Thank you, Laynie That was a lovely reading.
Our last reader of the poetry series section of the festival
is Anne Waldman.
And it is a great honor for me to introduce her to you
and tell you a little bit about her work.
I met Anne when I was in graduate school at Naropa
University.
And she's a venerable poet that I've had the good fortune
to study with, engage with, share community with, and call
a friend, which means more than anything else.
Anne Waldman has been an active member
of the Outrider Experimental Poetry community for over 40
years as a writer, performer, professor, editor,
Magpie scholar, infrastructure and
cultural political activist.
She has also collaborated extensively
with a number of artists, musicians, and dancers.
She grew up on McDougal STREET in Greenwich Village,
where she still lives, and moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1974,
when she co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied
Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University, where
she currently directs their celebrated summer writing
program.
She is the author of over 40 books of poetry, including
Fast Speaking Woman, which was recently reissued,
Kill or Cure, Marriage: A Sentence,
Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, The Poetic Text
Outrider, In the Room of Never Grieve, New and Selected
Poems, Manatee Humanity, out through Penguin Poets 2009,
and her most recent book, as well as
a small chapbook put out by Chax Press,
in the occasion of this reading called Matriot Acts.
Her work has been translated into Italian, Czech,
and French.
And she has edited and co-edited a large number of anthologies,
including Beat Book, The Hare Angel Anthology,
Civil Disobediences, Poetics and Politics in Action, and Beats
at Naropa.
She also helped found the poetry project at St Mark's Church
in the Bowery, which she directed for over a decade.
Her play, Red Noir, played off Off-Broadway at the Living
Theatre and was directed by theater legend Judith Marlena
just recently this year.
And Waldman has also been an activist for social change,
a student of Buddhism, a culturally active feminist,
and an ambassador for the oral revival of poetry
throughout her entire artistic life.
Recently, she returned from India,
where she lectured and presented her work
to Muslim students in the Kerala state
as an ambassador to the US State Department.
Anne's poetry, like her strong spirit and vibrant being,
has always and foremost engaged with the world
with a generosity and open heartedness I have infrequently
encountered in people or poetry.
It is with this generosity and fearlessness
that Anne has entered the world and continues
to enter the world, again and again, to speak the truth,
to fight for others, too praise, to shock,
to cross and break down boundaries,
to think, to love, to mourn, to sing,
and to live well, creating community
with her fellow artists.
I am sure she will continue to do this
until the end of what we may call time
in our own personal perception.
Her poetry will always sing itself.
We will always hear her voice in our ears
upholding her deeply ethical vision of our world
and affecting the change necessary to create
that world again and again.
And is that not one true purpose of poetry?
Please help me to welcome Anne Waldman.
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