Press Releases

Internationally Renowned Poet Anne Waldman

Newly Released Book Manatee/Humanity

BOULDER, Colo. (July 21, 2009)— Anne Waldman, an internationally renowned poet, performer and Naropa University’s cofounder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, has a newly released book available, "MANATEE/HUMANITY" (Penguin Poets, 2009). Waldman will read and sign her book at the Tattered Cover Book Store on Thursday, July 30 at 7:30pm. Located at 2526 E Colfax Ave, Denver, CO. Free admission can be obtained at the door. For more information please call 303-322-7727 or e-mail books@tatteredcover.com.

This new investigative hybrid-poem explores the nuances of inter-species communication and compassion. It draws on animal lore, animal encounters (with grey wolf and manatee), dreams, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and Buddhist ritual to render a text of remarkable sympathy, reciprocity, and power.  

 “It is almost as if Waldman wishes to conjure a kind of primordial chaos from which we may emerge seeing the world in a different way,” wrote Robert Baker in the Winter 2004 issue of Talisman:  A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics.  “That she often accomplishes this is no small step in her desire to rejuvenate our collective visionary capacity.”

Waldman’s publisher Penguin Poets says, “What does it mean to inhabit our condition through language and imagination inside a ‘wheel of time?’  How do we shift perspective, how do we change our view towards self and others, be they human, plant, or animal?   These are some of the questions Waldman explores in her newest work, Manatee/Humanity, which Penguin published as a trade paperback original in its Penguin Poets series on April 7, 2009.”

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. She is the author of over 40 books of poetry including Kill or Cure, Marriage: A Sentence, and Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble. She is also the author of the legendary Fast Speaking Woman, now translated into Italian, Czech and French, as well as the 800-page epic Iovis trilogy, forthcoming in 2010. She is editor of The Beat Book and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology, Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, and a comprehensive Beats at Naropa, with previously unpublished work by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and William Burroughs, among others. She was an assistant director (1966–1968) and the director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project (1968–1978) as well as the director of curriculum for the Schule fur Dichtung in Vienna in the fall of 1999. Recent conferences and festivals include China, Berlin, Rome, Quebec, Luxembourg, Prague, Vienna, Britain, Spain, London, Italy, Prague, Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico. She was a fellow at The Bellagio Center and a Civitella Ranieri Fellow in Umbria as well as a recipient of a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation and is a winner of The Shelley Memorial Award for poetry. Anne Waldman’s considerable literary archives reside at the Naropa Audio Archives and at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which hosted a symposium and exhibit from that collection in March of 2002.

Accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, Naropa University is a private, nonprofit, nonsectarian liberal arts institution dedicated to advancing contemplative education. This approach to learning integrates the best of Eastern and Western educational traditions, helping students know themselves more deeply and engage constructively with others. The university comprises a four-year undergraduate college and graduate programs in the arts, education, environmental leadership, psychology and religious studies.