Anne Waldman is best known as an energetic performance poet who has lured a generation of television viewers back to the printed word. As Robyn Selman put it in the Voice Literary Supplement, Waldman has done more than almost any other writer "to break down the myth that poets stay at home." A Buddhist and a teacher at the Tibetan guru Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, since 1974, Waldman has also traveled to Europe, South America, and Canada, giving oral presentations of her craft. American Book Review contributor Anselm Hollo during the 1980s dubbed Waldman "an essentially populist poet in the best sense of the word, engaged in winning back the so-called wider audiences of MTV and 'Dallas.'" Hollo added, "Depending on weather and state of mind, that can be seen as either quixotic or laudable, but as her diction is always fierily personal and never condescending, we have to cheer her on for cheering us up."

Levi Asher in Literary Kicks called Waldman "one of the most distinctive and confident poets among the latter-day Beat community." A contributor to the Museum of American Poetics called her "one of the most interesting, vibrant and unpredictable members of the post-Beat community," saying that Waldman's "confluence of Buddhist concerns and thought-paths with sources of physicality and anger is particularly impressive." Among the most well known of Waldman's more than forty published works are Fast Speaking Woman, The Beat Book, Journals and Dreams, First Baby Poems, and the two-part epic poem collectively titled Iovis.

Waldman was born in Millville, New Jersey, in 1945 and raised on Macdougal Street in New York's Greenwich Village. Both her parents were involved with literature, teaching and translating poetry and writing magazine articles. Waldman herself became fond of poetry at an early age and was drawn to the Beat poets, some of whom she actually encountered on the streets of New York. She attended Bennington College in Vermont, where she studied with Howard Nemerov, Bernard Malamud, and Stanley Edgar Hyman before receiving her degree in 1966.

During the summer of 1965, Waldman attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference in California, where she was dazzled by the broad scope of poetry she heard. Determined to become a poet herself, Waldman finished her college education and returned to New York City, where she became assistant director of the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church in-the-Bowery. By 1968 Waldman was running the Poetry Project herself, an excellent opportunity for her to meet fellow poets and essayists of both her own and older generations. She also began to read her own poetry at the Poetry Project and was encouraged by the likes of Ted Berrigan, Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Guest, Diane di Prima, and Kenneth Koch.

Waldman began publishing her poetry in the late 1960s with small presses like the New York City-based Angel Hair, which she cofounded with Lewis Warsh, and Joe Brainard's Boke Press, moving to Bobbs-Merrill in 1970 for her first major work, Baby Breakdown. In 1974 she cofounded, with Ginsberg, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and she continued her association with the Poetry Project. Much of Waldman's early work is indebted to the oral, incantatory tradition, and she began to earn a considerable reputation for her readings. This reputation reached a zenith with the publication of Fast Speaking Woman in 1975. The book appeared in a second edition in 1978 and in an expanded edition to celebrate its twentieth anniversary in 1996. In a New York Times Book Review piece on Fast Speaking Woman, Aram Saroyan wrote: "Waldman's poems are a kind of high-energy shorthand, elliptical brain movies of her life and times, . . . repetitive, chant-like 'songs,' which bring to mind tribal shaman ceremonies." Characterizing the 600-line title poem "Fast Speaking Woman" as "something of a tour de force" in his essay in Contemporary Women Poets, John Hank noted that "in its extremity it is characteristic of the aims and methods" of her work: somewhat self-absorbed "open-form" or "projective" poems that "strike the ear not as speech but as snatches of song stitched into even more various musical patterns—a variousness in music which answers to and resolves a rich contradictoriness of feeling and perception."

In an essay in American Women Writers, Kimbally A. Medeiros quoted Ginsberg, who called Waldman "a poet orator, . . . her voice a trembling flame rising out of a strong body, her texts the accurate energetic fine notations of words with spoken music latent in mindful arrangement on the page." Medeiros wrote that "Fast Speaking Woman" manifests "Waldman's intention to list-chant all the things women are to be, including her own personal intricacies (how she sees herself)" and that Waldman "concerns herself with women's roles and how Everywoman is both messenger and protector."

By the early 1980s Waldman had taken her performance poetry to radio, television, and even a music video with a poem called "Uh-oh Plutonium!" Dictionary of Literary Biography essayist Ann Charters noted, "With her talent for organizing readings, little magazines, and fund-raising events, along with her many appearances reading her own poetry and encouraging poetry students, . . . Waldman has worked hard for the cause of poetry in America." Her work as a performance poet has been credited with influencing such artists as David Byrne and Laurie Anderson.

Waldman's more recent work has been praised for its appeal to the eye as well as to the ear. In a 1984 New York Times Book Review piece on Waldman's Make-up on Empty Space, Patricia Hampl wrote: "If . . . Anne Waldman has made her way most forcefully thus far as a performance poet, maybe she has a new role ahead. For these poems are most moving not when they perform, but when they ponder and reflect. Then their difficulty resolves itself into light, the pure transparency of the soul given speech as it breathes in and out." Robyn Selman also addressed Waldman's stylistic capabilities in a review of Helping the Dreamer: New and Selected Poems 1966-1988. "Given her penchant for performance, it's surprising that no clever marketer has packaged these selected poems with a video or cassette," Selman observed. "But many of Waldman's poems sound better as black words on white pages than they do read into a microphone. The collected work benefits from being loose in the world."

Waldman published her poetic epic beginning in 1993 with Iovis: All Is Full of Jove. Taking her title from Virgil, the poet begins a more than 300-page discourse on the Roman god Jove, her father, her son, and such male mentors as William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, as well as the emotional and physical relationships men have prompted. She addresses the poets Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, and Berrigan, by writing: "You float now tattered boddhisattvas in my heart to struggle without limit live a life in flames my words seem small in step with your enchantments Work finished, you 'guys' conquer no more 'languages.'" Described as "a compendium of dreams, journal entries from travels to India, Indonesia, and Mayan Mexico, letters, chants and overheard conversations," Iovis "deploys everything from sonnets to chunks of Buddhist philosophy seized as pure truth by this wryly self-described 'born East Coast protestant,'" according to New York Times Book Review contributor Ken Tucker.

In 1997 Waldman's vast, quirky Iovis was joined, in characteristic 1990s fashion, with a sequel titled Iovis II. Organized into twenty-five sections and incorporating a variety of stylistic techniques—lists, blank spaces, and broken, elliptic construction—the poetic sequel deals with themes similar to those of its predecessor, using both prose and poetry to touch on everything from mythology to contemporary U.S. politics. Medeiros explained that in Iovis II Waldman shifts to female energy: "It is in this second part that Waldman sets up themes about the confusion of women's roles in the 20th century" and closes by exclaiming "renewal of that feminine charge." A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote, "Although often overwhelmingly abstract and disjunctive, [ Iovis II] retains a firm hold on relevance with its accrual of talon-sharp details."

With the 2000 publication of Marriage: A Sentence, Waldman turns to the Japanese poetic form of haibun, combining prose pieces and verse responses, a technique a Publishers Weekly contributor maintained works well for Waldman. "At their best," the contributor wrote, "the verse responses offer mythological depths and elegant counterpoints to the prose fireworks." In Marriage, Waldman invokes Native American, biblical, mythological, and contemporary international marriage traditions and superimposes them on her own experiences of marriage in the 1960s. Stephen Whited of Book found Marriage to be influenced by Waldman's Buddhism as well as by the works of Charles Olson and Gertrude Stein. He also commented on Waldman's use of what poet Ezra Pound called "melopoeia," the enhancement of words by the music of voice and language. "The overall effect is like incantations or spells in a celebration [of] . . . relationships," Whited said.

Waldman returned to compilation and editing in 2001 with Angel Hair Sleeps with a Boy in My Head: The Angel Hair Anthology, compiled with Lewis Warsh (with whom she coedited Angel Hair magazine in New York and published more than sixty books, broadsides, and pamphlets in a thriving poetic community between 1966 and 1978). The anthology includes works by Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Frank O'Hara, Robert Creeley, Philip Whalen, Alice Notley, Kenneth Koch, Lorenzo Thomas, Joe Brainard, and many others, including Waldman and Warsh. The editors also provide introductions for the anthology, and some twenty poets contribute short memoirs. Descriptions and photographs of each book published are included. A reviewer for Granary Books called Angel Hair "one of the longest-lived and most influential publishers of the small press scene." A contributor to the Bloomsbury Review touted the anthology as "a historic document" of [late twentieth-century] . . . American poetry.

In an interview with Sonya Lea Ralph of Tricycle, Waldman explained, "My role is to be a language guardian. I uphold and query the use and abuse of the gorgeous, subtle, mellifluous, energetic, and imaginative Mother Tongue! I think one of the downsides of the 'New Age' has been its horrific debasement of language—and adjacently, its dangerous lack of intellectual discourse. . . . If you don't valorize reading and study and thinking and imagination, you are in trouble as a culture. You remain cut off from other cultures, other realities."

Related poems

Related authors