The Brooklyn Rail

Guest Critic

Looking Into the Darkness of One’s Time

I live in poetry and this is some of my world. I’ve been repeatedly asking the question how is one contemporary with one’s time? And what does it mean to look unto the darkness of one’s time? Here are some of the results from a range of poets, artists, thinkers, as well as radical projects of innovation and archive.

In Conversation

Peter Lamborn Wilson with Lucía Hinojosa, Diego Gerard, Raymond Foye, and Anne Waldman

We talked for hours—surrounded by his books and objects—about language and its origins, about technology, US-Mexican politics, and primordial societies, themes we were pursuing in the translation of his texts.

BILL BERKSON (1939 – 2016)
Bill Berkson: Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently

Love this title of yours, Bill. But never silently, as the subtext is a great adhesive roar to what counts, what sounds, what listens, what lights up the cortex in relation to Bill Berkson.

ALEXIS MYRE Orchid Petal and Small Twig of the Upper Hemisphere: “Ojo de Dios”

Alexis Myre builds a box of light with flowers, other natural objects, fragile and tenacious, and metaphors and correspondences. Alexis Myre begins “using a compass” to master a world within. What plays out in the Orchid theatre? Am I her Situationist? Her poet? We will see.

Nostalgia
for Jane Freilicher (1924 – 2014)

To you, muse who / rocked the brains of / so many of my heroes / You a hero too / for wise quip bon mot and / panoramic eye

In Conversation

UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE with Anne Waldman

Our mission is fairly specific: to publish translations, performance texts, “forgotten” literature, investigative writing, books by artists, and contemporary poetry that would have a hard time being placed at another publishing house.

In Conversation

DAWN LUNDY MARTIN with Anne Waldman

I dig Agamben and his theories of lawlessness. I want more than lawlessness; I want recklessness, fury, spatial and dimensional disregard, and linguistic spatter. Disorder for the sake of good.

In Conversation

Infrastructure Poetics
STACY SZYMASZEK with Anne Waldman

It seems like you were mightily prepared and inspired to this task of directorship at The Poetry Project, in addition to being a very dedicated and prodigious poet.

In Conversation

ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE with Anne Waldman

As a poet, how are you contemporary with your time?

In Conversation

ALEXIS MYRE with Anne Waldman

On the occasion of Alexis Myre’s first solo show in New York (The Power of Limits, La MaMa Galleria, February 4 – 21, 2016), the artist spoke with Anne Waldman about her about the structure—and potential—of working with limits.

In Conversation

THOMAS SAYERS ELLIS with Anne Waldman
(January 2016)

It’s weird how lineage works, all forms of it. As you know I am a person who worries and bothers and has been worried and bothered by poetry, teaching, photography and––in my own way––performance.

JOHN GIORNO: ACTIVITY DEMON YESHE NORBU

I felt akin to John Giorno’s kinetics from the start. A generally calm person, John is a torrent of purpose, an “activity demon.” His unique style on stage as preacher/hipster, radical dharma-wit-yogin, and more increasingly the lone poet with cowboy-inflected voice, feels like vital transmission.

Manatee/Humanity

the manatee is found in shallow slow moving rivers

If I Could Say This With My Body, Would I. I Would

Anne Waldman is the author most recently of Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets 2009), Matriot Acts (CHAX Press 2010) and the co-editor of Beats at Naropa (Coffee House Press, 2009). Her play RED NOIR was recently produced by The Living Theatre, directed by Judith Malina and had a two and a half month run in New York City. She is the Artistic Director of the Jack Kerouac School's Summer Writing Program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She has collaborated with artists Donna Dennis on Nine Nights Meditation, and with Pat Steir on Cry Stall Gaze.

from Jaguar Harmonics
         [person woven of, of tesserae]

Anne Waldman is the author most recently of Gossamurmur (Penguin Poets 2013) is a Guggenheim 2013-14 recipient, and her magnum opus The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment won the PEN USA Literary Award for 2012. She co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg in 1974 and directs its celebrated Summer Writing Program. "Jaguar Harmonics", her "serial" yage poem, will be published by Post-Apollo Press in 2014.

Vito

ANNE WALDMAN has been a prolific and active poet and performer many years, creating radical new hybrid forms for the long poem, both serial and narrative, as with Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and Manatee/Humanity, and most recently Gossamurmur, all published by Penguin Poets. She is also the author of the magnum opus The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment ( Coffee House Press 2011), a feminist "cultural intervention" taking on war and patriarchy which won the PENCenter 2012 Award for Poetry. Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born, a prose poem meditation on William Blake's Book of Thel, was published by Coffee House Press, 2016.

Shadow Behind Eclipse
for John Ashbery

ANNE WALDMAN has been a prolific and active poet and performer many years, creating radical new hybrid forms for the long poem, both serial and narrative, as with Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and Manatee/Humanity, and most recently Gossamurmur, all published by Penguin Poets. She is also the author of the magnum opus The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press 2011), a feminist "cultural intervention" taking on war and patriarchy which won the PENCenter 2012 Award for Poetry. Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born, a prose poem meditation on William Blake's Book of Thel, was published by Coffee House Press, 2016.

Stepping Back

Anne Waldman is the author, most recently of Trickster Feminism, Penguin 2018, and Sanctuary, Spuyten Duyvil 2020, and her vinyl album SCIAMACHY was just released by Fast Speaking Music with support from the Levy Gorvy Gallery in NYC.

Will Power

A Tribute read at the Brad Will Memorial at St Marks Church In-the-Bowery, New York City November 11, 2006.

Excerpt from Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born

Anne Waldman has been a prolific and active poet and performer many years, creating radical new hybrid forms for the long poem, both serial and narrative, as with Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and Manatee/Humanity, and most recently Gossamurmur, all published by Penguin Poets. She is also the author of the magnum opus The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment ( Coffee House Press 2011), a feminist “cultural intervention” taking on war and patriarchy which won the PEN Center 2012 Award for Poetry. Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born, a prose poem meditation on William Blake's Book of Thel.

trick o’death

Anne Waldman is the author of the forthcoming Trickster Feminine (from Penguin) Voice’s Daughter of A Heart Yet To Be Born (Coffee House Press) and Extinction Aria. (Pied Oxen). She is the Artistic Director of the Jack Kerouac School’s Summer Writing Program at Naropa  Boulder, June 10-30, whose theme this year is The Capitalocene.

From IOVIS 3: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment

She dreams herself the mystic lover of Che Guevara (a corpse) indoctrinated in anti-imperialismo and is roused to write an alturistic manifesto for the good of all humanity.

Poems for Jackson Mac Low: Staying

& that the staying be prolonged of his staying/in the writing, the sounding & rasp & glee…

LET GO /

Anne Waldman is the author most recently of Trickster Feminism (Penguin), Sanctuary (Spuyten Duyvil) , co-translator of The Songs of the Sons & Daughter Of Buddha (Shambhala) and the album SCIAMACHY (Levy Gorvy).