Poet, performer, professor, editor and cultural activist, Anne Waldman is the author of over 40 books of poetry, including the recent book-length hybrid narrative poem Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets, 2009), and is the editor and co-editor of numerous anthologies, including: Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, and Beats at Naropa (2009) (both Coffee House Press). Her books include: Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights), and now in multiple language editions, First Baby Poems, Marriage: A Sentence, and In The Room of Never Grieve. Her 800-page epic Iovis will be published by Coffee House Press in 2011. She is the co-founder (with Allen Ginsberg) of the renowned Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado where she is Chair and Artistic Director of The Summer Writing program. She is the recipient of grants for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and has been awarded the Shelley Memorial Prize. She has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Center in Bellagio, the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, and a fellow of the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice and was resident poet at the Women’s Christian University in Tokyo. She has been one of the prime movers and creators of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community for over 4 decades.

Recently, she works collaboratively with her son Ambrose Bye, a composer and musician. Their CDs include Eye of the Falcon, Matching Half (with Akilah Oliver), and The Milk of Universal Kindness (forthcoming in 2011). Her play Red Noir was directed by the legendary Judith Malina and produced by the Living Theatre, running for over 2 months in New York City (2009/2010). She is also the co-writer of the script Entanglement (2009) with her husband Ed Bowes.

   from Matriot Acts

“Women are the weapons of history, we are the
symbolic representations of compassion and decency.”

• Carrie Mae Weems

invoke the hyena in petticoats!
laughing hyena, spotted hyena, striped  -
all stalk the charnel ground amidst
microscopic & telescopic worlds
a step ahead of what is to come in lineage
in gratitude, in naming las madres
las mujeres,
look for reclamation, sniff it out…
in a voice not my own but all of them
the wizened ductile face of slumbering female memory:
beginning of time, the timepiece of time
she who was the mother of a ghost ship
Ship of Locked Awe and subjugated dream
she who learned from all the male poets
she who could never be reduced to a “gender issue”
she who announced a talismanic bond to planet
who saw vole tracks in the snow once on the
radical poet’s tiny death plot
Lorine, Lorine! you can come out now…
who salvaged a blow dryer for the art people while
they sold the rights to  textures of paper, of glass
(touch me, touch me with crenellated beauty now)
particles in the sunlight, a democratic grace
who documented all hurts and slights & transmuted them
to poetry, to flesh, to the wink after sex
she was a challenge in  my heart, the penultimate mother
did you have any animals around you from the start?
did you enjoy yourself a lot?
how old were you when you started this running around?
what was your mother tongue?
was it in a language that translates “ocean of bliss” to a seed syllable
she reports a tabula rasa and a grandmother who cautions
“Denial Silences Violence”
“Remember the Suffragettes”
or considers William Blakes’s schema of Los representing
Imagination in Action
who then tries to create forms so they can be recognized
who then gets deluded that it created the universe and can thus control it
and then whose zones split into genders
genders lost in realms of jealousy & fractal time
battling the projected others
seeing one’s own imagination in a pool produces a double
while another character sacrifices herself to the sun…