[Reader-list] An evening with poet Anne Waldman at Sarai Reader 09

[Kavya Murthy]

AN EVENING WITH POET ANNE WALDMAN
at Sarai Reader 09: The Exhibition with Almost Island
30th November, 2012
6 PM, at the Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon

Come and listen to legendary American poet and performer Anne Waldman at
Sarai Reader 09. Waldman comes to India as a guest of the literature
journal, Almost Island (www.almostisland.com)

In 2011, Waldman published her complete feminist epic Iovis: Colors in the
Mechanism of Concealment -- perhaps her most ambitious, radical work to
date. With the scope of its subject and the range of the poem’s formal
procedures --including polyphony, collage, montage, visual poetry, and
performance notation -- Iovis constitutes a compendium of experimental
writing strategies and, in equal parts, an unofficial history primer, a
homage to Waldman’s forebears, a Buddhist sacred text, a score for a
shamanic healing ritual, and a rallying cry. Iovis has recently won the PEN
USA Center 2012 Award for poetry.

Waldman’s poems often seem to have fulfilled themselves when she performs
them—she is a riveting performer—and indeed their movement into orality is
a most natural one for her. She says, “I am primarily interested in the
trajectory of a difficult text to performance, and in the notion of
Sprechstimme (“spoke-sung” in German) and how I might encapsulate a ‘modal
structure’ that’s within my head of such a text—political poetic,
philosophical—within a soundscape. So I think of myself as a word-worker
who can also sing and “mouth” the words.”

This need and facility have also been cultivated over the years as she
performed with jazz musicians like Thelonius Monk, and was a poet in
residence on Bob Dylan’s tour during 1975-76.

 Waldman has over forty books including Fast Speaking Woman (1975),
Marriage: A Sentence (2000), and an ecological hybrid narrative,
Manatee/Humanity. She is an active member of the Outrider experimental
poetry movement, and has been connected to the Beat movement and the second
generation of the New York School.

An interest in the East began very early, in the days Waldman spent with
the Beats, especially mentor Allen Ginsberg, who called her his “spiritual
wife.” She has been a student of Vajrayana Buddhism for many years. Says
Waldman, “there was a need to turn away from the master colonial narratives
of Europe as a woman poet.”

Waldman has helped create several seminal poetry communities. She was
director of the Poetry Project in New York in its earliest incarnation,
where she worked a decade and then co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of
Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University in Boulder,
Colorado. Naropa continues to thrive under her direction.

There is an apocryphal rumor that she started—started— the phenomenon of
Poetry Slams when she and poet Ted Berrigan donned shiny trunks and boxing
gloves to verbally pummel each other with uppercuts of verbs and
roundhouses of metaphor.

Read excerpts from Iovis at:
http://almostisland.com//monsoon_2008/poetry/che_guevara_came_to_me_in_a_dr.php

http://almostisland.com/monsoon_2008/poetry/eleven_faces_one_thousand_arms.php

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SARAI READER 09 is an ongoing contemporary art exhibition (18 August 2012 –
16 April 2013), curated by Raqs Media Collective. The exhibition is a
collaboration between Sarai-CSDS, Delhi, and Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon.
Over nine months, roughly 100 artists/researchers/practitioners, invited
through an open call, will be working within the exhibition context.

Address:
Devi Art Foundation, Sirpur House, Plot 39, Sector 44, Gurgaon.
Tel: 0124-4888177

Map here:
http://www.deviartfoundation.org/map.htm

Sarai Reader 09: The Exhibition is generously supported by the Royal
Embassy of Norway, Delhi.