Poet, performer, professor, editor and cultural activist Anne Waldman will open the spring 2018 Hughlene Bostian Frank Visiting Writers Series at Appalachian State University.

Waldman co-founded, along with Allen Ginsberg and Diane di Prima, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, in 1974. The school was the first Buddhist-inspired university in the western hemisphere.

She is the author of more than 40 collections of poetry and poetics and an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry movement. 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”; “Manatee/Humanity,” which is a book-length rhizomic meditation on evolution and endangered species; and “Gossamurmur,” a meditation on the archive of poetry — all published by Penguin Poets.

Her anti-war feminist epic, “The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment,” which was a 25-year project, won the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. Her most recent book is “Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born,” which, as described by poet Lyn Hejinian, “brings Waldman’s work into the more intimate paradoxical folds of poetic (and prophetic) knowledge”; and “Fantastic Caryatids” (Blaze Vox, 2017), which Waldman co-authored with poet, translator, critic, editor and curator Vincent Katz. Her complete bibliography is available here.

Waldman, whose work has been translated into numerous languages, has read in the streets as well as in numerous larger venues, such as the Dodge Literary Festival in the U.S. and the Jaipur Literature Festival in India in 2017, where she was the keynote speaker. She continues to teach poetics all over the world and has presented her work in Jaipur, Bratislava, Wuhan, Beijing, Berlin, Nicaragua, Prague, Kerala, Mumbai, Calcutta, Marrakech and Madrid, among other locations. In 2017, she curated the Voz Alta poetry performance festival at Casa del Lago in Mexico City.

Waldman served six years as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and the Huffington Post named her one of the top advocates for American poetry. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for lifetime achievement; the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award; and a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship. Additionally, she has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, and has held the Emily Harvey residency in Venice.

She is distinguished professor of poetics at Naropa University, where she is artistic director of the university’s Summer Writing Program and continues to work to preserve the school’s substantial literary and oral archive. Her new collection, “Trickster Feminism,” is forthcoming from Penguin Poets in July 2018.

North Carolina Poet Laureate Emeritus Joseph Bathanti, professor of creative writing in Appalachian’s Department of English, is the faculty host for Waldman’s visit.

In his reflections on the poet, Bathanti said, “In 1974, maybe 1975, I was an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, and I attended a reading by Anne Waldman. The reading and Anne simply knocked me out. I was thoroughly unprepared for her presence and delivery. I can still see her swaying and chanting from her now canonical ‘Fast Speaking Woman’ from which she read that evening.

“The work she has done — not even mentioning her dozens of books — to forward social justice and environmental stewardship and peace over the span of her career is astonishing,” he said. “The Hughlene Bostian Frank Visiting Writers Series, in collaboration with Appalachian’s 2018 Black Mountain College Semester, is so very excited to host her this semester.”

Copies of Waldman's books will be available for purchase at the reading and craft talk. The author will also be available for book signing following each event.

For additional information about the spring 2018 series, please visit https://visitingwriters.appstate.edu or contact Susan Weinberg, the series' coordinator, at [email protected]

Trickster Feminism

By Anne Waldman
2018

New from celebrated poet and performer Anne Waldman – an edgy, visionary collection that meditates on gender, existence, passion and activism.

How do we investigate the psyche of our playful resistance to assumptions and norms through poetry? What mischief can we invoke as purveyors of a contemporary feminism, its ambiguity and power? Its “intersectionality”? In her new collection, “Trickster Feminism,” Anne Waldman looks to the imagination of mercurial possibility, to the spirits of the doorway and of crossroads, and to language that jolts the status quo of how one troubles gender and outwits patriarchy. Waldman summons Tarot’s Force Arcana, the passion of the suffragettes, and various messengers and heroines of historical, hermetic, and heretical stance. Mythopoetics, shape shifting, quantum entanglement, and chance operation play inside the field of these intertwined poems, which coalesced out of a year of protest with some texts penned in the streets.

Coming soon from Penguin Random House

Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet to be Born

Poetry by Anne Waldman
2016

Waldman appropriates the idea of Blake’s unborn spirit of Thel to explore artists’ and activists’ roles during the Anthropocene.

“Full of conscious and subconscious energy it bravely brings forth the diverse forces of our lives. It is a work of epic vision delivered as if in a trance of truth saying.”

New York Journal of Books, review

Coming in the wake of her vast and magnificent epic (“The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment”), this volume brings Anne Waldman’s work into the more intimate, paradoxical folds of poetic (and prophetic) knowledge. This should not suggest that “Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born” is a book of small things; it is anything but. Juxtaposing lyric arcana, journalism, critical fragments, visions of mythic and mystic beings, narrative, polemics, and even ekphrasis, Waldman has created a work that is simultaneously jeremiad and psalm. It is, then, both fearful and celebratory, an epic of a “time before birth.”

Available from Coffee House Press

Fantastic Caryatids: A Conversation with Art

By Anne Waldman and Vincent Katz
2016

“Fantastic Caryatids,” by Anne Waldman & Vincent Katz, is a lush, vivid and spectacular reading/album/book of poetry, conversation and photographs. Note that the subtitle is A Conversation with Art. The "with" has the particularities of city, specificities of the senses, of memories, of an ethos whose upper limit is friendship, companionship. It is a model, a remarkable “alternative version of how to be alive.” (Anne Waldman) Dynamic, urbane, intimate, “the occasion of these ruses” (Frank O’Hara) is synergy from chronos to kairos. From Ted Berrigan and Barbara Guest to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, from Chelsea to St. Mark’s, from Kiki Smith to Patti Smith, we see the duo’s radiant and earnest exchanges about how communities develop around being together in space and time, making and sharing a world, a life. The proliferations of concretions and abstractions connect to early days (“first hits of reading,” first poetry) to the making, the working, the people they knew and know. “From you I get the story” gestures back to Guido Cavalcanti’s subtle spirit which “strikes through the eyes/ That rouses a spirit in the mind/ From which a spirit of love will rise.” From “Look at that field” to “What did we miss?” From Vincent Katz’s “Alright, we’re live” to Anne Waldman’s “Satori!” Well, you get the picture: “Form is love.” You don’t want to miss this! — Norma Cole

Available from BlazeVOX books

The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment

Poetry by Anne Waldman
2011

Published for the first time in its entirety, this major epic poem assures Anne Waldman’s place in the pantheon of contemporary poetry.

“Begun in the 1980s, this mammoth work may be the summit of [Waldman’s] career and . . . an attempt at a new world history, a radical re-creation myth, an homage to Blake’s epics and Pound’s cantos, and a mystic or matriarchal answer to the male-dominated civilization that we have known. . . . A book to admire, to pay homage to, to get lost in, Waldman’s epic goes splendidly on and on, mixing the shamanistic with the diaristic, the topical with the prayerful, incorporating almost everything.”

Publishers Weekly, starred review

“The Iovis Trilogy,” Waldman’s monumental feminist epic, traverses epochs, cultures, and genres to create a visionary call to poetic arms. Iovis details the misdeeds of the Patriarch, and with a fierce imagination queries and subverts his warmongering. All of Waldman’s themes come into focus—friendship, motherhood, politics, and Buddhist wisdom. This is epic poetry that goes beyond the old injunction “to include history”—its effort is to change history.

Available from Coffee House Press

The Hughlene Bostian Frank Visiting Writers Series

The Hughlene Bostian Frank Visiting Writers Series, named in honor of alumna Hughlene Bostian Frank ’68, brings distinguished and up-and-coming creative writers to the Appalachian State University campus throughout the year to present lectures and discuss their works. Frank is a 2013 Appalachian Alumni Association Outstanding Service award recipient, past member of Appalachian’s Board of Trustees, current board member of the Appalachian State University Foundation Inc. and generous supporter of Appalachian.

The spring 2018 Hughlene Bostian Frank Visiting Writers Series is supported by the Appalachian State University Foundation Inc., Appalachian’s Office of Academic Affairs, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of English, the Office of Multicultural Student Development, Appalachian’s University Bookstore, Belk Library and Information Commons and the Appalachian Journal: A Regional Studies Review. Business sponsors are The Gideon Ridge Inn, The Red Onion Restaurant and The New Public House & Hotel. Community sponsors include John and the late Margie Idol, Paul and Judy Tobin, Alice Naylor and Thomas McLaughlin.

Learn more

See other spring 2018 Visiting Writers Series events

Black Mountain College Semester

Appalachian State University
Spring semester 2018

For Appalachian State University’s Black Mountain College (BMC) Semester in spring 2018, multiple departments across the university are collaborating with area museums and other venues to host exhibits, lectures and workshops that will highlight the importance of BMC’s influence within the Appalachian region’s creative, educational and political movements.

Visit the official website

View the complete event schedule

About the College of Arts and Sciences

The College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) at Appalachian State University is home to 17 academic departments, two centers and one residential college. These units span the humanities and the social, mathematical and natural sciences. CAS aims to develop a distinctive identity built upon our university's strengths, traditions and locations. The college’s values lie not only in service to the university and local community, but through inspiring, training, educating and sustaining the development of its students as global citizens. More than 6,800 student majors are enrolled in the college. As the college is also largely responsible for implementing App State’s general education curriculum, it is heavily involved in the education of all students at the university, including those pursuing majors in other colleges. Learn more at https://cas.appstate.edu.

About Appalachian State University

As a premier public institution, Appalachian State University prepares students to lead purposeful lives. App State is one of 17 campuses in the University of North Carolina System, with a national reputation for innovative teaching and opening access to a high-quality, cost-effective education. The university enrolls more than 21,000 students, has a low student-to-faculty ratio and offers more than 150 undergraduate and 80 graduate majors at its Boone and Hickory campuses and through App State Online. Learn more at https://www.appstate.edu.

What do you think?

Share your feedback on this story.