Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye Reading at Tribes March 27th5-7pm Five dollar contribution at the door

Anne Waldman “She is the fastest, wittiest woman to run with the wolves in some time”- Ken Tucker, The New York Times a.waldman@mindspring.com

Poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community for over 40 years as writer, sprechstimme performer, professor, editor, magpie scholar, infra-structure and cultural/political activist. Her published work is prodigious and 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, the recent Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets 2009) which is a book-length rhizomic meditation on evolution and endangered species, and the 1,000 page Iovis Trilogy :“Colors In The Mechanism of Concealment” which will be published by Coffee House press in 2011. “Waldman’s work is the antithesis of stasis…She is a flame. ” as one reviewer has noted. She has also collaborated extensively with a number of artists, musicians, and dancers, most recently artists Pat Steir and Kiki Smith and the theatre director Judith Malina. She has also been working most recently with other media including film and video, with her husband, writer and video/film director Ed Bowes. Publishers Weekly recently referred to Waldman as “A counter-cultural giant”.

Waldman is a recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, has recently been appointment a Chancellor at The Academy of American Poets.

Anne Waldman grew up on Macdougal Street in the heart of Greenwich Village where she still lives, and bi-furcated to Boulder, Colorado in 1974 when she co-founded The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired school in the West, where she currently serves as Artistic Director of its celebrated Summer Writing program. During their long friendship and work together, Allen Ginsberg called her his “spiritual wife” and she has spiritedly continued their vision of keeping the world safe for poetry. Her 40 books and chapbooks of poetry also include Skin Meat Bones, Kill or Cure, Helping The Dreamer, In The Room of Never Grieve and the selected poetic texts: Outrider which includes an interview with Ernesto Cardenal, and essays on Lorine Niedecker and Charles Olson. She has also the author of the legendary Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, San Francisco), now translated into Italian, Czech and French and Spanish.She is editor of The Beat Book (Shambhala Publications) and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books), Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (Coffee House) and Beats at Naropa (Coffee House, 2009), with previously unpublished work by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Diane diPrima, Joanne Kyger and William Burroughs, among others. Her play RED NOIR played two and a half months on off off Broadway in New York City, in 2009/10, produced by the Living Theatre and enthusiastically reviewed by the NY Times. She is the co-author of the script of her husband Ed Bowes’s latest movie “Entanglement”. She also performs with her son. musician and composer Ambrose Bye. Their latest CD is “Matching Half” with Akilah Oliver, and their new CD “The Milk of Universal Kindness” is forthcoming in the summer of 2011.

Waldman recently returned from India where she lectured and presented her work to Muslim students in Kerala state, supported by the US State Department. She also presented her work at panels and performances at the Kolkata Book fair and in Mumbai and at an ecology-center on the Bangladesh border. Other recent conference and festivals Waldman participated have taken place in Nicaragua, Madrid, Prague, Wuhan (China), Beijing, Montreal, Brussels, Paris. In May of 2011 Waldman will be working for two weeks at a girls’ school in Marrakech, Morocco.

She has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, and had a residency at Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy.

Waldman has worked actively for social change, and has been involved with the Rocky Flats Truth Force and was arrested in the 1970s with Daniel Ellsberg & Allen Ginsberg protesting the site of Rocky Flats which was bringing plutonium onto property 10 miles from Boulder for the manufacture of “triggers” for nuclear warheads. She has been involved with clean-up issues and also with Poets Against the War, organizing protests in New York and Washington, D.C. , and with the Poetry Is News events, co-curated with poet and translator Ammiel Alcalay. She took a vow at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 to devote her life to poetry and artistic “community”. She helped found and direct The Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery where she worked as first assistant director and then director a decade. She also recently served on the Board of the Bowery Poetry Club, under the guidance of poet Bob Holman, and Issue Project Room in New York City and is on the Friends Committee for the Poetry Project. Many of the projects she helped initiate and found continue to flourish, which is a testament to her perspicacity and commitment into a future “beyond her own lifetime”. Her co-founding and work of over 35 years on behalf of The Kerouac School at Naropa has helped magnetize and develop an extraordinary literary and poetic community, serving as an exciting component to life in the Rocky Mountain Zone.

She has been an editor of several small press magazines and venues over the years, including The World, Angel Hair Magazine and Books (with Lewis Warsh), Full Court Press, Rocky Ledge (with poet Reed Bye) , Erudite Fangs and the front range magazine Thuggery & Grace, co-edited with Naropa graduates.

Waldman has been a student of Buddhism a number of years, and an ambassador for the oral revival of poetry, as mentioned, appearing on stages from Berlin to Caracas , from Mumbai to Beijing.. She is the co-translator of Songs of the Sons & Daughters of Buddha (Shambhala Publications), from the Buddhist Indian tradition of the Therigata. In addition to projects on her home turf, been instrumental in encouraging poetry projects world-wide and has helped organize programs in Vienna and Indonesia. She has also collaborated with artists Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle, Donna Dennis as well as dancer Douglas Dunn, and her son, musician/composer Ambrose Bye, her nephew Devin Waldman, sax musician and composer. Her most recent collaboration is CRY STALL GAZE with Pat Steir. Her extensive historical literary, art and tape Archive resides at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Ambrose Bye, musician (piano/keyboard, guitar, voice) and composer, grew up in the environment of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, counting Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs as “poetic” godfathers. He graduated from The University of California, Santa Cruz with a degree in music/sociology and was certified at the music /production program at the Pyramind Institute in San Francisco, working on numerous productions and his own compositions as well. He also studied and played in gamelan orchestras in Bali, Indonesia, Boulder, and Santa Cruz. He has performed on stage a number of times, accompanying poets and performers at New York’s Issue Project Room, The Poetry Project, The Bowery Poetry Club, KGB Bar, at The Boulder Theatre’s “Music and Poetry for Progressives” headlined by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, Naropa University, Old Dominion University, The New School, White Columns Gallery, and San Francisco’s Meridian Gallery, and He is in production with his next CD, “The Mi of Universal Kindness” His most recent CD is “Matching Half” with Anne Waldman and Akilah Oliver, which was produced by Farfalla, McMillen, Parrish. His previous composing/ production credits include “In The Room of Never Grieve”, (produced by Coffee House Press, Minneapolis) and “The Eye of the Falcon” (Farfalla, McMillen, Parrish) with poetry by Anne Waldman. His music accompanies the video “The Wake- Up Call of a Poet”, a portrait of Anne Waldman, produced by the Buddhist Broadcasting Foundation, the Netherlands and was broadcast over Dutch TV in December, 2009.

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