Fine Print
Warp Speed
Beat Generation heiress folds space with her tongue
by Noel Black Comment on this Story
NOVEMBER 22, 2001: Poet Anne Waldman, author of the famous Fast Speaking Woman in the mid-1970s, has reached light speed. The author of over 30 volumes of poetry, editor of many magazines and several anthologies, and professor/director at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Waldman is at the apex of her career, and the legitimate heir to Allen Ginsberg's crown as America's underground "poet-ambassador" laureate. Born in New Jersey at the end of World War II, Waldman grew up in New York's Greenwich Village amidst the rich intellectual and bohemian life of the 1950s and '60s. She was only 16 years old when she began to make friends with older poets more central to the "Beat Movement" like Diane di Prima, Phillip Whalen, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg.
Beat legend Anne Waldmans at the top of her game. Though she'd grown up on jazz and was infused with the new spirit of liberation and burgeoning feminism ushered in by the Beats and the cultural tectonic shifts of the times, Waldman was also drawn to a circle of New Yorkbased poets more concerned with aesthetics than politics. Jokingly referred to as "The New York School," these poets were more a circle of friends than a "school." Their interests in art, French poetry (the surrealists in particular), and the life of the city that fueled their writing brought them together. Originally consisting of Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, there was also a "second generation" that included Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, Eileen Myles, Lewis Warsh, and the artist and writer Joe Brainard (among others). | |
|
