04/08 @ 8:00pm - Bob Holman + Anne Waldman w Peter Gordon + Kit Fitzgerald

Bob Holman is best known as a free-wheeling impresario of new poetry:
slams, hiphop, performance.  But he’s also written eight books, most
recently A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, a collaboration with
Chuck Close published by Aperture, teaches at NYU and Columbia, and is
the Proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club. He’s made recent trips to
the Kolkata Book Fair, Banff Arts Centre, the Costa Rican
International Poetry Festival,  and the Naropa Summer Writing Program.
His new project is a film documentary on the Poetry of Endangered
Languages, starting with his recent two month shoot in West Africa,
“On the Griot Trail,” and another on Ginsberg in India
watch

Anne Waldman

“She is the fastest, wittiest woman to run with the wolves in some time”- Ken Tucker,

The New York Times

a.waldman@mindspring.com 

Poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental  poetry community for over 40 years as writer, sprechstimme performer, professor,  editor, magpie scholar, infra-structure and cultural/political activist. She grew up on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village where she still lives, and bi-furcated to Boulder, Colorado in 1974 when she co-founded The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at  Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired school in the West, where she currently serves as Artistic Director of its celebrated Summer Writing program. Allen Ginsberg has called her his “spiritual wife”. She is the author  of over 40 books of poetry including Kill or Cure, Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble,  and the poetic text: Outrider which includes an interview with Ernesto Cardenal, and essays on Lorine Niedecker and Charles Olson.  Manatee/Humanity  will be published by Penguin in 2009 and she will be on a reading tour in April. She has also the author of the legendary Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, San Francisco), now translated into Italian, Czech and French, as well as the 800 page epic Iovis trilogy (Coffee House Press), forthcoming in 2010. She is editor of The Beat Book(Shambhala Publications) and co-editor of  The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books), Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (Coffee House) and a comprehensive Beats at Naropa  (Coffee House, 2009), with previously unpublished work by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and William Burroughs, among others.  A book translated into Chinese is forthcoming in 2009. 

Waldman has worked actively for social change, and  has been involved with the Rocky Flats Truth Force and was arrested in the 1970s with Daniel Ellsberg & Allen Ginsberg protesting the site of Rocky Flats which was bringing plutonium onto property 10 miles from Boulder for  the manufacture of “triggers” for nuclear warheads.  She has been involved with clean-up issues and also with Poets Against the War, organizing protests in New York and Washington, D.C. , and with the Poetry Is News events, co-curated with Ammiel Alcalay.She has been active in the current election, along with countless young people and elders and artists. She took a vow at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 to devote her life to poetry and  artistic “community”. She helped found and direct The Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery where she worked as first assistant director and  then director a decade. She currently serves on the Board of the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. She has been an editor of several small press venues over the years, including Angel Hair Magazine and Books, Full Court Press, Rocky Ledge, Erudite Fangs and Thuggery & Grace. 

She has been a student of Buddhism since 1962, a feminist, and an ambassador for the oral revival of poetry, appearing on stages from  Berlin to Caracas , from Mumbai to Beijing. She has been instrumental in encouraging poetry projects world-wide and has helped organize programs in Vienna and Indonesia. She has also collaborated with artists Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle, Donna Dennis and Pat Steir as well as dancer Douglas Dunn, filmmaker Ed Bowes,  and her son, musician/composer Ambrose Bye. Her extensive historical literary, art and tape archive resides at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. 

Some of her performances may be viewed on YouTube. 

Some Responses to Anne Waldman’s Poetry: 

“It’s as if people have ceded both their destinies and their imaginations to “a hopeless gray area of defeat an despair, Anne Waldman comments in Civil Disobediences: Poetic and Politics in Action. Few other American writers have responded to that malaise with as much joy, ferocity and irrepressible charge as Anne Waldman.”- Forrest Gander. The Harriet Blog, National Poetry Foundation, Chicago 

“Here is a voice from the frontlines of poetry’s improvisational traditions”- Peter Gizzi 

“She’s the fastest, wisest woman to run with the wolves in some time.” Ken Tucker, New York Times Book Review 

“From St Marks in the early sixties, to her stewardship of Naropa, to her worldwide travels, Anne Waldman has shown herself to be one of the key players on the U.S.A. poetry scene. Her energy, her total commitment to her art, and her cultural work are a wonder to behold. Wherever it happened, Anne was there.” -  Marjorie Perloff  

All 3 below from an essay by Ravi Shankar, in the Quarterly Conversation 2008: 

“The apocryphal rumor that she started – started- the phenomenon of Poetry Slams when she and Ted Berrigan donned shiny trunks and boxing gloves to verbally pummel each other with uppercuts of verbs and roundhouses of metaphor.. Her prodigious proliferation: publishing a book of poems a year, not to mention translations, edited anthologies, sound recordings, cameo appearances in Bob Dylan’s film Renaldo and Clara, performances with Allen Ginsberg, Meredith Monk in the documentary Cooked Diamonds, fried Shoes, collaborations with artists Richard Tuttle and Elizabeth Murray, with musicians Steven Taylor and Steve Lacy, the co-founding with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired educational institution in America, two-time winner of the International championship Poetry Bout in Taos, New Mexico, recipient of many of the country’s major grants and literary awards, onwards…

***

“Waldman is a transpersonalist and Maximalist. [Her] choice of deity is Kali, Hindu goddess of time and ferocity, meat and skulls, remover of the advidya (the ignorance that makes us fear death), a creative and destructive force that wears a girdle of severed arms, a bracelet of cobras, corpse-earrings, and a mouth darkened with blood…Waldman is a Flame.”

“Anne Waldman’s work is the antithesis of stasis. Orality is crucial to her. She is a force of nature. Needed to be in order to hold her own in the male-dominated world of the Beats. And her work is an specially potent example of Helen Cixious’s idea of ecriture feminine, female writing that overcomes the limits of Western logocentrism and male patriarchy, or in Waldman’s own words, “body poetics and politics, right now.” Her erudito, which she wears like a mantle, is deeply eclectic and one feels that all of the turbulent waves of the late 2oth century have washed over her From Olson to Oulipo, from Sappho to Diane di Prima, from apperceptions of genocide to sexual empowerment that enclose menstruation. Waldman’s a sponge who has soaked up art and drips what she’s absorbed into splotches of color. She also leans Eastward, using Buddhist concepts and Sanskrit words in a way that doesn’t feel like dilettantism or mere shrubbery in her poems, but something meditated upon over a course of years, studied and given breath to breathe.”- Ravi Shankar, the Quarterly Conversation

Of IOVIS: 

Iovis is a monumental improvisation, epic length, major work by a major poet, Anne Waldman” -  Allen Ginsberg 

“A marvelous mytho-poetic collage of self-and-other, male an female, in demonstration of a female universe (“open system”) packed with seed. The Goddess considers the role and power of Jove in detail, in cosmic gossip and multiple language. Anne Waldman’s vast poem is a net of language and spirit that opens out the possibilities of writing and our enactment of

Archetypes in one long breath” – Gary Snyder 

“Waldman’s chapters are fuid and ever-changing-like life. Hers is a pedagogic poetic that teaches as much as it complicates, enlightens as much as it mystifies, is filled with stories and myths, personal reflections and homages.  Because the poem moves through time, contained among clusters of practical information are also elegies for the deaths of loved ones, ritual practices, erotic wishes… Waldman is carrying on the 20^th century epic tradition…” Poetry Project Newsletter 

Of Vow to Poetry

“Waldman’s utopianism a good antidote to current militarism. Vow to Poetry is an enticement to vocalize, to make ideological interventions with language. Deluged as we are by agenda-hiding, mendacious rhetoric of profiteering, I is  good time to read Waldman. She has spent a lifetime artfully hexing and arguing against violent territoriality. The utopian imagination is embodied in this stellar poet whose heart has an interstellar wingspan.” The Sunday (Boulder Daily) Camera, Boulder, Co. 

Of  Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble: 

“Waldman accomplishes an open alliance between the bodhisattva path and her radical poetic and artistic determination. In this marvelous volume, Waldman makes a vow to poetry. [The poem] upholds the complexity of being human in the entire bubble-shaped world that it confronts..Waldman leaves her readers with a sense of provisional hope, conditioned by our participation in making the possible world possible.”-The Poetry Project Newsletter 
 

PETER GORDON is a seminal figure in the New York music community. He first gained attention with his Love of Life Orchestra, which helped define the fusion of experimental composition with punk and jazz infused dance music. Gordon has worked some of the most influential artists and musicians of the past decades, including Laurie Anderson, Arthur Russell, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Foreman, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane, Flying Lizards, David Van Tieghem, Stephen Petronio, The Talking Band and Chuck Berry. His work in film and television is featured on the soundtracks of “Desperate Housewives”, “Joe Versus the Volcano”, “Déjà Vu” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. His collaborations with video-artist Kit Fitzgerald at venues such as DTW, La Mama and BAM/Next Wave Festival have pioneered live video performance.
 
Gordon’s music has been released on the Lovely Music, CBS Masterworks, Warner Brothers and Newtone Record labels. Recent releases include: LCD Soundsystem James Murphy and Pat Mahoney’s remix of LOLO’s “Beginning of the Heartbreak” on the critically acclaimed “Fabriclive 36″ mix album; Gordon’s opera collaboration with Lawrence Weiner, “The Society Architect Ponders the Golden Gate Bridge”, on the “Crosstalk” anthology (Bridge Records); and the re-release of Gordon’s debut album “Star Jaws” (Lovely Music). Peter Gordon is currently working on a new retrospective LOLO album to be released in the fall by DFA Records. Gordon’s collaboration with Bob Holman, INDIA JOURNALS, will be appearing in the new issue of Rattapallax.

Kit Fitzgerald is a media artist and director working in video art, live performance, digital painting, and music video. Her works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and have been presented in the Whitney Biennale, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave, the Hetmusiktheater (Amsterdam) and LaMama E.T.C. Ms. Fitzgerald has collaborated with composers Peter Gordon, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Max Roach; poet Seiku Sundiata and choreographers Donald Byrd, Bill T. Jones, and Bebe Miller. Her hi-definition video, Painted Melodies, won 1st prize at the Electronic Cinema Festival in Montreaux. The Deadman, her film adaptation of Bataille’s Le Mort, won  second prize at the Riccione Film & TV Festival. Ms. Fitzgerald has been awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and the NHK Foundation of Japan. She is a graduate of the American Film Institute Directing Workshop for Women and Director of the Department  of New Media and Digital Production at Concordia College, New York.