Photo by Ken Sibley
Reproduced courtesy of Anne Waldman

Anne Waldman was born in 1945 in Millville, New Jersey, grew up in Greenwich Village, and graduated from Bennington College in 1966.  At Bennington she began her career as editor of the literary magazine Silo.  She later founded the literary journal Angel Hair, and became director of the St. Mark�s Church Poetry Project in the Bowery from 1966-1977.  She co-founded, with Allen Ginsberg, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder Colorado.  She has been a life-long activist against war and the use of nuclear energy.  She continues to be involved with St Mark�s Poetry Project and Naropa University, where she is the Distinguished Professor of Poetics.    

Entering poetry late in the Beat movement, Anne Waldman adopted the Beat, New York, and Black Mountain poetics.  Drawing from her Beat �elders�, Allen Ginsberg, Diana Di Prima, Joanne Kyger, Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, and Brenda Frazer, and with a feminist ideology she began producing works in a cornucopia of media and art forms.  She took her inspiration from music, dance, Buddhism, and created poetry with complex visual and literal structures that strives for existential purpose and social action far better than her �elder� Beats.  She exemplifies the non-conformist, wild, energetic, individuality, of the Beat Generation and continues to celebrate, experiment, and promote the Beat ideologies still today. 

For more information on Anne Waldman, check out these source materials. 
 

Written by: 
Jody Trost

Last updated: 22 July 2005