Eyewitness Glimpse

with

ANNE WALDMAN

at

The Jack Kerouac Festival

Lowell, Massachusetts

October 1997

Jessa: We just heard you read your tribute to Allen Ginsberg. How did you first meet Allen?

Anne: I talked to him on the phone in the early sixties; it was before the Poetry Conference of '65. My father had met him in the fifties. My father worked at Pace University in the History Department, and had invited Allen to come to Pace at which they gave him an honorary degree.

I called him from Bennington College to invite him to read, but he was going out of the country. Then I went out to Berkeley to the big Poetry Conference in 1965, where there was Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Ted Berrigan, Ed Sanders--and I was still in school. Allen was very much around; he was the alternative community in American poetry that was gathering at some of these events. This was not the poetic academy. And I took a vow that night that this was going to be my life. I was going to sit at the feet of these masters, and stomp on their corpses with my own voice, activated.

Jessa: That last line sounds like your poem of the dancing skeletons.

Anne: The "Cittipatti," yes, they're the dancing skeletons.

Jessa: So this was like a catalyst event for you.

Anne: Yes, and then I went back to New York, where I was from, and started working at the St. Mark's Poetry Project the next year--and worked there almost twelve years, until 1978.

Jessa: Was the Poetry Project already going then?

Anne: Well, there had been open readings, and in '66, we got a grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity under Lyndon Johnson, to work with alienated youth on the Lower East Side, and it was being administrated through the New School. So we got books, and support. There was also a film project, Theater Genesis, where Sam Shephard did his early plays.

This poetry scene was a continuation of what'd gone on at Cafe Metro and other places on the Lower East Side. I started as Joel Oppenheimer's assistant, a poet from the Black Mountain group; then became the Poetry Project director in '68, and from that was invited to Naropa. So you see, through this group, I was organizing readings and editing a magazine.

Jessa: Which magazine was this?

Anne: The World Magazine, and editing Angel Hair Magazine of Books, which I'd founded with another poet in Berkeley, at that Robert Duncan reading--the first reading we'd gone to.

So through the small press work, the reading series, the workshops at St. Mark's, my involvement kept evolving from the late sixties into the early seventies.

Jessa: When did the Naropa School open in Boulder?

Anne: Naropa Institute started in the summer of ' 74. That's when I went out to Boulder with Allen, and Diane di Prima was there. For a while I kept going back and forth between Boulder and New York, and then decided to get the energy from the Rocky Mountain high, and be there on a more regular basis.

Jessa: How did the name for the Naropa School come about?

Anne: Well, the name, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets, came about because we didn't have a space; we didn't have a desk; we didn't have an office, phone number, or faculty. We just had this vision.

There's a line from a poet friend, John Ashby, "The academy of the future is opening its doors to us." That's when the word "disembodied" happened, as sort of a joke on the fact that we didn't have anything--like this peripatetic faculty, etc. Yet the name's unforgettable, when people heard the full name, you know, they'd ask, "What does that mean?" Because, in fact, it's very much a body of poetics. I mean we're all very much alive and walking around, in the language of the living body.

Jessa: I was also very taken by your telling of how Allen Ginsberg called you his "spiritual wife." Could you elaborate on that?

Anne: Well, we sometimes joked about an alliance--you know, like a power alliance. We were so much on the same wavelength, in terms of our Buddhist practice, political commitment, and running the school; we even had the same Buddhist teacher. He was a part of my world, in many ways, over a long period of time. Also my brother lived at his farm when my family moved up to Cherry Valley for a while; and Allen was always so interested in my son.

Jessa: The two of you also traveled together. I especially liked the story about when Allen was crowned "The King of the May" in Prague, and was reinvited back twenty-five years later.

Anne: Yes, and he wrote a new poem--updating the old one--called "The Return of the King of the May."

Jessa: Did they recrown him then too?

Anne: No, he crowned the next one. You see, the whole thing had gone dead--or at least in slumber--for twenty-five years; and then he came back, and with a beautiful crown, reawakened it. It was a very high time; it was during the Velvet Revolution. It was wonderful to be there with him, and to see--when you traveled with him abroad--you saw how important he was. Not just for his writing, but for his being. He was someone who stood for the values that these other countries and cultures were fighting for.

Lee: Anne, I loved your poem about Allen's dying; it was very good.

Anne: Thank you.

Lee: The last time we saw you was standing out in the rain with David Amram and Anne Charters at the Beat Conference at New York City's Town Hall in May 1994. How did you meet Ed Sanders?

Anne: I remember talking to him first. You see, we were having a lot of parties when St. Mark's Place first started up the Poetry Project. Of course I'd seen The Fugs--I'd grown up on MacDougal Street, and later lived on St. Mark's Place.

Lee: He went to school there.

Anne: Right, and then Ed had the Peace Eye Bookstore. During that time we got very close; he is like a soul brother.

Lee: He's a very good man, a mench, yes.

Anne: He's been out to Naropa a lot as one of our guest faculty, and then we've been in Vienna together.

Jessa: You also em-cee'ed together at the Beat Conference in May '94.

Anne: Yes, I mean these people are just getting more and more precious as time goes on. Robert Creeley is getting up there too.

Lee: Yes, really, they turn into gold, but not the way you thought they would. It's mineral. (all laugh heartedly)