Read Eleven Faces One Thousand Arms and Che Guevara Came To Me in a Dream by Anne Waldman.
Anne Waldman, poet, editor, performer, professor, curator, cultural activist carries in her genetics the lineages of the New American Poetry, and is a considered an inheritor of The Black Mountain, Beat (Allen Ginsberg called her his “spiritual wife”) and New York School (Frank O'Hara told her to “work for inspiration, not money”) mantles as well as being an originator of her own deeply investigative and polyvalent “modal structures”. She is a noted performer of her own work, and its rhizomic sprechstimme strategies. Some of her performance work may be accessed on Charles Bernstein's Penn Sound.
Waldman has had her work translated into German, Italian, Czech and there are forthcoming editions in Chinese and French. She has been working on her epic IOVIS for over 25 years, now running to 800 pages. Waldman has helped create and nurture poetry zones in the USA and abroad for much of her life. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts award, the Shelley prize for poetry, and has had residences at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center and at the Christian Woman's University in Tokyo. She has taught experimental writing workshops for years at the Zen Mountain Monastery, as well as universities and colleges across the USA and abroad. Recent appearances and residencies: Wesleyan University, Barnard College, Cal Arts, and The University of Buffalo, and she participated in a recent Poetry festival in Mumbai this past February of 2007, and the PEN World Voices in New York.
Directing the Poetry Project at St Mark's Poetry Project for over a decade, she co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at the Buddhist-inspired Naropa University in 1974. She currently is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of Naropa's Summer Writing Program and is working with the Study Abroad on the Bowery project in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Author and editor of over 40 books and small press editions of poetry, including the epic IOVIS project (two volumes published by Coffee House Press, 1993, 1997, the full test: Colors In The Mechanism of Concealment due in 2009) and has published in recent years: MARRIAGE: A Sentence, Penguin Poets 2000, IN THE ROOM OF NEVER GRIEVE: New & Selected Poems with CD collaboration with Ambrose Bye, Coffee House Press 2003, Dark Arcana: Afterimage or Glow, with photographs by Patti Smith, Heavenbone Press 2003, and STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD COMPARED TO A BUBBLE, a long Buddhist poem, Penguin Poets 2004. She also co-edited the major anthology CIVIL DISOBEDIENCES: Poetics & Politics in Action, Coffee House Press 2004 with talks and essays by Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Michael Ondaatje, Barbara Guest, Robert Creeley, Sonia Sanchez and others. She has directed productions with the Gertrude Stein Players in Boulder, Colorado and has worked in collaboration with students, dancers, videographers, visual artists, musicians, composers for over 30 years. She has, in particular collaborated with artists Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, Susan Rothenberg, Elizabeth Murray, Donna Dennis and Richard Tuttle and her husband, movie director and writer Ed Bowes. She has also helped cultivate and worked with poetry programs in Vienna (the historic Schule fur Dichtung) and Prague. She is co-founder of the Poetry Is News collective which curates forums of political and poetical discussion, and is a co- artistic/curriculum Director of The Study Abroad On the Bowery Program in New York City. RED NOIR, a collection of short performance pieces and the CD THE EYE OF THE FALCON (produced and with music by her son Ambrose Bye are now available from Farfalla, McMillen and Parrish. And OUTRIDER - a selection of essays, interviews and poetry, including an interview Waldman did with Nicaraguan poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal, has just been published by La Alameda press in New Mexico. She is also a cultural guardian of some of the history and archive of the New American Poetry L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and beyond and is active with the Audio Archive project at Naropa which has thousands of hours of readings, performances, lectures, panels by the likes of William Burroughs, John Cage, Gregory Corso, Jackson MacLow, Jerome Rothenberg, Allen Ginsberg, Roberto Tejada, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Diane diPrima, Joanne Kyger, Gary Snyder, Amiri Baraka, Cecilia Vicuna and many others. Anne Waldman's comprehensive and ongoing personal Archive resides at the Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She makes her home in New York City and Boulder, Colorado and frequently travels to other poetry zones throughout the world, most recently the Conference on 20th Century American Poetry in Wuhan, China and at the International Literature Festival in Berlin (2007).