"The lectures compiled here range from poem to storytelling to information-share to monologue, but all have at least two (and certainly many more) things in common: first, that they are concerned with the construction of a livable future for the world, for poetry, for art, for life; and second, that they owe their existence to the archive. . . [I]n every line detailed above, I feel the grace of the archive like a guiding hand."—The Brooklyn Rail
“Waldman has developed her own patented brand of rhythmically insistent model structure, both conveying and imitating the transitoriness of the human moment. Occurring in key points in this scheme, harmonistic images of natural wholeness, reconciliation and plentitude provide the chords that hold the receptive, inclusive structures together.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Anne Waldman is a poet orator, her body an instrument for vocalization, her voice a trembling flame rising out of a strong body, her texts that accurate energetic fine notations of words with spoken music latent in mindful arrangement on the page.”—Allen Ginsberg 

“Celebrates her awareness of the many roles a woman plays with incantations of comtemporary flux. . . . A reader-performer, a manic public voice whose poetry joins graffiti, collage, jazz, and conversation.”—Library Journal

Anne Waldman, poet, performer, professor, literary curator, and cultural activist, has been a prolific and active poet and performer many years, creating radical hybrid forms for the long poem, both serial and narrative, as with Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, Manatee/Humanity, and Gossamurmur, all published by Penguin Poets. She is also the author of the magnum opus The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press 2011), a feminist “cultural intervention” taking on war and patriarchy which won the PEN Center 2012 Award for Poetry. Recent books include: Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet To Born (Coffee House 2016) and Trickster Feminism (Penguin, 2018). She has been deemed a “counter-cultural giant” by Publishers Weekly for her ethos as a poetic investigator and cultural activist, and was awarded the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Lifetime Achievement in 2015. She has also been a recipient of The Shelley Award for Poetry (from the Poetry Society of America), a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Elizabeth Kray Award from Poets House, NYC in 2019. Waldman has also been at the fore-front many decades in creating poetic communities and has focused on the necessity of archival practices to insure the memory of some of the 20th and 21st century’s most precious literary histories and oral recordings. She was one of the founders of the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, and its Director a number of years and then went on to found The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University with Allen Ginsberg and Diana di Prima in 1974 and went on to create its celebrated MFA Program. She has continued to work with the Kerouac School as a Distinguished Professor of Poetics and Artistic Director of its Summer Writing Program. During the global pandemic she and co-curator Jeffrey Pethybridge have created the online “Carrier Waves” iteration of the famed Summer Writing Program. She is the editor of The Beat Book and co-editor of Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, and Beats at Naropa and most recently, Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics. She is a Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets. She makes her home in New York City and Boulder, Colorado.

Emma Gomis is a Catalan American poet, essayist, editor and researcher. She is the cofounder of Manifold Press. Her texts have been published in Denver Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Entropy, and Asymptote among others and her chapbook Canxona is forthcoming from b l u s h lit. She was selected by Patricia Spears Jones as The Poetry Project’s 2020 Brannan Poetry Prize winner. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Poetics from Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where she was also the Anne Waldman fellowship recipient, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in criticism and culture at the University of Cambridge.

QUIDDITIES: An Introduction 

SANCTUARY & APOCALYPSE 

I Tried to Honor the Ancestors, Lisa Jarnot (2017) 

Pepper and Salt, Kevin Killian (2014) 

Loss and Language, M. NourbeSe Philip (2014) 

(tentative title, transcription needs editing) 

Dreams, Again, Alice Notley (2008, 2013) 

Cultural and Political Rhizomes, Sherwin Bitsui (2012) 

The Poetics of Field Experiments in the Evershift, Edwin Torres (2019) 

The Wind at Night, Cedar Sigo (2019) 

The Coming Mental Range, Will Alexander (2019) 

On Contemplative Poetics: A Practice for Saving the World, Allen Ginsberg (1989) 

ECOPOETIC ATTENTIONS 

The Future of the Past: Eco-poetry and the Carboniferous, Forrest Gander (2008) 

How to Get Lost in the Living Room: Brief Thoughts on Bewilderment, Dan Beachy Quick (2018) 

Eco-Etho Poetics, Jack Collom (2015) 

Danzeling on the Age of the Volcano: Environmental Awareness as the 21st Century Approaches (1992)   

Paula Gunn Allen Ed Sanders Letter from Peter Warshall (Solstice, 2011) 

COMMUNAL ACTION 

Let’s Start Stopping. A Commencement Address, Eileen Myles (2013) 

The Collective, Lisa Robertson (2020) 

Eros and Ethos, Akilah Oliver (2010) 

The Woman in the Wilderness, Peter Lamborn Wilson (1993) 

On Property and Monstrosity, Julie Carr (2018) 

The Lockout, Lewis Warsh (2018) 

Collective Action, Jos Charles (2019) 

IDENTITY IN THE CAPITALOCENE 

What’s the Frequency?: Trends in Contemporary Poetry, Alan Gilbert (2017) Investigative Poetics: Imagination and Documentation, Ronaldo Wilson (2011) 

Lyric Embodiment, Hoa Nguyen (2018) 

Beyond Sovereignty: Aimé Césaire, Opacity, and a Poetics of Invagination Roger Reeves (2019) 

Identity, Narrative, Anti-Narrative, Alexs Pate, kari edwards, Thalia Field, Robert Glück, Thomas Glave (2001)  

kari edwards Robert Glück On Mistranslation, Layli Longsoldier (2014) 

(tentative title, place-holder notes, waiting for Layli’s essay version) 

Notes of a Dirty Old Man (who masturbates in public), Samuel Delany (2015) 

AGAINST ATROCITY 

Black Freighter, Tongo Eisen-Martin (2020) 

Racoon Magic, Ariana Reines (2014) Ancestors, Eliot Weinberger (2015) 

Writer’s Block and Noeteny, William S. Burroughs (1981) 

On the Edge of Forgetfulness, Eleni Sikelianos (2012) 

Panel: Radical Instances: How to Work with Difficult “Material” What is the Work Now, Rodrigo Toscano (2019) 

Late Hominid Poetics, Lisa Jarnot (2017) 

Transmission Fluid, Thurston Moore (2018) 

A Condition of Impossibility, Lyn Hejinian (1995) 

Poetry, Politics and the Real World, Amiri Baraka (2012) 

The Question is the Beginning of the Healing: Cecilia Vicuña and Anne Waldman on Ritual and Performance (2021)   

BIOGRAPHIES