THREE YEARS ago, in June 2021, we launched Rock and the Beat Generation with a view to covering that fertile terrain where the poetic and the novelistic cross-fertilise with the musical, particularly popular music in all its rich representations: rock and jazz and folk and blues and more.
Few of the living, working, poets linked to that mid-twentieth-century literary tradition are more committed to this connecting creative force than the great Anne Waldman, writer, organiser, campaigner, recording artist, a true carrier of the original Beat baton into the new century and the current age, a pioneer in the field of words and sound for five decades.
It is therefore with great pleasure. that we dedicate a two-part feature to Waldman: an extended interview by the respected post-Beat poet JIM COHN, conducted in recent weeks, and, to follow, the first consolidated discography of her work, a survey compiled by the writer herself and the very same man with whom she conversed last month.
Poet, professor, performer, librettist and cultural activist, Waldman is the author of over 60 volumes of poetry, poetics and anthologies including The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in The Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press), which won the Pen Center Literary Prize. Penguin has published her books over many years, including Trickster Feminism, among five others.
She was a founder of the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery in New York City in 1966 and co-founder, in 1974, of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. The School’s 50th Anniversary Summer Writing Program will be in session this summer in Boulder, Colorado, from June 9th-29th.
Waldman’s album SCIAMACHY, released in 2020 by Fast Speaking Music, has been described by Patti Smith as ‘exquisitely potent, a psychic shield for our times.’ In the spring of 2022, she was the keynote speaker for the conference ‘Bob Dylan and the Beats’ in Tulsa.
She wrote the libretto for the critically acclaimed opera/movie Black Lodge with music by composer David T. Little that premiered at Opera Philadelphia in 2022. The work was Grammy-nominated in 2024.
Pictured above: Anne Waldman Image: Nina Subin
Most recently, Waldman has been the author of Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House Press) and co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat). Furthermore, Rues du Monde/Streets of the World (2023) has seen her poems translated by Pierre Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte with Eline Marx, for Editions Apic, Algiers.
Her essay on the Beats and the founding of the Buddhist inspired Naropa University, with notes and poems, appears in the 2024 title Tendrel: A Meeting of Minds (Trident Books), a collection called Activist Scissors is forthcoming from Staircase and Penguin will issue a new volume in 2025.
Reviewing Bard, Kinetic, Nick Sturm from the Poetry Foundation commented: ‘Waldman is one of the most important and irreducible living American poets.’ She has been described by Publishers Weekly as ‘a counter-cultural giant’.
ANNE WALDMAN’s interview with JIM COHN took place between May 15th and 29th, 2024
Jim Cohn: Anne, much of your music catalog is available at Fast Speaking Music, the record label you formed with your son, Ambrose Bye, which is hosted online by Bandcamp. I’d like to celebrate essential works from across your fifty-year musical trajectory and encourage readers to listen along. To begin, would you contextualize how you see your Fast Speaking Music catalog (fastspeakingmusic.bandcamp.com) in relation to your oeuvre of written poetry, poetics and prose?
Anne Waldman: It’s a unique inventory, an important archive for me where I can hear the pieces, remember some of the details of composition, recording, collaboration and experience the work in a more sonorous, textured way. Not only being another channel, but vocalization engages a different frequency and sense of process than the practice of making bare poems does.
The texts are various. I might cannibalize from more performative places the poems go, collage lines together within a different frame. Have writing for the music or instrument(s) etc. I respond and feel called or challenged by the instruments around me. So different structures in terms of the words and modes. A varied architectural quality of rising and falling language, bending and breaking, than a traditional poem or prose block provides on the page. Improvising often on top of my own words. My sense of time is perhaps more exacting but I can also expand. I have to make decisions on the spot as ‘tape is rolling’. First takes often seem (feel) the best.
JC: In 2014, you did an interview with Glen Morrow entitled ‘The Vocal Body’ for the online music magazine Perfect Sound Forever and cited these music giants of your youth: Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers, Sam Cooke, Johnny Ray, Peggy Lee, Ray Charles, Buddy Holly, and Elvis. Coming of age, what narratives, what messages, what terma (‘hidden treasures’) were going on in popular songs that spoke to you?
AW: I listened to the pop radio station, must have been WABC late at night in the dark in the early sixties. I felt the resonance of desire, human toil, heartbreak. Ray Charles has the transcendent ‘That Lucky Old Sun’ with chorus, and the sun’s rolling around heaven all day, and he’s going to ‘sweat til I’m wrinkled and grey’. Peggy Lee with ‘Fever’ invoking Captain Smith & Pocahontas and Romeo & Juliet. The line ‘I burn forsooth’. ‘Forsooth?’ Poetry! Sam & Dave’s upbeat soothing sound sitting by the bay. The Everly Brothers harmony with steel guitar, a great combo, and so on… ‘Dream, dream, dream, dream’. ‘No Particular Place to Go’, Chuck Berry’s funny tangle with the girl’s safety belt. Of course, many songs had lyricists (some more poetic than others, there’s research on all that) behind them. At Bennington, I did a paper on rock ‘n’ roll for Stanley Edgar Hyman’s ‘Myth, Ritual, and Literature’ class where I explored African roots.
JC: You directly engage musical properties that charge a word beyond its typical meaning in the sound poem ‘Skin Meat Bones’ on Live in Amsterdam 6.2.91 (1992) and Battery: Live at Naropa 1974-2002 (2003). Another essential sound poem from around this time, ‘Crack in the World’, appears on your recording Alchemical Elegy: Selected Songs and Writings (2001). Early on, was it the somatic and liminal spaces between poetry and music that attracted you to sound poems?
AW: Yes, all that. Threshold space, body’s reach and larynx, specific runes, words in the head, enunciations, ‘endommmmmeeeeeetriuuuum shedding…’ etc. ‘Modal structures’ is the term I’ve always used to delineate this aspect of the poetry. Kurt Schwitters’ ‘Ursonate’ is a vocalized word sonata in 4 parts, really great. 1930s. (I’ve got a secret plan for a follow up: ‘Urarias? of Uroratorios?’, no music.) I knew and heard Ernst Jandl, Viennese poet, perform in his later years. He had a kind of jazz timing. Jaap Blonk another wonderful sound poet performer.
Improvisation for me, of course. The John Cage ‘Pieces of An Hour’ of mine that’s in Iovis epic has some of these aspects with the random lineages. Somewhat dramatized. I’m going on nerve, mood, time of day. There are moments where I can jump in if voice is strong and clear. That’s the instrument I’m saying. It can also draw from protest text where the situation is fluid, where you have to be able to intervene vocally.
And you get to opera. Although classic opera is very structured, there’s a lot of adventures of surprise and reaction, give and take, that’s structured into the form. Thus, a ‘recitativo’ space, and often the complexity of how the words are placed, and the notion of emotive language. The nine rasas, the moods, the flavors, the more you get into other music from other cultures, this idea of the changing possibilities of states of mind, encounters in meditation, talking to yourself, heartbreak, spiritual ritual, deviation, and praise evolve. The modes seek their forms. It starts with the language and consciousness.
JC: I hear similarities between your sound poems and that modern classical sound in the poem ‘Furor Bellicus’ (from The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, 2011), in Steven Taylor’s accompaniment on guitar and in your voice (Battery). I also hear vivid modern classical music throughout the masterful Jaguar Harmonics (2014), with ‘Beyond the Canopy’ as the centerpiece, as well as the remarkable music from composer and cellist Ha-Yang Kim who joined you on that project. Also on Jaguar is the exemplary ‘Cross Lines’. There is the thirty-eight-minute piece, ‘Entanglement’, a monumental work created with composer and guitarist Roger Green on Untethered (2017). And the epic ‘Extinction Aria’ (2020), a 20-minute collaboration with Cecilia Vicuña. Growing up with classical and contemporary classical genres in mind, what unique feminist qualities have these musical spaces offered your poetry and its performance?
AW: Classical music has been in my life as long as I can remember. My father would have it playing on the radio, especially Saturday Metropolitan Opera matinees. So, the feminism and power of the divas! Occasionally we would see the chamber orchestra, and I loved the structure of that ensemble. Counting how many women in the orchestra pit. My older brother Mark studied and played the clarinet. My father had been a swing piano player before the war and also played music for modern dance classes.
Some of the choices you highlight here such as Entanglement called for a different formality, and originality and experiment. The text could be endless. I wanted to be ‘on’ for Roger Green, which was an improvised performance but we took forty minutes to entangle everything. I remember taking deep breaths before we started. When I’m working with someone who’s especially skilled as a composer or musician, there’s a wonderful serendipity, where you don’t know where it’s going but it ends up pulling together with the communal intentionality and trust, and you’re wanting to make a ‘bigger’ more engaged, complicated work. Something I couldn’t necessarily do on my own. Take pride also, surprising, on essentially being a ‘loner’. I was always curious but there was a push on the guys, I could tackle anything, be as good as, if not better.
These forays into vocalization, performance, were natural extensions of poetry for me. I wasn’t planning, or ever had, a pop rock ‘n’ roll career. I really appreciate Joan La Barbara, a singer who has worked with experimental musicians like Cage, and her own husband Morton Subotnick, perhaps more freedom there. But pieces like Jaguar and much of ‘ were also part of the family continuum for me personally in performance and music and original sound. My son, Ambrose Bye, and I were studying gamelan at the same time. We got to be in Bali together playing. I had worked with my nephew Devin Brahja Waldman when he was a kid, playing sax. We performed ‘Masters of War’ at Town Hall for Bob Dylan’s 6oth birthday. I knew Steve Lacy from an early age. He was married to my former sister-in law.
Perhaps I am also listening to that ‘voice’ of other, but also the voice I hear in myself, in my own head space. The collaboration with Cecilia Vicuña, yes, I had this short epic poem that goes through the 6 realms of existence in tantric buddhism: Hell realm, animal realm, hungry ghost, warring and blissed out gods etc. and I could see and hear Cecilia’s animalia husky and curling voice and breath in the text. The Buddhist idea of filling space, adorning space, standing up for your space as a feminist, standing by your word, and creating walls of protection through sound is always there. She is an energetic performer with a great vocal rage.
The metabolism that comes through sprechstimme (speak song), as a feminist, this idea of creating this atmosphere of psychological awareness, from infant to virgin to lover to old hag to charnel ground is profound. It’s the eternal return. That proclamation as a solo voice with these walls of protection through sound and a kind of metabolism that I consider root force to my kinetics have been blending and playing with this metabolism now in ways I find even more interesting and curious. Entering the forest and caverns, climbing mountains, going underwater, as with the manatee. In my newer long poem, ‘Mesopotopia’, I am on the streets of a falling city with crutches, intoning the prophet Isaiah.
Pictured above: Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg at Naropa, where they co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 1974
JC: Clearly, your work in poetry and music touches on the blues. Angela Davis, in her book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday (1999), noted that performances and lyrics by these three blues legends were powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture. Your music catalog also lays the groundwork of an aesthetic still at odds with the American mainstream. I’m thinking of ‘Kaliyuga Blues’ (Live in Amsterdam and Alchemical Elegy), ‘Citipatti Blues’ (Alchemical Elegy), and ‘Born Again Blues’ (Battery). Can you speak about your own work in the blues as a vehicle of multiconsciousness?
AW: These three geniuses are extraordinary and life changing presences on planet earth and their performances are ritual transmission of emotional peaks and the deeper recesses of suffering and experience. The trajectory of the existential, how you are in relation to your heart. Your heart song. The rhythm of your essence. They are enshrined forever.
At the time I was coming of age, mainstream American culture was this sense of victory and relief, that we won World War II, which influenced my childhood, but I also yearned for this sense of something more. My father was a swing piano player. An amazing lineage with giants like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Earl Hines and Art Tatum in the continuum. Folk-activist Seeger had hootenannies down the block where I was growing up.
With these haunted powerful Black women, it’s a different story. By virtue of being Black women in America, their existence running counter to the mainstream, yet their being the heartline of the culture, their work was not the usual matter of pop songs. Blues is a demeanor of dream and drama, of healing, of emotional fracture, and restoration of body, speech, and mind by singing the heart out. There’s always troubling mind… The Black women artists carry the true heart of spiritual America.
JC: One of the first times jazz appears in your Fast Speaking Music catalog is a live collaboration with jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, also featuring Allen Ginsberg, titled ‘Cut Up: Long, It Took Long’ (1990), on Battery. Saxophonist Steve Lacy, who played with legendary pianist and jazz composer Thelonious Monk, can be heard on your collaboration ‘Pieces of an Hour’, also on Battery. On Alchemical Elegy, your sax-backed ‘Jack Kerouac Dream’ speaks to your own jazz ties as a Beat poet. Other standout tracks include ‘Hombres’ from The Milk of Human Kindness (2011), the exceptional ‘Oasis at Biskra’ from the album of the same name (2014), and Max Davies’ subtle instrumentation behind the single ‘Das Kapital’ (2022). In the long multigenerational conversation between poetry and jazz, what’s been your most significant takeaway?
AW: It’s a great parity. Poetry and jazz seem as mirror arts of one another. Between the poet and the jazz musician, yes, a long historical appreciation and love. Growing up also the economic parity… the gig to gig life as poet too. There’s a lot of common ground of articulation, of conversation, talking presences that point to certain life forms in community. There’s intervention, improvisation, spontaneity, cut up, word of mouth lore. When I’m working with jazz folk, there’s a mutual appreciation for each other’s backgrounds, stories. I was listening to jazz very young, it’s in one’s metabolism.
We have some women poets of the Beat Generation to credit for this poetry and jazz state of Beat affairs over the years. Some had brief forays into jazz: Diane di Prima, Janine Pommy Vega. The poet ruth weiss was one of the first artists who performed her poetry together with jazz musicians. As early as 1949. After she decided to move to San Francisco in 1952, she began jamming and reading poetry with street musicians, friends opened The Cellar, a club in which she would hold poetry and jazz sessions Wednesday nights. We performed together at some gigs in Vienna. She would call me often in the middle of the night the last years of her life just to chat. She had a strong pulse for the work and life on the ‘road’.
So, while the first Jazz & Poetry Beat recordings were produced by Rexroth, Ferlinghetti and Kerouac (and Ginsberg and Burroughs were also having full lives as multimedia performers), the guys were not the sole inventors of the form. I never thought about gender re this kind of work for myself. I was growing up with jazz. I trembled hearing Nina Simone live. The women singers were poetic goddesses. Women of my generation like Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk were finding their own way within the backdrop of an everything else going on in the Sixties… I’ve also credited Om Kalsoum and Subalakshmi as influences from other realms entirely.
JC: You saw the folk tradition up close during the 1960s folk revival. I hear the folk tradition in your 1988 song ‘Corridoror’ (a.k.a. “Bardo Corridor”) and the beatific ballad ‘Al Sueño’ featuring Steven Taylor on guitar and Stephen Smith on violin, from Battery. There’s your lovely cover of Allen Ginsberg’s musical version of William Blake’s poem ‘Garden of Love’, with harmonium by Ishtar Kramer, included on By the Side of the Road (2003); and your transformational remakes of ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Go Down Moses’, into ‘Verses for the New Amazing Grace’ (Alchemical Elegy) and ‘Prisons of Egypt’ (Anne Waldman with Max Davies, 2015). As a political activist and feminist poet working with diverse folk traditions throughout your life and art, what do these folk traditions teach us about personal freedom and self-determinism in dark times?
AW: Well basically that you have a power in your expression, you are thinking about ‘it’, reality, the world, the struggle all the time as artist. You are also historian and seer. You exude your art through consciousness, relationality to the events of your time, startling, disturbing, extraordinary, from space travel to genocide. As an activist you can be a witness, scrying, prophesying, you can observe and pay attention to events around you and in your own life. There’s a long tradition of this in troubadour culture, the role of the poet as witness, seer, chronicler, the griot, telling and living the epic of the time. Capturing the heart break and injustices and sorrows of the time as well. It’s almost archival in a way. You collect, you save things, you amplify things, and you keep things alive. These traditions, in contemporary times, we’re seeing poetry within protest encampments, in refugee camps, places where people don’t have access to other forms of art. With poetry you only need the voice.
Pictured above: Fellow poet and Waldman interviewer Jim Cohn
JC: In 1976, you were invited to join Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour as poet-in-residence. You’ve talked about meeting a number of contemporary musicians: Joni Mitchell, Eric Anderson, Joe Cocker, Joan Baez. You also wrote this: ‘I had a close look at the rock 'n' roll world and as compelling and glamorous as it was, I felt starved for the conversation of poets.’ Looking back on these remarks today, was it a pervasive sense that the rock and roll world was enslaved by its own mythology?
AW: No I wouldn’t say that, but that is a possibility. It was more that, in the poetry world, people tend to continue the conversation long after a reading or work is over. In the rock and roll world, in my experience, there was more of an emphasis on getting relaxed after the job which could also be an ecstatic performance. Any artist has the steady gaze through their work, that’s influenced by your experience, and for the rock and roll scene, there’s so much more of a demand and expectation from the fans on the performers, which takes a toll on you as a musician and performer.
I remember being in Dylan’s hotel room one time and the offerings from fans were piling up outside the door. So I don’t think it’s that rock and roll is enslaved by its own mythology, but that the expectations on performers are different. On the other hand, Bob would be in white face during Rolling Thunder with this kind of shamanic kachina doll-like hat, a trickster figure, so he would come to that edge where he takes on the makeup and energy of the crowd, and responding with this dynamic sharp vocalization, giving back to the fans what they need from him. For me, Dylan is this poet, musician, trickster, shamanic figure. Diane di Prima dedicated her Revolutionary Letters to him. So there’s also Dylan being a liberating force for women. I don’t consider him to be enslaved to the mythology of rock and roll at all, despite the fact that those expectations are put upon him. And he enjoys roles and masks as well.
JC: One relic from Dylan’s Renaldo and Clara film (1978) was a scene where you’re heard reciting from your breakthrough list-chant everywoman poem, ‘Fast Speaking Woman’, from which you delivered an excerpt on Battery. In your essay, ‘Fast Speaking Woman’ & the Dakini Principle’, in the 20th anniversary edition of Fast Speaking Woman (1996), you cited the ‘elemental modal structure’ of Mazatec shaman Maria Sabina’s own chanting as well as her ability to channel her healing chants toward ‘radical empowerment […] as she guides young female initiates to confident womanhood’ (38). I also hear chanting in your piece ‘Stepping Back’, the soundtrack from the film of the same title (2020), with its ‘I notice…’ anaphor, written on the 13th anniversary of Allen Ginsberg’s death. As a poet who has championed the notion of nonbinary or ‘both, both’ mind as a form of radical empowerment, how has chant continued to inform your poetry-music today?
AW: Chant is heartbeat, it’s minding and reminding itself, one of the great improvised structures for repetition. You can spin around on your heels and everything you see will be inside the chant. This notion of nonbinary as ‘both, both’ that you can hold the contradictions of your own mind, you can hold more of your own life and breath, hopefully appeasing the demons as well. My piece for Diane di Prima, ‘Antithesis Reality’, was an attempt to articulate this binary in an effort to break it down, ‘the only war that matters is the war of imagination’.
JC: In 1982, you released the single ‘Uh-Oh Plutonium!’ as a 45 and as a music video. Your performance is a mashup of style, genre and content. Looking at the remastered music video in 2024, the song’s performance strikes me as punk. In 2001, you recorded ‘Duality’ (Alchemical Elegy), a more straight-ahead punk-rock number featuring Steven Taylor on guitar. There is the remarkable ‘Extinction Aria pt. II’, a kind of punk-rock opera from the album SCIAMACHY (2020), as well as the high energy ‘My Lover Comes Home Today’, both tracks featuring Guro Moe, Deb Googe, Håvard Skaset, Devin Brahja Waldman and Ambrose Bye. What is it about punk that seems so illustrative of Buddhism and feminism as you embody it?
AW: States of mind that are unfiltered can go into the cave, the crux, the body, with sound. Feminism is an ongoing battle, no matter what time we’re in. It’s in the lexicon of experience of half the population of the world, but it’s still a battle. By saying something you can make it happen. Multi-headed demons with many arms and red skin, the kind of Buddhism I’m drawn to, is very evocative and performative, that's not all love and light.
JC: Your music has been influenced by travels to India, Tibet, Indonesia, Thailand as well as other nations near and far. I hear those influences on these tracks: ‘Battery’ & ‘Anarchy Reggae’ from Live in Amsterdam; ‘Book of Events’ and ‘Notes on Sitting beside a Noble Corpse’ (Alchemical Elegy); and on the operatic ‘Field of Mars’ (Battery). Embedded within world music traditions are all kinds of drumscapes; one of which backs you on ‘Paean: May I Speak Thus?’ on Battery and featuring Don Cherry on the Malian doussn’gouni. Are you embedded in any other country’s music at the present and is that inspiring you in new directions?
AW: Currently I continue to be interested in trance music, working with the drone. I’d like to incorporate the oud in some recent compositions. I’ve been working with my nephew Devin Brahja Waldman and a double bassist Georgia Wartel Collins, who’s deep sound is very magnetic to me, voice and ‘lyrics’. I’ve been spending more time in Mexico and working with folks there. I wouldn’t necessarily call it Mexican jazz, but there are many passing through in the free jazz tradition.
JC: You’ve also worked with musicians to create electronica soundscapes for your poetry. Think of ‘Ice’ and ‘Desert Storm’ from Live in Amsterdam. This direction seemed to crystalize in your 2006 album, The Eye of the Falcon, a recording with music by Ambrose Bye, and including songs as diverse in their musical composition as the Stax-like horn loops in ‘Tanks Under Trees’ to the signature composition ‘Devil’s Working Overtime’. Your album Matching Half (2008) includes the electronica laced ‘Corset’. There’s also your 2021 single, ‘Sisupacala Speaks With Mara’, with Nathan Wheeler’s soundscape, and ‘Anarqua/AmorDesamor’ with Adriana Camacho (a.k.a. Loope) who provided sound design fx and loops from the Loope album (2022). Much of electronica is about dancing in clubs or at raves. Do you view it meditatively?
AW: I love Arthur Russell’s approach to electronic music which was more avant-garde than meditative, but I don’t strictly view electronica as all about dancing and raves. It’s a frequency of mind, it’s a body rush.
JC: You’ve worked with numerous women poets and musicians working in the poetry-music space. I’ll speak of four, though I know there are legion: Patti Smith, whose song ‘Ghost Dance’ you covered in 2013; Meredith Monk, with whom you’ve collaborated as recently as 2017; Laurie Anderson, with whom you collaborated on ‘Rune’ (SCIAMACHY); and, as mentioned earlier, the esteemed international activist poet, performance and visual artist, and eco-feminist Cecelia Vicuña in 2020. Why has the idea of ‘third mind’, which discounts any particular ‘master narrative or one view’, remained central to your collaborative work in your poetry and music?
AW: Artists and musicians, we’re all basically composites, there are these compositions within us, and these ways of working and creating and being vehicles for attentive consciousness. There’s an inclination to participate in the acknowledgement of archiving of these forms of expression, especially of these particular times and events, to feel as though you have some kind of agency in the suffering and joy of the compositional world. There’s a warmth and necessity to connect, acknowledging the genius of others is part of our vow. It’s not about one mode or one way, one sound doesn’t have to dominate. The third mind, of heaven, earth, man, or the father, the son, the holy spirit, it’s part of the essence of collaboration, to feel the adhesiveness, to learn and feel the give and take with another artists.
JC: The album Harry’s House Archive (2014), with its 83 tracks featuring many poets, some in song and some reading, including your spoken word and music track ‘Holy 21st Century’ with music by Brendan Haskins, reminds me of Harry Smith’s own Anthology of American Folk Music (1952). Have Harry Smith’s field recordings been a kind of template for your own experimental poetry and music explorations all along?
AW: Harry Smith is a major template for many of us. He put together, he anthologized, the Invisible Republic’s range of stories. The revival around Harry’s archiving, film work, cinema work, artistic practices, his hipster and trickster energy, his alchemical and quixotic presence, has influenced my thinking of myself also as a field poet. I am interested in everything.
JC: What musical genres and/or individual pieces in your catalog haven’t come up that you would like to mention? Last, do you have a legacy set of recorded poetry and music in the works?
AW: I wanted to mention creating librettos. One was for ‘Cyborg on the Zatere’ (with Steven Taylor) and there was the play Red Noir which Judith Malina wanted to do as a voice musical as well, and also creating libretto for ‘Black Lodge’, the opera that started as a stage production and then became a movie. It was so interesting to work with David T. Little and be hired on in this assignment to incorporate Burroughs, Artaud, and Lynch into an existential drama. Librettos are very different from my own live performances in that I’m working with so many other talents and visions to create a single piece.
I’ve spoken often of how being born towards end of World War II the April after Hitler died and my father still serving in Germany then and how the USA still murdered innocent victims in Japan by dropping deadly atomic bombs, how this was life altering. It made me a poet – an artist – a performer. To integrate the dark emotions and create sanctuary as a child, my parents helped me with this with creative practices.
Creating the bomb made it somehow essential to dropping it. Truman was happy and we could, would, end the war. And yet that war still has enormous continuing deadly complicated karma. Effecting the situation in the Middle East. The aftermath, the wrong decisions, treaties, suffering. How a political leader can come along and more and more want to start up the nuke industry full tilt. The warring god realm feeds on itself. Every weapon is created by a multi-international industry. We make weapons for our enemies. It’s insane. And so on. We are interconnected beings, and we are complicit beings as well. This world civilization and also the planet itself is at risk. We have the evidence and yet keep it running through the 6 realms and spending most of the time in the warring god realm.
I think there is or will be a consciousness that can elevate to a higher plane and I don’t think it will be AI. Artistic practice and life, and in community with other artists, and making music and poetry together is for me a spiritual Endeavor. It can be anarchic and free and it can also embrace the past in a profound way. And the poetries of the past continue to wake us up. Those beings making art not so different from us living a kind of primordial life.
And the work is consociative and choiceless. We need to make sure that art practices are not shut down in our worlds, censored, destroyed, books burned, radio stations banned, forbidden language. Schools in turmoil over gender and Other freedoms that should be guaranteed. Self-expression, creativity and so on. Freedom of speech of what you study and read. The book bans! We are communicative, we humans. If we can’t travel freely with a more spiritual purpose that has little to do with organized religion and its constraints, we are in deep trouble. I sing and civilize with others to stop the savagery, even if it is only ritual efficacy. The text for ‘Astral Omens’, a six-part art album, are relevant and transcendent and the three musicians are in a kind of spiritual accordance.
I worked with bassist Charlie Haden years ago in a spontaneous performance. And now find the double bass player Georgia Wartel Collins a great ally. She is from Sweden. Is just 29. I love the sax work of my nephew Devin, whose musicianship I’ve grown with. And my son Ambrose has continued to work with student poets and musicians at the yearly Naropa University summer program. And done music video with his partner Natalia Gaia. And James Brandon Lewis, major sax artist, is a guest this time, 2024, and we have also worked together. The mode is ‘free jazz’. I want to work with a young oud player and also collaborate with other languages. My grandchild is half-Mexican. She is already performing!
I’m sure some recordings will manifest with the publication of the new book, Mesopotopia, which encodes much new writing. A series of Confessions in epistle form etc. There’s also the album Your Devotee in Rags which has my vocalizing parts of the epic Iovis Trilogy under the direction of music prodigy and poetry scholar Andrew Whiteman, who is based in Montreal.
The Beat lineage has been a force, always in my life, and I was blessed in this life to know the members well in some cases. The openness, the collaboration, the travels into unknown places, physically & psychically, the friendships, the communicating of whispered transmission… The sounding of all this that travels through the psycho-physical body into the intelligence of the language, the heartbeat, the off-rhythms out into air waves and in public space. It is a ‘body’ poetics. A conglomeration of tendencies to awareness of body speech mind that poets who felt the spiritual enactment of our existence also transmitted to us.
Editor’s note: Jim Cohn is a poet, writer and recording artist, editor, publisher and poetics curator. In 1976, he took a poetics class with Anne Waldman and later received a Certificate of Poetics from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Cohn’s Treasures for Heaven: Collected Poems, 1976-2021 was published last year by Giant Steps Press.
See also: ‘Anne Waldman #2: A poetic discography’, which supports this interview, will be published by Rock and the Beat Generation in the near future. Discover more by visiting Anne Waldman’s website.