Essays by Anne Waldman
June 1, 2001 • 6 x 9 • 250 pages • 978-1-56689-112-7
A trumpet call from our most iconoclastic poet that tears down the walls of prescribed creative processes.
Vow to Poetry is a clarion call from one of our most dynamic and iconoclastic poets that tears down the walls of prescribed creative processes. This stirring assemblage of autobiography, interviews, essays on politics, poetics, Buddhism, and Naropa University lays bare a life dedicated to the imperatives of experimental poetry and cultural activism. This is much more than a “how to write” book—it is a “how to live the life of poetry” book. Like a radical instruction manual, this collection plaits together many of Waldman’s most powerfully felt and deeply examined experiences to wake and dare its readers to make the ultimate commitment to one’s life and art.
About the Author
Anne Waldman is the author of numerous volumes of poetry including the feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, which won the USA Pen Center Award for Poetry in 2012. Other recent books include Manatee/Humanity, Gossamurmur, and Jaguar Harmonics, and the anthology Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics (Coffee House Press 2014, co-edited with Laura Wright). She is a recipient of a Shelley Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship and is the chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She has been at the forefront of cultural activism and is one of the founders of the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church In-the-Bowery and a co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, the first Buddhist-inspired university in the West. Her work has been published in translation, most recently in French and Finnish.