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.

"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

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).

A collection of lectures transcribed from the audio archives of Naropa University's Summer Writing Program that represent a continuing lineage of experimental literary movements. New Weathers asks us to consider how poetics might embolden deeper engagements with the world. Collected from the alternative education zone founded by Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg with the aim of opening up discourse and fostering political engagement, these texts invoke issues of gender and race-based injustice, the global climate crisis, and our possible extinction. They weave through our poetic community, the conversations we are having, the issues we are facing-our "new weathers" to posit strategies of resistance. List of Contributors: Paula Gunn Allen, Amiri Baraka, Dan Beachy-Quick, Sherwin Bitsui, Robin Blaser, William S. Burroughs, Julie Carr, J'Lyn Chapman, Jos Charles, Jack Collom, Samuel R. Delany, kari edwards, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Tonya M. Foster, Forrest Gander, Alan Gilbert, Allen Ginsberg, Renee Gladman, Robert Gluck, Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Jarnot, Kevin Killian, Thurston Moore, Fred Moten, Eileen Myles, Hoa Nguyen, Alice Notley, Akilah Oliver, M. NourbeSe Philip, Margaret Randall, Roger Reeves, Ariana Reines, Lisa Robertson, Ed Sanders, Andrew Schelling, Cedar Sigo, Eleni Sikelianos, Harry Smith, Edwin Torres, Cecilia Vicuna, Asiya Wadud, Peter Warshall, Eliot Weinberger, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Ronaldo V. Wilson.

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.

'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.