Threadworms, From the Archives: Anne Waldman
MIND PROTECTION WITH ANNE WALDMAN
Clem MacLeod speaks to poet Anne Waldman on paying attention to stories, people and archives; and passing them on through writing and performance.
Photography by No Land
Anne Waldman is a poet, performer, professor, literary curator, political and cultural activist and a founder of The Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church in NYC. One of the only female poets involved in the Beat Generation, Waldman set up the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg, with the aim of educating future poets on the social uses of poetry for a damaged planet.
Waldman grew up with an early exposure to Eastern religion, and garnered an appreciation and knowledge of meditation practices that would go on to inform her work as a poet and performance artist. When we chat over Zoom, it’s been 4 days since the war between Gaza and Israel has tragically commenced. We discuss the social use of poetry, and how we can use our time as writers and artists to fulfil our role as global citizens.
Clem MacLeod: Thank you so much for giving me the time to chat with you. I’ve just finished reading your book Bard, Kinetic but I feel like all of the questions I previously wanted to ask you were answered in the book.
Anne Waldman: That's funny, I'm glad. It’s got some life to it. It’s a memoir of sorts. I remember hanging out with various poets (Amiri) Baraka and Allen (Ginsberg), and journalists would come to interview them and they'd ask the same sort of questions. Are you a communist? What is your favourite colour? What's your favourite poem? Who killed Malcolm? Allen was just like I’ve already talked about that 20 times.
Actually, after reading the book and after everything that's going on in the Middle East, it feels like it makes sense to direct this interview into talking about the social uses of poetry and how we can use our positions as poets and writers to benefit society in any way. I also want to talk about the uses of poetry in relation to ecology and the natural world, given the theme of this issue. In the last line of your piece, ‘Feminafesto’, which is in your upcoming book New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive, but also in Bard, Kinetic, you say that poetry is not empire building, it de-territorialises empire. Do you think that poetry is an effective and accessible way to communicate solutions and partake in activism?
I think so. I think it can be for certain poets to communicate an ethos. I feel it from (Anna) Akmatova, (Amiri) Baraka, Adonis, and Layli Long Soldier. I also think there's a further demand of how you're engaged in community as a poet, even if you require a lot of privacy and a particular kind of space to make your work. I think there's an aspect of deeper investigation; investigative, documentary work. It's a dharma view that as you strengthen your consciousness to be receptive, in a sense that it is part of a kind of archive, if you will; the consciousness of your time. Working with the epic mode or whatever it is - what is the story of your tribe? What is the story of your wars? Your psychological state? The raising of consciousness? And I think we're very much stuck in this paradigm of paralysis and what we're needing is a new leap forward with our mental and spiritual capacity. Evolution of the brain! You can blame capitalism - it's very numbing in ways, and you become habitually patterned to a certain expectation. We went through this with Hurricane Sandy not that long ago, and what have we learned? We have to be more involved with care of our cities. Why are the subways still flooded? Why can't you get to where you need to go? How do you take care of your neighbours? These crises don't necessarily change people's ethos.
So where you are is so important. And then you need retreat. You need to go off and work with what is coming up and what you’re learning, what you are kind of inclined to in your own proprioception, how you're feeling out the world without a lot of didactic thought or necessarily the science that you might need to really unpack things.
I use the term “infrastructure poetics”, and not everybody is equipped for this, but if you look into certain societies of the past - I've worked in Indonesia with the Naropa programme there, and we had a programme in Nepal for a while - but if you look at how other people have worked through the years with a sense of artistic lineage; family, what you pass on, who's good at what, this person is better at this, this person is better at that. And so being in touch with individual talent and heart in a way, what are people passionate about? What is their desire – your desire? What are the luminous details of other’s art, age-old traditions and roles. It's very complicated. It's not like there's somebody in charge figuring it out and appointing you, the outsider. But we are entangled as a species.
You need to go off and work with what is coming up and what you’re learning, what you are kind of inclined to in your own proprioception
It depends on the inclination of the work you do; what it's for or with, but how it is in relation. The Sanskrit term for it is ‘pratītyasamutpāda ’ or the interconnectedness of all sentient beings - not sentient in a necessarily enlightened way - but just sentient communication. With the perspective of the Wheel of Life, it's the human realm that has the most potential for communication through language. We have this extraordinary gift and we’re abusing it all the time. The outer shell of our world can't even talk anymore.
It's interesting because I feel like when you put it that way, it's so clear that everyone needs to figure out their lineage and what's important to them, to really feel what they’re meant to be writing. But living in a city, and this must be the same for you in New York, you look around and you see that everyone is so disconnected and they're just thinking about their phones or thinking about making money and gaining power and capital. So how does the individual navigate that? How do we navigate all of the things that are going on in the world that are so tragic and horrific and hone in on what is going to be the most beneficial for the global community to write about? How can we do the most good with our work? You are doing the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. What is our role as creative poets and writers though?
There’s a freedom at the Kerouac School, and it was started by poets. Have one purpose, as a poet, which is to stay with your imagination, your consciousness. Then it’s about tithing your time. Tithing time where you put 10% of your time (or more) towards whatever the specific thing is that needs attention. It could be investigative poetics where you're actually doing research and talking to people, but that comes through this web of other things, like travel. It could be a cut-up of five things going on at once in a text or performance, which is my rule - there has to be at least five different things going on at one time in some kind of creative work. So you keep adventuresome in your thinking. I’ve worked primarily on founding communities or what we’ve called after Hakim Bey, “temporary autonomous zones”, helping creative communities - that started with very little - to keep going.
it's the human realm that has the most potential for communication through language. We have this extraordinary gift and we’re abusing it all the time
There's tons of information on the endless problem (not-)solving of Israel and Palestine, and it's been that way during my whole lifetime, so many people who've tried to crack the knot, which is geo-political. But so tied up in a complicated history and occupation, and for all these different reasons. Going way back. The carving up of empire by the UK after World War 2. The Balfour. According to the Old Testament the Jews and Muslims are cousins. And you can't reshape everything that’s wrong but you can respond, seek the truths of power and oppression and injustice. You can study, be informed as a reader, and witness. If you have a public voice, call things out. Go to the poetry, the culture, try to absorb the truths there. But the immediate problem is the brutality of endless war, the young people and children are suffering the most. It's not changing. They are the victims of bad decisions and the ruling of others. The terrible suffering of those trapped in Gaza which is like a prison camp and under the rule and thumb of current Israeli hegemony has certainly helped create this horror. It is so tragic. The condition of lives, then poverty, the blockade. My first husband was Jewish American. He and many Jews cared about Palestine. Allen Ginsberg, also Jewish, was in touch with the Jews for Peace in Israel. And now we know wonderful Palestinian poets and artists and scholars have Palestinian friends. Palestinian-American friends. No one knows the hearts and experiences of all the people involved, so many years… It has to be studied, the karma of all these fraught and samsaric histories. The Nazis (my father fought in World War 2), the holocaust, and the difficulties in resolving homelands. The whole world seems implicated now. We have many psychopathic leaders and those with "skin in the game”. The armaments, the war machine. Russia, China, all of the Middle East...Will this war help liberate Palestinians, will it demilitarise the region or bring more Islamophobia and Antisemitism and death into the world? Or a total Armageddon? A world war? How do all the parties measure up when it comes to tolerance and compassion? Empathy and love? How does Hamas feel about women’s rights, gay and transgender rights? Where is the common ground to save the ailing planet and our consciousness and imaginations? We need to think and act with a more evolutionary view, not eye for an eye. Ceasefire now.
Do you think that it's our duty as creative people and poets and writers to comment on these things?
I think it’s our duty to pay attention. It's up to you. It's not simply ‘commenting’ because the commentators are commenting all the time. But you should also see the undersides, the complexity. Know the history, as I say. Not just the master narrative. The so-called fogs of war. Why did this happen? Because this happened, that is happening. But it's not the poet's job to necessarily tell the story unless you're in the gnosis of it - drawn to a certain kind of aspect of the struggle. Take the time and work with other people as best you can, and do work that makes you feel empowered and strong and that you're in communication with yourself. I wrote an enormous epic (The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment) that in a way started with my father coming back from World War 2, and a photo where I am 9-months-old and toying with a button on his uniform.
I think of it as this kind of spectrum, and it's like the people that are completely ignorant to it and are just reading it as the news and not connecting those stories to the human experiences (on one end), and then there's the people that dedicate their lives to others (on the other end). So I feel like what you are saying is that you can exist in a place where you can harvest the experiences that have had an effect on you and that you've paid attention to, and put them into your creative work to explain that narrative and that way of thinking; and be like a catalyst for all of these things. So you pay attention, you be compassionate, and empathetic, and let it seep out of you with your work, and hopefully it’ll influence someone along the way?
Indeed, maybe you’re making things with your language, your music, whatever it is - just be yourself, but don't be ignorant. Maybe you just have a thread, a trace of insight, pass it on. Don't be asleep while it is burning down. You talk about the elements - water! We're going to have water wars soon. This is extreme the way that our planet is right now, it's extreme. There are many more bodies in the world, there are so many desperate situations all over.
Keep daily notebooks. Lists. Visit the Naropa archive online. I also have an album called Sciamachy up on Bandcamp I recommend. Find a cohort that worships poetry. Go to the woods. Sit by oceans when you can.
Do you feel like people have become more selfish? You talk of this time of “perpetual self-curation” that we’re living in in Bard, Kinetic. Do you think that this time is removing us from nature, ecology, and community? Do you think that this is causing a struggle to see the self as a fluid part of a larger web of life?
I can't speak to these big generalisations, but yeah. My observation is that we know we've learned something from the last tragedy. This is in a very privileged place, New York City. It also evidently has the most extreme wealth disparity. There are many homeless, there are parts of the whole island that are struggling - a lot got shut down during Covid, people coming and going, the prices are out of control. Nobody can really afford it.
I'm really interested in the spoken word versus the written word. I wanted to get your perspective on what the different uses of the spoken versus the written are?
In my own work I know when something is there to be orated, or if something is to be in that more ritual category. I had a piece called ‘Rogue State’. [projecting her voice] “I'm in a rogue state, don't tell me what to do. Your rules aren't my rules. I'm the Lady of Ms Rule.” And it was directed at John Ashcroft and certain people during the Bush administration who were endlessly coming to Wall Street. So its purpose was to go out and recite that poem. I was inspired by the image of Rangda who's a Balinese demon figure and is part of these various ritual performances, but she’s this great energetic beast and sort of hag figure with long scary nails who wakes you up! She often shows up in the middle of the night. I'm drawn to tantric Buddhist images, particularly in the Tibetan tradition, because they represent performative states of mind. The idea is that you enter these states of mind and then return with new knowledge. And you keep the balance of the world going through these experiences. When you've seen or ‘become’ a so-called deity with red skin and skulls around her neck and long fingernails and glowing eyes, or another deity who's one eyed, got one breast, one leg and has a turquoise lock of hair; you’ve invoked and possibly added power to enactment. I had to somehow manifest a performative text that I at least, if there are guards and barricades, could shout it or have a megaphone for. Your language, your energy is entering the discourse that way. These are rituals.
There was just an event out in a park for Arthur Russell. It was an early radical piece of his called “City Park” (for voices and musicians) and Philip Glass was there and many others. There were other voices coming in and lines from Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound at one point, and things taped and collaged and montaged. But then there were people, kids milling about and a very large, tight crowd. So somebody might be walking through and what they were saying - all of that was entering in, which is a very (John) Cagey-an thing; how everything is contributing to this performance. Language has always been so key to that because you’re presenting a whole dynamic of actuality, of naming where you are, naming where all these things are, and these things becoming totemic in a way. So that’s how performance can work with those kinds of situations. I think as a poet, being into that, being into the surprise or being able to compose on the spot a bit, navigate, improvise, is important. I've always appreciated listening to one another.
Sometimes instruments can talk to each other. For example the sax and the voice of the sax, the mood and the tone and the pitch and all that goes into it. My voice will go to places that it wouldn't perhaps otherwise. So that's important. Then the text, what maybe comes after you've done that, or even before, is flexible; it changes, it's malleable. It can be up to the present, that now-time. So that's key. And then how you present it is important - that you say this is a text written for… I might've done that with the piece for the Dalai Lama, which was when he was coming to Colorado, arriving by helicopter to this stupa that’s not far from Naropa. There was the sense that I wanted to push against the darkness, push, push, push against the darkness. And show that idea of coming through, arriving by air. So all that came into this more gestural word, homage and litany and chant and repetition. But also in his case, this kind of honorific thing. And I’ve performed it with Meredith Monk where we are literally pushing the air out in front of us.
you can't reshape everything that’s wrong but you can respond, seek the truths of power and oppression and injustice
So within the possibilities for our performative work, there's a whole spectrum. Even including things for propitiating health and healing and all that. So it's not that we're trying to be do-gooders and write boring, didactic, prosey work about what we should and shouldn't do, but the immediacy, whether it's a public space, a protest, a kind of celebration… There's a film I worked on at one point, Crepuscular I was just at the Trump Tower up on Fifth Avenue going, om ah con be gone. That was my mantra. Om ah hum, con, you con man, be gone. Om, con be gone. And con became a mantra syllable.
So it's about being more of an embodied experience?
Yes. And then also wherever you go, if you get invited, you can do something. It's not like oh, I have to run home and get my precious poem. You have to be prepared.
I love the bit in Bard, Kinetic where you compare the form of the long poem to sitting around a campfire telling stories.
I mean talking about earth, air, fire and water; the fire within the fire - you're saying something and you're sort of seeing it appear in the flames. You're seeing a figure dancing or falling. It's just wild. It all happens in your own mind. Your mind is a screen.
You were invited to Naropa University to teach meditation and poetry with Allen Ginsberg. What was the initial invitation?
Well, I'd known Chӧgyam Trungpa in New York. I'd been up to Vermont to the Tail of the Tiger centre where there were some dropout students from Brandeis and Yale who were interested in Buddhism. And there were many Zen teachers coming to the West. Growing up in an urbane city, I read Alan Watts books and studied comparative religion in high school. Sufism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism. Kabbalah was amazing, the fiery letters I still need to investigate further. I was very interested in Asian religions for some reason. There's some sort of primal connection there. We had the transcendentalists, of course, within the history of American maverick culture; people who were investigating the natural world with a more meditative view. Then with a figure like (Ezra) Pound, invoking Chinese poetry and (Kenneth) Rexroth later and scholars like Arthur Waley and Burton Watson translating.
Rituals and those kinds of forms in music are so related to the elements as I see it, and their seed syllables and their mantras. The literal meaning of mantra is “mind protection”. Language in itself, being a kind of poetry, is a kind of mind protection. The more I live in this crazy world, I don't know where I'd be without poetry. I mean it's a lifeline to understanding some kind of human possibility, human energy, the way things work, the sense of these different rich composites that we are.
You can also look into these cultures with their different alphabets and learn what they signify. The Chinese glyph “standing by your word”. The [Waldorf] school where you dance the alphabet? You dance the alphabet with very young children. It’s called Eurythmy. My grandchild Kora and I do little ballet performances; she's been going to ballet classes in Mexico City. But we choreograph these ballets and we'll be the wind - we’ll get scarves out and twirl them about and sound the wind. And pirouette. This summer she was in Colorado, and there was a hailstorm that was so intense. People had not seen hail this big. And again. I said, we'll do a hail ballet, let's do the hail ballet! The young mind is really in tune to that. It's much more fun.
I do think poetry was really the first religion, I'll just say that.
My brother's about to have a baby and she’s going to be the first baby in our family, and I'm really excited for her to start learning and to read to her and to just explore language with her for the first time when she is able to.
That will answer all your questions. You wanted to talk to an old person? You can talk to a child!
I'll just interview my brother's baby for our next issue. With these Asian traditions and religions, do you feel like there’s more importance placed on the role of poetry? Maybe as a result of meditation rituals and more breath heavy language rituals?
I'm interested in the non-theistic. We're not just always adoring, always worshipping. Especially growing up after World War II, there was a way that religion in this neighbourhood in New York had a kind of control. I remember we had this collective devil experience in the girls' bathroom. The public school that was right around the corner from here. It was a great performance. We were enacting our vision of the devil and we believed it.
I mean, it's so powerful in this kind of spiritual entanglement, syncretic tradition. I guess it's the performance, the ritual, and the necessity of the language crossing through most traditions whether it’s translated or interpreted - you need that quality of sound, imagery and the logopoeia; the logic, the message. I don't want to say message, but let's just say gnosis through language or some kind of intellectual voyage or journey. Then it’s about how things get put together in these unique ways and then you're able to open a little lock, and it's what gets called self-secret. Self secret is a measure I find in poetry too, where you feel like you are discovering something you knew all along. You are knowing something further by exploring your own inclination - say you do a retreat for the next week where you're just working on your writing, you will know so much at the end of that, even if it's very minimal, you don't feel like anything is finished, but you're tracking your mind. You're maybe working with things that come up, whether it's a dream or something you want to work on - you will know more. It becomes it in of itself. I do think poetry was really the first religion, I'll just say that.
With the Jack Kerouac of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, what was the initial mission with that?
I'd met a Buddhist teacher early on, Geshe Wangyal, a lama from Mongolia, and also Robert Thurman who was a student back then - he's a prominent scholar and he was still at Harvard when we met. It was when all the psychedelic stuff was going on at Harvard. So there were these young seekers there who had taken entheogens (LSD etc.) which open up your mind, so you're having hallucinations, you're having these voyages, you're feeling your ego dissolve, you feel empathy and so on. And it drew them into Buddhism. I felt similarly and had already had these twinges in high school. It propelled my first and then subsequent travel to India. The fact that Naropa was to have a Buddhist backdrop, with a view of non-competitive education with teachers travelling to the west from India and Japan and so on, and that Trungpa was spearheading this by being a part of the Naropa vision for a Buddhist Studies program (offering Tibetan and Sanskrit languages) as well as the Arts - music, poetry, dance, theatre was the lure.
Language in itself, being a kind of poetry, is a kind of mind protection
Actually Naropa is also developing their psychedelic therapy programme now, as are Harvard and Johns Hopkins, and there's a lot going on with various study, research, therapy and how psychedelics help with psychic breakthroughs and heal trauma. PTSD in particular. We're not going to be a laboratory, but a training program. Having grown up in the sixties and seeing the benefits and magic of that kind of research, and the repressive shut down it’s been a long time coming.
It’s also about going to the wisdom of various indigenous cultures for these teachings. There's been real agon and struggles with these certain kinds of solid mindsets though. There's the figure of Urizen by William Blake, he's the mental control patriarch figure.
So that's another thing - Ginsberg would teach Blake at Naropa. We were invited to come and teach what we knew. I've been working for the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church in New York City doing curation and activism, publishing over a decade. But we weren’t an academy. I think we were 10 years without any kind of accreditation at Naropa. We had to really work on that - apply by showing that we had a library, showing that we had people who knew what they were talking about, but at that time you didn't have to have a PhD to come and teach. In fact, recently we did a list of all the people who would not have been able to teach at Naropa with all the credentials most universities require.
Academic teachers and intellectuals?
We always preferred poets, that was enough, wild mind, experimental. It was maverick with many of the folks from the Beat Generation. It was the New American poetry and these wonderful extended communities. There was no particular requirement of academic credentials.
I was just asked about the relationship between the New York school and the Beat literary folk and there's so much overlap; Diane Di Prima doing her poet's theatre and presenting plays of Frank O'Hara was just one example of that. There was (John) Cage's work, or jazz or the more political things. I'm just so proud of my generation which is a hybrid of all that and much more from other traditions and cultures now, and the discourse that continues. The ‘company of friends' as Robert Creeley calls it; because you are having that sacred conversation all the time. After we had done the Poetry Project for years, Danspace started, and that became a kind of collaboration that opened things up for dancers. They’re thriving in New York now. It's very wonderful to see, and much more diverse when it started honouring elderly dancers Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti and younger geniuses like Okwui Okpokwasili and certain movements within the post post post Merce Cunningham tradition. Then being able to bring more of a ballet influence in through the (George) Balanchine tradition. I just love it.
It's interesting that you talk about the kinds of people that you wouldn't allow to teach. I feel like poetry is one of the most intimidating forms of writing, and I feel like people have this misconception that you need to be educated in poetry or you need to ‘get it.’ What advice would you give the people that feel like they don’t ‘get it’?
Just send them over to me and we’ll go to the Poetry Project and we'll just travel around town. I have one Naropa student, a wonderful trans student, brilliant, really great with helping furthering archival research, loves to uncover the meanings of words and is also interested in all the history of these lineages. So just walking around New York is a thrill with them.
It’s interesting with cancel culture now. Especially because the Beats have come under fire with it - you have somebody talking about Jack Kerouac as a symbol of white patriarchy. He was an immigrant from Quebec, with a very poor background, his father was a factory worker coming to the US, he got a scholarship because he could play football, goes to Columbia, has a rough time, with alcohol, et cetera. This is not a stable figure of white patriarchy.
It is funny you say that because with Worms it's always been solely female and non-binary people that we’ve featured. It kind of just happened with my first issue, that all the underrepresented voices, and the voices in literature that I was interested in WERE female and non-binary. I hadn’t set out for it to be that way, that was just how I was inclined. So I kept going with that and actually with this issue, we've got a few First Nations Australian cisgender men in it because I don’t want to have any kind of discrimination, and I recognise the importance of these voices. I suppose we’re just anti-white patriarchy! There’s so many words for it, so we’re just opening it up to ‘underrepresented voices in literature’ as a whole, and that can be any gender, they can look like anything. We’re an all-female and non-binary run magazine though, so it’s mostly going to be female and non-binary people populating our pages anyway!
I was going to ask you about this ethos with your publishing and the vision for it. Thanks for this.
It’s hard to empower everyone that needs representation with the same set of words.
Just keep making those words and having your list of words and you can dance around ‘worms’ and ‘fertilise', just keep building; it's amazing to have a focus like that.
Thus the project continues, the Poetry Project continues. It's been over 60 years now. We're celebrating our 50th anniversary of Naropa, at the early meetings we were calling it the hundred year project. It's not institutionalised. It doesn't have the full backing of the great white protestant patriarchy that started all the major educational private schools in the US. Or the Jesuits. So how do you work with that? This sense of the interest zone, the rhizome, the community - these multiplicities that I keep going on about. And then how to keep building it - there was ‘Project Outreach’, working in prisons and so on - we'd like to bring that back, but we're struggling in a way more than ever with the economy and the politics, so where can it all go? You feel like it's got to be in the consciousness too, to be a model, a rhizome for things to come.
It's a dharma view that as you strengthen your consciousness to be receptive, in a sense that it is part of a kind of archive.
Black Mountain lasted under 20 years and for me was such an important blueprint of a place that Naropa could be. In the early days we were starting with full teams of musicians and dancers and other kinds of artists, and then trying to develop programmes that could last via a more academic path, resulting in students getting a degree. How important was that? I remember our faculty having trouble giving grades and simple things like that. And the project - it's not an educational pedagogical place! So individual people come and teach what they love and are focusing on right now. That was always the view - what do you love? What are you passionate about? What do you know? What can you teach about what you love? And so the fact that you sound sort of fluid about your mission statement or whatever, it's good.
Yeah, I think I'm fluid about it, but I can also feel it inside of myself. I know what it is that I want to do, but sometimes the language around it changes based on the cultural, political, social conversation. What’s your next project?
The next project, which is currently called Mesopotopia, is the mess of Mesopotamia where everything starts and where the craziness is continuing to go on as we see daily. But it’s also
drawing on rituals and spiritual traditions including geomancy, augury.
The chaos begins... I wrote about you in the first issue of Worms because you were one of the few women that had their name recognised as part of the Beat Generation - you must get asked about this a lot, so I don’t want to hark on about it, but tell me briefly about your experience with the Beats… What was that environment like for a woman? I imagine it must have been both inspiring and a bit infuriating?
I felt at one point I could stand up and say what I could say. It was hard at first to talk to William Burroughs, but then we became very comfortable with each other and I considered him a friend. Allen (Ginsberg) was very easy. I don't know what it was, kind of a karmic thing, we were both in a three-month seminary together in Lake Louise in Canada. In the middle of winter. I was pregnant and going crazy. I couldn't stand the food. We had to eat in the shrine in these Japanese Ōryōki bowls. We experienced that kind of rigorous training together. Anyway, I don't know what it was that he saw in me exactly. Energy, conviction? Sometimes Allen seemed to want to get married! He called me his “spiritual wife”. We were interested in a lot of the same things, political things. He had been to India. I was going to India in the early seventies and would visit poets he knew in Calcutta, and I would go to the ghats in Benares, so we had a lot to talk about. I never felt intimidated by him. I loved William's work and scientist mind. I loved the methods of his work; dream, old memory, and auspicious coincidence. I worked with the cutup method in certain texts and performance in a way. The opera libretto I wrote for Black Lodge invokes him and aspects of his story. A kind of hauntedness. Also close to Diane diPrima and Joanne Kyger and their poetry. Their journals were inspiring.
Everybody had their baggage in a way, and at this time in our lives, many people of my own generation, women in particular, were all going through incredible stuff around their own identities, and issues like abortion, and sexuality and needs for space and time as under- published, underrepresented artists; all the things that you've stood up for.
At the time, did you feel infuriated by the lack of women that were getting recognition as poets and writers, or was that something you realised on reflection?
No, no, it was at the time. It was hard. But this is where you claim the space for your own work and you start doing it yourself. I had been the co-editor of the publishing project Angel Hair. And I also edited 30 issues of The World magazine at the Poetry Project which were much more diverse in genre too. It was my generation and the next around St Mark’s Poetry Project that helped move things forward. Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, Maureen Owen - all involved with publishing others as well, out of the more experimental wings of these different New American Poetry trajectories. Publishing first chapbooks by women. The founder of Belladonna, an important feminist publishing collective, was a Naropa graduate, Rachel Levitsky. 20 years of publishing now.
The Archive is kind of the centre of New Weathers, isn't it?
Exactly. Making that book was a labour of love, as I'm sure you can tell. And I had lived through so much of it. Harry Smith’s wandering talk. And it just takes so long for these things to get transcribed if they're not presented as texts, and then after that there's the editing that has to happen. Then some of the people have passed, so you're working with their families or appointed representatives and trying to make it work without it just being an ‘A to Z.’ And tracking down the Remedios Varo painting we wanted for the cover. Emma Gomis, Catalan-American poet and graduate of our MFA, was a wonderful cohort in this. It was an intergenerational commitment of passion for our fabulous archive.
I haven't said what will save us…what will save us!?
Poetry… What one piece of advice would you give someone trying to get into poetry?
I would suggest listening to tapes and delving into anthologies because they give you a range.
And go back to the old stuff. Poetry from other languages too. Joy Harjo edited this amazing native anthology called When the Light of the World was Subdued. It's short selections of a whole range of people, she had a lot of guest editors within the native community. The descriptions, provenance of the work, histories, those kinds of things can sometimes help one see where something's coming from. Huge range. Jerome Rothenberg's anthology Technicians of the Sacred, — the footnotes in there are great and the opening about the range of what poetry is and can be from the shamanic oral worlds. Keep daily notebooks. Lists. Visit the Naropa archive online. I also have an album called Sciamachy up on Bandcamp I recommend. Find a cohort that worships poetry. Go to the woods. Sit by oceans when you can.
The more I live in this crazy world, I don't know where I'd be without poetry. I mean it's a lifeline to understanding some kind of human possibility, human energy, the way things work
I actually think Fast Speaking Woman is a really good way to understand poetry. For me and probably a lot of the people that I'm surrounded by, we think so fast because of technology and productivity. So when I read Fast Speaking Women, I feel like I don't have to slow down my brain. Whereas when I usually read poetry, I really have to slow down for it. When people say they don't ‘get poetry.’ I suggest trying to slow down and just spend time with it and if they say they can’t, I tell them okay, read Fast speaking women. You don't have to slow down.
That poem is inspired by the curandera Maria Sabina, a completely oral poetry. What's your astrological sign?
I'm a Virgo. Does that make sense? I feel like people are always like, oh, okay. I think it means that I'm anxious, but organised.
No, it sounds very powerful, that combination. That you pour energy into the work. I’m a triple Aries. But I really don’t know much about these things. I ultimately go on my nerve, as Frank O’Hara says.
Thank you for your time and mind, Anne.
Anne Waldman is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outriders Poetry Project experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist.
