Synopsis "Sanctuary: (Addenda)"
Internationally recognized and acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over five decades as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. She has read in the streets as well as numerous larger venues such as Casa del Lago in Mexico City, a program she also curated in 2017, the Dodge Literary Festival in the USA and the Jaipur Literature Festival in India and continues to teach poetics all over the world. She remains a highly original “open field investigator” of consciousness, committed to the possibilities of radical shifts of language in her voluminous poetry texts as well as exploring states of mind to create new modal structures and montages of attention. She is the author of many books, including the mini-classic Fast Speaking Woman, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books in San Francisco, a collection of essays entitled Vow to Poetry and several selected poems editions including Helping the Dreamer, Kill or Cure and In the Room of Never Grieve. She has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of The World Compared to a Bubble, Manatee/Humanity, which is a book-length meditation on evolution and endangered species, and Gossamurmur, an allegory on the rescue of poetry’s aural Archive. Her anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, a 1,000 page 25 year project, won the Pen Center Award for Poetry. Waldman’s major publishers are Penguin Poets and Coffee House Press. Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born (2016), as Lyn Hejinian says, “brings Waldman’s work into the more intimate paradoxical folds of poetic (and prophetic) knowledge.” Recent books include Jaguar Harmonics in both English and French editions, and Trickster Feminism (Penguin 2018), of which Erica Hunt writes “Waldman’s poems enact insubordination, a kind of pinwheel parataxis, to offer a necessary second sight. We are summoned to peer past appearances, past the sense of square-one beginnings and ineluctable dead ends. Instead we are invited to raise our gaze afresh and rise to our feet.” Waldman is the Artistic Director of the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
