find your way through dream yoga or spiritual instruction. But there’s no guarantee. I have a song entitled “Bardo Corridor” that speaks of having “an ego and two grams of hash” and traveling through “a corridor of pyramid dream power,” “a spook-like corridor.”
I was always receptive toward this deep-felt inclination, or “will,” as Karen Weiser says, to want to be making my own way. Determined. And trust the non-theist view of existence. Not about salvation or finding a safe hiding place. It’s a lonely but fully energized path. And you’ve probably had a lifetime of mistakes already and yet here you are, a precious human body which is a vehicle of communication and empathy and poetry! Don’t tarry! Wake up further, poet. You old urn singer!
I wanted to experience liberation of mind.
Proving something to the guys, perhaps, my mother, showing feminist independence. So hitchhike to Mexico underage, travel alone to Greece, to Egypt also at a young age. Read a lot. Know more. Being an all-women’s college made Bennington a period of incubation away from invasive eyes. Later surviving cancer. Wanting to be vocal politically. Performing my poetry in public space. And so forth.
A freedom from critical scrutiny as one is evolving. I also like the version of the meaning of bardo as something, as in media res—in the middle of things, or the beginning and the end of things. A wild moment you can jump right into, you are already prepared, “going on your nerve” as Frank O’Hara puts it. You took the vow a long time ago. I realize these long poem-books are like bardos, fields of investigation with an evolving consciousness. Things live and die. The long Iovis Trilogy, Manatee/Humanity, Gossamurmur, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, Trickster Feminism, which opens with a funeral ritual, are all in this mode of exploration. Maps, recitals, rituals (sadhanas, sutras), day books, libretti, archives, epics.
I didn’t want to be part of a trend or poetic “school” as such, actually. Or anything too redundant, predictable. So a blessing always honored to be associated with the second generation New York or Beat school, and Olson, the Black Mountain historian, as a shadow mentor. Always turning toward the experimental modes, free writing, the “alap” of Indian raga. And it was funny discovering that these covens of poetry were also naturally fierce about their own identity and originality as investigative, and as forming clusters of exploratory poet-power and realizing how serious we all were and entangled in a way, yet different and distinct and interested in what we were all doing. And that felt unique in the sense of making something non-institutional happen, in such droves. Intervening on the culture. Wanting to help build communities with all that magic of language and willpower. Interzones. To have sanctuary in the midst of the insane capitalist business and endless brutal war.
“Arms against onwards water.” I love that quote from Karen. And there are more floods on the way. And artists. Poetry could invade, flow into the culture and change the frequency, the politics, wake up and put off Endtime.
I could go to a zone that included the unknown, the cosmos, the dark times, my own dreams, the sound of something or someone I loved, people talking, dying, in ritual, in encirclement, in performance. Suddenly there were people to talk to in my poetry—and in Bard, Kinetic, including the dead. We were here to make an offering; an archive for the future. “To help wake the world up to itself.” Allen Ginsberg’s line, and also his lines about doing the work to ease the pain of living: “everything else, drunken dumbshow.” My motto was, “Keep the world safe for poetry.” If it’s not safe for poetry and the imagination, where are we in our humanity?
SANDRA SIMONDS
You have a piece in your book called “Bodhisattva Frank.” Diane di Prima writes a lot about Frank O’Hara in her memoir. Can you talk about the overlap between the Beats and the New York School? Where was the aesthetic overlap, and what about the social overlap?
ANNE WALDMAN
The conversation, the high talk, the curiosity, the overlapping love affairs? Queer life, the urbanity, the looking deeply at things on the one hand, and enjoying surface of things as a painter might. The walking-around-all-night adventure like Apollinaire’s “Zone.” Art, music. The interdisciplinary interests, the long poems of Kenneth Koch and Ginsberg. The relationship between Frank and Baraka. The second-generation New York School felt more akin to the Beats. With drug experimentation, lifestyle, and in my case, study of dharma, ritual, trips to India, Mexico, and later Japan. Political activism. Montage. Diane was involved with her Poets Theatre that produced plays by the great James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery. It’s a longer discussion that might include the radical cut-up work of William S. Burroughs and that of Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath and Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets. Joanne Kyger and Philip Whalen, associated with the Beats, were such good friends to the second-generation New York School poets. An interest in Asian forms and in French poetry’s connection to surrealism. The relationships with visual artists: Jasper Johns, de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Warhol. It’s an enormous rhizome.
We loved their poetry and correspondence through small press publishing, the evolving poetry reading scene and venues in New York and around the country and abroad as well. These categories are fast or necessarily accurate, but they are handy for a sense of “a company of friends” (Robert Creeley’s phrase) of the different groups that were categorized in Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology. Both Diane and Gary Snyder told me they didn’t want “Beat” on their gravestones. This was when I was editing the Beats at Naropa anthology. I was publishing a lot of this same school of folks in The World magazine at The Poetry Project (I edited thirty issues), and also in the publishing realm of Angel Hair Magazine and Books with Lewis Warsh. It’s a big story of publishing and curation as well for me and the enormous sense of community in all this.
We were all many things, many composite poet selves.
SANDRA SIMONDS
I love the eclectic nature of Bard, Kinetic, how your book moves between memoir, letters, poetry, and beyond seamlessly. Can you talk about how you organized the book?
ANNE WALDMAN
It went through different permutations but there were the distinct sections in mind and I tried to make them work as smaller investigative constellations in and of themselves. I vacillated about including “Sketch.” I think it works, although it needs a Part Two. And one of my editors encouraged including my mother Frances LeFevre’s intense letter written to me at Bennington at the very end of the book. An early poem at the beginning, “Teen Languishing at Cove,” is an engaging bookend to her letter. I wanted it to be a more personal book. I wanted a hint for the magnetizing relationships, and some interview bits from my son Ambrose Bye and a recent poem for my granddaughter Kora included. And the letter from Etel Adnan.
SANDRA SIMONDS
You talk about this a bit in “Sketch,” but I would love to know more about what ways Bennington shaped or even mis-shaped your early ideas about writing and being an artist in a community of artists.
ANNE WALDMAN
Being an artist in a community of artists was perhaps a challenge since I was at the All-Women version of Bennington. And as I say in Bard, Kinetic, there was the feeling of being treated like a dilletante at times, rather than an outright full-on poet or artist. We did want the mentorship of some of our teachers and of course we were fledglings. It was complicated. We respected many as our mentors. And without gender variety, it was a bit unreal. But the benefit as I mention earlier is a chance to be in the proverbial incubator without the pressure and distraction of the guys, although most would be allies. And develop close if not intimate friendships with my cohort. But we had male faculty dominance and lack of boundaries back then. And that was a difficult misshape. An insult to our depth and intelligence and our sexual autonomy. Maybe the challenges made us better feminists and poets.
But self-directed learning was the key. The heart of the mission. And dancers came in the thirties and forties to chart the course of modern dance. And in the forties and fifties, visual and performing arts. And it was seen always as a fertile ground for writers. The music evolved with the likes of free jazz geniuses like Milford Graves and William Parker. The off-campus semester was always generative for me. I was in Greece and Egypt one semester.
Bennington helped in part inspire aspects of the design of the Poetry Project and some of the pedagogy for Naropa like the reading series, the translation track, a comprehensive library, study abroad. One was lucky to be in a creative and politically progressive place as well. I was editing SILO my last year. And the canon was already changing towards more diversity. I was never forced into requirements. Some of the faculty were outwardly gay, and safe with this at the college and in community. I admired anyone who knew anything about poetry or poetics or literature. William Blake was essential both at Bennington and Naropa and was first taught in our poetics program by Ginsberg.
We also felt the urgency of the sixties with Vietnam, racial disparity, and white patriarchy. A need for feminist action.
Both Georges Guy and Claude Fredericks were inspirational to the Angel Hair project as it evolved. By 1966 I had a job inventing and helping found the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, which I became director of in 1968.
These former lives feel like transitory bardo states, do you know what I mean? They were visionary efforts for a counterculture environment that fostered and nurtured poets and poetry and community with a hope to change the frequency of the competitive Capitalocene and the scary Anthropocene. These spaces gave us sanctuary for our own survival and purpose as creative beings.
This ethos hopefully continues with whatever time we have left.
SANDRA SIMONDS
Can you talk about performance and your incorporation of song and music in general when you read your poems? I loved that when we were at Naropa, your son played music on stage and accompanied you and your granddaughter kept walking towards the stage. It was really wonderful to see—like I was witnessing the art being passed down from one generation to another.
ANNE WALDMAN
Thank you so much. I observed the communal Deer Dance at the Taos Pueblo and rituals in Java and Bali where whole families are involved in and with the performances. In Bali there’s the person who manages the oil lantern during a “wayang kulit” (a shadow puppet play) and another might care for the gamelan instruments that must be honored and blessed with regular pujas as well. Or the mask artist who creates personae for the dancers, taking these “living” presences out of their cases. One has a role in all this animism and magic. Children of Buddhist lamas may become practitioners and teachers themselves, receiving direct transmission from their parents.
My Buddhist teacher Jadrel Rinpoche trained his daughter as a lama in Nepal. She became a true “wisdom holder.” I am hoping my granddaughter Kora Bye Anaya, born in Mexico, whose mother is a videographer and father a musician, has all the benefits and advantages of a long relationship to and with the arts. And will know some of the traditions of the astonishingly rich culture in Mexico, her home. We play a game where we open a pizza restaurant in Condesa with snappy aprons. But she already seems interested in being on stage, as you saw at Naropa, and is often fearless with her ballet dancing (we also choreograph “Rain and Storm” dances) and poetry readings. Her first line of a poem about the moon is, “The moon is disappointed.” My son Ambrose traveled with me to performances in Hawaii, Japan, Indonesia, and Europe when he was young, and studied gamelan. He later played gamelan in college. And accompanied me musically on piano primarily, and synth as he got older. It is astonishing that we had that kind of rapport and sense of continuity as mother and son.
My own family, as I was growing up in bohemian Greenwich Village, had a bit of that sense of lineage although no one ever insisted on this as such. But I knew from an early age that love of art and poetry and music were the most important things in life. I felt that naturally, it wasn’t forced. But I was lucky it was encouraged and shared.
In terms of orality or song I don’t think it is “incorporation” in a methodical way, after the fact. The song or its presence as sound, and resonance and meaning is already in me, as if I have already witnessed its potency and it needs to get beyond my body into public space. Not stuck cerebrally. So some of musical pieces “arrive” as being or having particular “modal structures” first. There’s also the sutra that takes form as “Extinction Aria.” There’s that thread of sound with pitch that imprints, and I can move around that with my voice and the intensity of the logopoeia, communicating a state of mind. As “I am a g-g-god” or “The sky is not blue and will not ho-o-o-o-ld.” As with Jaguar Harmonics, I was going back to something that I had already “heard” which was a mantra with the words “person woven of…” This writing came after an all-night entheogen ceremony. And that composite “person” had come across Beringia and was also stepping into a void.
SANDRA SIMONDS
I love your book Manatee/Humanity. Can you talk about this project?
ANNE WALDMAN
Manatee/Humanity is also an investigative study and a way of trying to gaze through the rhythm and time and song and perilousness of the manatee existence, a creature that goes back many, many years, land to water, water to land, whose closest relative is the elephant. Who also has extraordinary empathy and more gray matter in the brain than humans. The book is a long voyage and took over three years and initially arose from an encounter with an ancient female manatee scarred with motor blade cuts and monofilament lines at the aquarium in Miami. It’s all in the book in various sections. A Buddhist rite is invoked on the nature of time (Kalachakra) with manatee as central icon, the sections of that visualization continue over a few days. They include putting a blade of kusha grass under one’s pillow for tracking dreams, and so on. The dual-voiced litany that is in the secret part of the initiation is a kind of call and response.
There are different voices in the book. It ends with “Without Stitching Closed the Eye of the Falcon.” I love to perform this with Ambrose. (We still need to make the album of this book!) There are wolf walk-ons and lemur as well and the cover of the book has drawings by Kiki Smith of a woman wearing a wolf skin and also another one of caressing a wolf.
The manatee evolves from the order of sirenia near Africa in the Eocene. The term comes from the Haitian word for breast: “manati” (“breast like humans that suckled their young”). There are sections in the long poem named “Ontogeny,” “Soteriology & Apotheosis.” And so on… We had a public reading several years ago online with many readers, held on Manatee Appreciation Day in March, to raise funding for the continuing support of these animals. And want to do that again. It is a community performance, and ritual and celebration of this endangered animal who also stands in for others.
SANDRA SIMONDS
Is there anything that I haven’t asked you or anything that you didn’t talk about that you would like to talk about?
ANNE WALDMAN
The current horrific wars with such huge suffering and loss of life and threat of nuclear “solutions” are a challenge to our sense of what is to be a civilization. How to be a vibrant citizen, as a thinker, artist, teacher, parent, lover, friend, cohort, and activist in the amazing fraught adventure as we face very dangerous times with the rise of fascism everywhere and the disasters of climate chaos and nuclear annihilation. We are clearly not prepared in any coherent way and battle lines are drawn and there is still so much hatred and intolerance toward “difference,” and antagonism against women with Roe, and the war against LGBTQ+ individuals and communities that include very young people. All the hideous phobias.
Ladling water from flooding in my home in New York City not long ago, I felt concern about all those without water in war-decimated countries and was imagining future water wars. Starving Gazans of water, clearly a war crime. Killing civilians whatever side, a crime. Killing for water. The endless samsara of aggression altogether. How can we fix our dystopia? How can we take care of the basic needs of our living planet. How much suffering must we create to destroy one another and ourselves? Do we want to pass down wisdom, or some manifesto of suffering and doom? Why must this existence be such an ongoing tragedy? A mindset of cruelty. … is it time for our extinction? A reset? Will we all be reborn as hungry ghosts or bodhisattvas? It’s an urgent question to muse and ponder and I would encourage (right now, as we follow the ongoing atrocities of Israel/Hamas and Russia/Ukraine) we continue to study what we love and know, and never abandon others, always tithe our time for the benefit of others. Don’t feed the demon aggression. And don’t lose our minds! Where are the Peace Czars of every nation? The spiritual leaders? The wise philosophers? Many are crying “Ceasefire” all over the world as I edit this. We must I think be self-appointed wisdom-holders outside the War Machine. That’s the assignment. I am working on a manuscript entitled Mesopotopia, riffing off Mesopotamia, the cradle and the grave of civilization.
SANDRA SIMONDS
I have one more question. You seem to have an encyclopedic memory for people, places, and things. What do you see as the role of memory in Bard, Kinetic and what role does memory play in poetics?
ANNE WALDMAN
Memory is a great mirror and a life in poetry can be momentous—how you came to certain poems, what started a path for a book—what is your very particular poetics, what that time frame is, the shape. The duration of the text, language details, prophetic dreams, crises like armed guards at the Baghdad airport, an encounter with an animal in an aquarium, telepathy, how someone you adore responds, what are the circumstances and when you are a founder for multi-valent poetics projects too, keeping it going, working in community, keeping the public space performative: what are the things you are all doing for the first time as you collaborate or invent an alternate community (“antithesis reality”) or occasions with your restless desk syndrome, traveling, unpredictable and exhausted, stuck at an airport in the middle of the night in Nepal or North Carolina, imprinting on your psyche because it is so verbal, aural, frightening perhaps? Why are you here in these contexts of poetry? Why schooling at Bennington? Meeting so many of the avantgarde there, and the more conservative poets. Often fine teachers, and examples of the complicated poet-animal species. Later Edwin Denby, Diane di Prima, Cecil Taylor, John Cage, Bernadette Mayer, what to say, I love you? Memory is essential to metaphor and linked to high moments of vibratory “connectivity.” “I’m coming up from the tomb, men of war!” In the movie about me and my world in these past and recent years, scheduled to release in 2024 and titled Outrider—there’s a recent memory recorded: just as I’ve gotten news of my grandchild Kora’s birth in Mexico City at the Vernal Equinox, March 20, 2020, during pandemic lockdown, I tear up. Or break down, really. How to get to her. But moved to sing to her and do some Buddhist practice. Her mother Natalia is much more challenged, body on the line. Family, both by birth and chosen, whom I work with often, is so important to everything I do. It’s powerful to have that visual memory, the wee babe in Mexico City, her face a question on a screen; how did I land here, she seems to be asking. And the sequence of poems that evolved from that moment, but also what’s in my body continues to vibrate. That emotional thread to new life reverberates, becomes song, poem, “in relation,” and another vast world below the border. The harm to children in these wars that dominate is our worst mirror to the depravity we are in and tolerate.
I appreciate cultures and communities that work together, and in their various innovative artistic lineages. Memory like that is important in Bard, Kinetic. Some pages document my mother Frances LeFevre who left America when she was nineteen and lived in Greece a decade. A detail in my father’s army outfit started a thousand-page epic, The Iovis Trilogy. Involved in both liberated and complicated darker times, trying to balance dangerous energies of passion, ignorance, aggression, the triad that dominates our existence. Also memory can be in the questions and answers, in the research you do. In what the world is, with a probe of the “colors in the mechanisms of concealment.” Future memory, the destruction of our planet, the consciousness held in some form or other. The view of myriad world systems. How we feel this acutely with the world turning quickly under our feet, as we look up into an unbridled cosmos. It’s all still so full of vitality. Even on the precipice. One Buddhist text speaks of a world system we are apparently in called Endurance. We’ll see about that!
I am excited about poetry archives written and recorded, such as the voice of twentieth-century Maria Sabina, legendary curandera barefoot her entire life, tending her milpa in rural Qaxaca, Mexico, and healing the sick. Prosody wants you to remember all the syllabaries of rule and insight and dimension. The strophes and anti-strophes, meters, symbols. The links that peer into the astonishing architectures and communities of poetry. And the continuous occupation and obsession of poeisis—“making,” that goes back to the beginnings of human mind and song and dance. Libraries! Supposedly “chaos” meant “without a library” in Chaldean.
ANNE WALDMAN is the author, most recently, of Rues du Monde, English and French (Apic Press, Algeria 2024); Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House, 2023), a memoir with poetry, essays, and interviews; and Para Ser Estrella a Medianoche, English and Spanish (Arrebato Libros, Madrid 2021). She is co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat 2022). The Grammy-nominated William S. Burroughs-inspired opera and movie, Black Lodge, with music by David T. Little and libretto by Waldman, premiered at Opera Philadelphia in 2022. Waldman is one of the founders and a former Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, and a founder of the Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where she is the Artistic Director of the annual Summer Writing Program. A new volume, Mesopotopia, is forthcoming from Penguin in 2025, in addition to the album Astral Omens (Fast Speaking Music/In Earliest Morning).
SANDRA SIMONDS is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Triptychs (Wave Books, 2022), and one novel, Assia (Noemi, 2023), which won the 2023 Vermont Book Award in Fiction. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
