Anne Waldman takes the opportunity with this twentieth-anniversary expanded edition to add twenty poems to this collection that brings into focus her lifelong engagement with "Chant" as central to contemporary performative poetry. Here are spells, invocations, laments, ritual rants. Archaic beliefs in magic and ecstasy meet current notions of the power of the spoken word. Waldman writes, "The poem is a textured energy field or modal structure. The poems for performance seem to manifest as psychological states of mind. They come together in a mental, verbal, physical, and emotional form, making their particular demands on my voice and body. I am the 'energumen.' The poem is the experience." Also included in this book are three essays on the oral tradition in poetry. One essay discusses the history and occasion of the title poem. The others treat such topics as performance art and poetic tradition, ethnopoetics, intoxication and transformation, Tibetan Buddhism, and the renewed ascendency of feminine energy in writing. Anne Waldman, world renowned for her high-energy poetry performances, is the author of over thirty books and chapbooks of poetry. She is the co-founder and director of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "Anne Waldman is one of the fastest, wisest women to run with the wolves in some time." -- The New York Times Book Review Anne Waldman, world renowned for her high-energy poetry performances, is the co-founder and director of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of over thirty books and chapbooks of poetry including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet to be Born, and Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets).

"At Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, there has long been an illuminating, dynamic, ongoing exchange of ideas about the history and legacy of the Beat Generation--an exchange fortunately that has been carefully archived and preserved. This valuable anthology does not further embalm the 'legend' of the Beats. Instead it allows its readers to hear authentic voices --Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes, Diane di Prima, Philip Whalen, etc.--as well as introducing the thoughtful and responsible work of leading Beat scholars."--Joyce Johnson Amassed from the riches of the Naropa University audio archives, this collection offers an exciting new look at the Beats--whose influence lives on in the art and politics of our time. In this often spontaneous, conversational book, readers are introduced to the hard truths behind being a Beat woman, the haunting accuracy of William Burroughs's world-view, the passion and energy of Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, Jack Kerouac's unexpected musicality, Diane DiPrima's foray into small press publishing, Michael McClure's account of the famous first reading of "Howl," and, most of all, the inspirations behind America's most provocative and prescient thinkers.Contributors include:

David Amram
Amiri Baraka
Ted Berrigan
Junior Burke
William S. Burroughs
Lorna Dee Cervantes
Ann Charters
Clark Coolidge
Gregory Corso
Diane di Prima
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Rick Fields
Allen Ginsberg
David Henderson
Abbie Hoffman
John Clellon Holmes
Joyce Johnson
Hettie Jones
Edie Parker Kerouac
Joanne Kyger
Michael McClure
William S. Merwin
John Oughton
Marjorie Perloff
David Rome
Edward Sanders
Gary Snyder
Janine Pommy Vega
Steven Taylor
Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
Anne Waldman
Philip Whalen
Laura Wright
Joshua Zim

The expansive, countercultural, and wildly prolific life of celebrated poet Anne Waldman, in her own words. In Bard, Kinetic, Anne Waldman assembles a multifaceted portrait of her life and praxis as a groundbreaking poet. Waldman charts her journey through a maelstrom of radical artistic activity: growing up in Greenwich Village, creative partnership with Allen Ginsberg, touring with Bob Dylan, and founding the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church and later, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She discusses the philosophies that guide her as a writer, activist, performer, instigator, and Buddhist practitioner, and pays homage to friends and collaborators including Amiri Baraka, Lou Reed, John Ashbery, Kathy Acker, and Diane di Prima. Waldman's experiences serve as a guide for others committed to making the world a conscious and conscientious place that soars with the discourse and activism of poetry and poethics.

New from celebrated poet and performer Anne Waldman - an edgy, visionary collection that meditates on gender, existence, passion and activism Mythopoetics, shape shifting, quantum entanglement, Anthropocene blues, litany and chance operation play inside the field of these intertwined poems, which coalesced out of months of protests with some texts penned in the streets. Anne Waldman looks to the imagination of mercurial possibility, to the spirits of the doorway and of crossroads, and to language that jolts the status quo of how one troubles gender and outwits patriarchy. She summons Tarot's Force Arcana, the passion of the suffragettes, and various messengers and heroines of historical, hermetic, and heretical stance, creating an intersectionality of lived experience: class, sexuality, race, politics all enter the din. These are experiments of survival.

The Beat Movement that emerged in the early 1950s was not just another literary genre, but a literary and social revolution. This wide-ranging anthology of the best of Beat literature includes biographies of the writers and a literary guide to "Beat places" around the world.

Partial parallel response to the making of a dance...

A fascinating new work from an internationally renowned poet Acclaimed for her visionary, incantatory verse and her experimental ethos, Anne Waldman's newest book-length poem is an allegory of a radical spirit in lockdown, dominated by "Deciders" and "Imposters" who threaten the future of poetry and its archive. A doppelganger nightmare ensues: the imposter "Anne" is a succubus, and the original Anne has to break free from a metaphorical castle of torture and psychological domination. There are travels through Vedic cosmology and ancient Japan before resolution on a treeless tundra, where fragile life forms struggle to survive. Waldman's oracular poem is a witty meditation on identity theft and a searing plea for the primacy of imagination and for collective sanity in our provocative yet precarious time.

A fascinating new work from an internationally renowned poet
Anne Waldman's new investigative hybrid-poem explores the nuances of inter-species communication and compassion. It draws on animal lore, animal encounters (with grey wolf and manatee), dreams, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and Buddhist ritual to render a text of remarkable sympathy, reciprocity, and power. The poem asks questions as well as urges further engagement with the endangered (including our human selves). Part performance litany, part survival kit, part worried mammalian soundings, Waldman explores, as ever, what it means to inhabit our condition through language and imagination inside a wheel of time. This is the mature work of a philosophical field poet with a shamanic metabolism.

"

Vow to Poetry" is a trumpet call from our most iconoclastic poet that tears down the walls of prescribed creative processes. This stimulating mix of autobiography, interviews, and essays reveals a life possessed by the muse. You've seen the "safe" versions, now comes this unconventional, irreverent, transgressive volume.

Anne Waldman ran the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York for over a decade. She is the co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she teaches and directs the Master of Fine Arts program in Writing and Poetics.

Contents>/B>

Author's Note, 13
Prelude: "My Long & Only Afterlife," 15
Feminafesto, 19
My Life a List, 23
Oppositional Poetics, 48
That Light Is Sandino, 49
Managua Sketches, 51
Seeing What Happens (Interview with Joyce Jenkins), 54
Kali Yuga Poetics: A Manifesto, 60
"Take Me to Your Poets ," 74
Loom Down the Thorough Narrow, 81
Hermeneutical (Light to Read By), 91
Vow to Poetry (Conversation with Randy Roark), 96
Sikelianos's Delphic Idea: Site & Poetic Legacy, 123
Hags, Nuns, & Magpie Scholars, 135
The Outrider Legacy (Interview with Mark DuCharme), 142
Poetry as Siddhi, 155
Noosphere & the Six Realms, 167
I Is Another: Dissipative Structures, 173
The Talisman Interview (Interview with Edward Foster), 192
Warring God Charnel Ground, 205
Deviant Identities, 213
Minstrel Bard, 228
Last Days, Hours, 230
Burroughs: Hurry Up. It's Time, 235
Go-Between Between, 238
Grasping the Broom More Tightly Now (Interview with Eric Lorberer), 247
Creative Writing Life Reading/Writing/Performance] Experiments, 247
Alphabetic Tesserae, 262
Epic & Performance, 266
"Surprise Each Other": The Art of Collaboration (Interview with Lisa Birman), 272
Spare Us Your Epiphanies, 280
Marriage Marriage: A Sentence Sentence, 283
Muse, 286
My Life a Book, 289

Acknowledgements, 292
Selected Bibliography, 295

Oppositional Poetics

""wozu Dichter in durftiger Zeit?""-Holderlin from "Bread & Wine"

How do we

'Kill Or Cure', a bold prescriptive for these apocalyptic days, brings together substantial new work as well as the best of Anne Waldman's previously uncollected poetry. It includes credos, manifestos, dreams, homages to literary predecessors, 'Shaman Hisses You Slide Back Into The Night' (the journal poem written during Bob Dylan's historic Rolling Thunder Revue), witty political diatribes, travel vignettes, incantations, and a new section of the ongoing epic poem 'Iovis, ' a powerful meditation on male energy.