Magic, Friends, Loyalty, Revolution

At a 2016 academic conference in San Francisco, the poet and novelist Kevin Killian chaired a panel—the first of its kind—devoted to the work of Anne Waldman. In his introduction, Killian noted Waldman’s presence at the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference, where the then-20-year-old poet made what she describes as “an eternal vow to poetry.” “Perhaps that vow,” Killian said, “has kept her returning to our city again and again, drawn back by a web of magic, friends, loyalty, and its twin, revolution”—all central components of Waldman’s poetics. Killian concluded by acknowledging, “I have a thousand reasons to honor and love Anne Waldman, who has changed my own life in dozens of ways and continues to do so today.” His gracious comments could easily be attributed to any number of vital contemporary poets who, like the late Killian, owe much to Waldman’s influence, support, and friendship. A relentless instigator of artistic community, Waldman’s “visionary” impact on American poetry, as Killian dubbed it, has galvanized poets across generations and literary movements.

Waldman is a poet in the self-described “Outrider” tradition of peripatetic experimental artists, a peer of iconoclasts such as Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Alice Notley. In 1966, she helped establish The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, which she directed for a decade. In 1974, she, Ginsberg, and Diane di Prima, cofounded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, an experimental literary arts program, at Naropa University. She has edited numerous magazines and small presses, including Angel Hair magazine and books coedited with Lewis Warsh; The World, the Poetry Project’s in-house magazine; Rocky Ledge, coedited with Reed Bye; and Erudite Fangs Editions. The author of more than 60 books, she has collaborated extensively with revered poets such as Joe Brainard, Eileen Myles, Bernadette Mayer, and Ted Berrigan and with musicians, dancers, and visual artists. And those are just her literary credentials. She has worked as a teacher, and she is a cultural and political activist and an unforgettable performer. As this brief summary attests, Waldman is one of the most important and irreducible living American poets.

Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House Press, 2023), her new book, offers a partial documentary record of the vast scope of her life and work. A collage of published and unpublished essays, correspondence, interviews, and poems from the last 20 years, the volume is a scrapbook-like experiment that replicates in prose form Charles Olson’s commitment to the poem as “at all points, […] a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge,” as he writes in “Projective Verse.” The kinesis of the book’s title, which echoes Olson’s focus on “the kinetics of the thing,” is embodied in the text’s rapid shifts between genres and across chronologies. “Bard, Kinetic [is a] field of possibility, with selected texts from parts and measures of my life lived interconnectedly,” Waldman writes in the preface. “And I want the field strewn with poems.” Though the origin of these texts and poems is relatively recent, Bard, Kinetic traces the arc of Waldman’s life from her childhood in Greenwich Village during its midcentury bohemian heyday up to the pandemic-distressed present. Rather than a memoir, however, this energetic assemblage creates its own fragmented chronology, looping through the whirlwind of contexts—literary, political, spiritual, familial—that constitute Waldman’s immense bardic self.

Waldman’s commitment to poetry insists on entangling aesthetics with nearly every facet of her life. Like Ginsberg, for whom poetic and political devotions were also bound, Waldman’s voice and vision have a collective breadth. “We need cultural and humanitarian revolution,” she asserts in “Interview with Poetas, Madrid 2018,” a piece from the book’s second section. “We need subversive remedy. We need poetry to remind us of the magic we have had that needs attendance, recharge.” For Waldman, these declarations are colossal, pressing, and material. “What is urgent to know about?” she asks the poet Karen Weiser in a series of letters collected in Bard, Kinetic. “I ask myself this every day and get extremely dizzy.” It’s comforting to learn that Waldman, who has been part of the countercultural fabric of American literature for a half-century, is just as overwhelmed as everyone is by the ever-shifting crises of the moment. And it’s liberating to discover the questions she poses that might ground us together in response; she asks Weiser, “What are you studying? What does your world look like?” Bard, Kinetic becomes its own “subversive remedy” as Waldman describes her radical paths of study, building a portrait of her world in all its forms of care and resistance.

In the autobiographical narrative “Sketch,” the first (and longest) piece in the book, Waldman describes what guided her to poetry from an early age. Her intellectual and artistic parents encouraged her “to read widely, to write, think, talk about it, be inquisitive. Be critical.” This creative permission was also embedded in “the labyrinthian playground of New York City,” where she grew up drawn to the performative energies of theater and poetry in which “[r]eading aloud, dramatizing the sense of the words all came naturally.” At Bennington College in the early 1960s, Waldman advocated for avant-garde writers such as Gertrude Stein, whom the faculty—including Howard Nemerov—dismissed. Waldman, already deeply reading “Stein, Laura Riding, [and] H.D.” laughed off Nemerov’s patriarchal response, but the diminishment of women writers affected her convictions. “Poetic confidence was erratic,” she writes. “What was I good at? Trusted my ear. Some deeper rhythm in the nervous system demanded attention. … I felt inept but ambitious.”

Reading “Sketch” for its prismatic autobiographical details and the auspicious moments that presage Waldman’s lifelong investments is a pleasure. For instance, she describes working in Athens, Greece, during college under the mentorship of American archaeologist Virginia Grace, who “bore a striking resemblance to photographs of the seminal writer H.D.” Waldman was tasked with meticulously cataloguing shards of clay amphorae by reading the fragmented stamped seals that helped identity the vessels’ origins in the ancient Mediterranean. Her later devotions to mythopoetics, a transformative feminism, and archives all seem rooted in anecdotes such as this one. As Waldman asked herself about her increasing interest in Buddhism and non-Western lineages, which she began exploring in the early 1960s, “How does all this, a vast knowledge, link to poetry?” For her the link was direct—“Poetic lineage went far back,” she writes—but she was also embedded completely in “a new generational frequency” radiating from the counterculture and literary avant-gardes.

Waldman merged that vast knowledge and new poetics in her unique role as a catalytic architect of alternative literary institutions. One of the most incredible sections in “Sketch” is her attempt “to explore and describe” the history of events she oversaw at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. How can she account, she asks, for the memories of readings in “the protective wing of St. Mark’s Church,” such as

John Wieners’s fragile and dreamy movie-star reading, one pant leg rolled up, gold lamé scarf around his head? Amiri Baraka hammering on content. Power of his prophetic song? Burroughs’s “comeback” to America, with gravelly, demonic voice from even darker side of samsara? Yoko Ono’s minute of white silence during the annual New Year’s benefit reading. Barbara Guest, elegant, brave, and lucid after a serious concussion. Light streaming in the church’s stained-glass windows the morning we began the all-day, all-night Gertrude Stein marathon. Some of the story will never be told...

Waldman’s interrogative list concludes with queries that turn back to herself: “How many times could you fall in love?” she asks. “How many times could you have your heart broken, reading after reading, event after event? I bow under the task of this description.” Such gorgeous questions are evidence of how profoundly braided with the ongoing history of The Poetry Project her life has been.

As an “ambassador of a ‘wild mind’ lineage,” Waldman insists “there is no time in human history without poetry.” In Bard, Kinetic, she celebrates that recent history in a range of cinematic essays and wave-like anecdotes that inventory her friendships with other artists: her “breakthrough” experiences with John Ashbery’s “shimmering language,” her adoption of an “observational poetics” from attending the ballet with Edwin Denby, and her allegiance to Lorenzo Thomas (“as steady witness, as poet-historian”), whose Fit Music she published with Angel Hair Books in 1972.

Waldman is now in her late 70s, and her kinetic exuberance is also tinged with elegy. An essay about her involvement with Occupy Art unfolds into a list of the artists and poets who died over the last decade—Baraka, Warsh, and John Giorno, among others—a reminder that her “alloys of artwork and political intervention” are bound up in the “human dimension” of lives, loves, and losses. The deaths of women contemporaries such as di Prima, Akilah Oliver, Bernadette Mayer, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Joanne Kyger, and Etel Adnan are poignantly marked in Bard, Kinetic. “What she attempts to do in language,” she writes about Adnan, who died in 2021, “is a crisis upon an altar, a crise of the vocal vibrating heart.” In her introduction to a selection of correspondence between herself and Kyger, Waldman writes that the Bolinas-based poet, who died in 2017, “had an open screen in her being” and that her poems “had perfect balance.” “It took Gary Snyder and Allen [Ginsberg] too long to see what a great poet Joanne Kyger is!” she writes elsewhere in the book, reminding readers that she and her peers’ achievements were made within and against a patriarchal literary culture that regularly diminished those achievements. “In many instances,” Waldman writes in the section “Feminafesto,” “when all these alternative cultures and communities and lineages and affinities were coalescing and trembling and forming and reforming, I was often the only woman in the room.” Bard, Kinetic is a recovery project that shows these women working in the room alongside Waldman to reimagine that poetic culture.

This kinetic documentary ethos is an urgent part of Waldman’s work, a sensibility embodied by poet Paul Blackburn’s ritual recording of poetry readings in New York City in the 1960s that Waldman helped build into the culture of The Poetry Project from its founding. This documentary practice continues at Naropa, where Waldman has become, as she writes in “Sketch,” “a guardian of a near half century extensive audio archive of poetry and poetics” that constitutes the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Audio Archive. Waldman’s preservation of this archive—at more than 5,000 hours it’s perhaps the largest literary audio collection in existence—has resulted in three volumes of transcribed lectures, including New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat Books, 2022). Like the two anthologies of The World edited by Waldman—The World Anthology (1969) and Out of This World (1991)—these vital projects are an extension of Waldman’s determination for “furthering a lineage and carrying forward a set of experimental histories,” as Waldman and coeditor Emma Gomis write in the introduction to New Weathers.

Waldman’s advocacy of cultural memory is also embedded in her poetry. In her book-length poem Gossamurmur (2013), she writes, “all I cared about in the mundane world […] was the survival and oral archive of an excellent poetry and record of a temporary autonomous zone from which it emanated, close to a high-altitude Divide.” In an interview with the poet Jim Cohn about her epic The Iovis Trilogy (2011), Waldman aligns her care for archives with her activism, noting that “As for the activist work, it just goes on, and it seems to be more and more about how to preserve an archive, how to preserve artistic culture, how to hide the treasures so that they can be found at a later date and re-activated.” Waldman tells Stacy Szymaszek in a 2012 oral history interview (not included in Bard, Kinetic) that establishing The Poetry Project and the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa “strengthened a sense of inventing how you could be a community together.” Bard, Kinetic documents and extends the ephemeral environments and radical potentials of those communities.

A recent review in Kirkus faults Bard, Kinetic for its variety and scope, describing it as “scattershot” and “an unnecessarily choppy flyover of an important artist’s intellectual and spiritual journey.” Perhaps some readers will find the array of forms and scales of vision a sign of inconsistency. But such readers might benefit from an attentive dive into Waldman’s poetry, in which prose and other forms continually mix, and which performs beyond the boundary of any singular voice. Waldman is incredulous that such a commodious desire can be seen as a liability. As she said in a 1991 interview, “I don’t feel compromised by my personal range. Heaven forbid I ever ‘find my own voice.’ I’m not really searching, you know. Embarrassing.” Though the movement across genres and between sections can be dissonant, a more productive framework for reading Waldman’s documentary compendium is to say that it retains the spontaneous energy and associative rhythm that are hallmarks of her work. Indeed, this new book is best read as a companion of sorts to Vow to Poetry (2001), Waldman’s previous collection of interviews and autobiographical essays.

It is true that Vow to Poetry reads as a more-unified collection, perhaps because at the same length as Bard, Kinetic it contains half the number of pieces, making the latter at times feel less cohesive. Nevertheless, there is inherent value in so much work by such a well-known yet understudied poet being assembled in this way. As Waldman writes in “Sketch,” she has fought to allow her poetry to “sing or rage through my body,” and Bard, Kinetic is a multifaceted monument to the force of her revolutionary music. At the same time, there are opportunities to reimagine certain choices that contradict her groundbreaking work. For instance, in Bard, Kinetic she refers to “cancel culture” in ways that misrepresent the struggle for accountability within structures of power. These are unfortunate deviations in what is otherwise a vivid, collaged interrogation of artistic permission, community building, and struggles against injustice.

In the book’s preface Waldman commands herself to “travel beyond binaries, keep pushing for knowledge, study and studying with, a deeper investigation, and human justice, a deeper action. The action. Totally necessary. And above all, do no harm.” These are high aims but ones Waldman has insisted on, tirelessly, her entire life. Bard, Kinetic puts readers on the path to recognizing poetry as numinous mutual aid, as an action that reaches across geography, species, and time. To paraphrase Waldman’s description of Frank O’Hara, the portrait of her that emerges in Bard, Kinetic is this: Anne glimmers. Her heart could be our heart.