Anne Waldman feature:
Return to the Contents list
This piece is about 700 lines
or 16 printed pages long
Andrei Codrescu
Who’s Afraid of Anne Waldman?
This is not one of the toughest jobs I ever had
Talking about Anne
After years of talking about Anne
With everyone I know
Who knows Anne
& that’s a lot of people
some of them in this room
& a few thousand in other rooms
I talked about Anne before I even met Anne
In 1967 in the fall
A year after I came to America
Alice and I hitchhiked from Detroit
To New York and stayed
On 125th Street in Harlem with a couple named Allegra & Jack
Allegra had been Lewis Warsh’s girlfriend
Before Lewis met Anne
& when I showed Allegra my poetry she said:
“You must show these to Anne Waldman,”
& what I thought she said was:
“You must show this to Walt Whitman”
not really, but
what was remarkable about that
was that Allegra was naked at the time
& sitting on Jack’s lap with the sheaf of my poems
in her hand
& I was so startled by that
I dropped the two cans of soup I had just stolen
From the corner store
Which, considering that I was the only white guy in the store at the time
& the four of us may have been the only white people for ten blocks
I thought was pretty bold
But so was this way of looking at poetry —
Alice & I went back to Detroit for the riots
& it was another year before I met Anne —
I first met Ted Berrigan
Who was teaching a poetry class at the Old Courthouse on 2nd Avenue
I actually went to Sam Abrams’ class because he encouraged pot-smoking in class
(The teaching of poetry in those days was serious business!)
but I ended up hanging by Gem’s Spa at the corner of 2nd Ave & St. Mark’s Place
with Ted’s disciples
& I became one too, I guess
when I saw that he could overcome just fine
in content and voice volume
his competition
Ben Morea the Motherfucker
Who used the same corner for starting riots
On weekends
With the lovely slogan:
“Free Food! Free Food down at the graveyard!”
which was the graveyard at the St. Mark’s Church
where Peter Stuyvesant is buried
and should be dug up
so we can put Ted Berrigan there instead
— from Gem’s Spa radiated a vast array of activities
carried out by mobs of agents of the esprit
du-temps
cadre of longhaired cappeloni brimming with inexact missions
all filled with light delights revolutionary zeal
& occasionally paranoia & terror
though in 1968 the summer of love in New York
the delight was much denser than paranoia
& I followed Ted around for about two weeks
until he looked at my poems
& the next thing I knew
I was invited to 33 St. Mark’s Place
Across the street from Gem’s Spa
& here was the literary heart of the lower east east side
Which was the Number 1 bohemia in the world in 1968
With London a distant 2nd
And San Francisco on its way out
Anne Waldman & Lewis Warsh in residence
Publishers of The World
The mimeo monthly of the St. Mark’s Church in the Bowerie Poetry Project
Anne Waldman director
33 St. Mark’s Place was the inner sanctum
the command bunker of the New York School of Poetry
manned by the second generation
who coined that “second generation” business anyway?
On my way to work at the 8th Street Bookstore one day
Some guy stopped me on the street and asked
“Do you know where the New York School of poetry is?”
and I directed him to 33 St. Mark’s Place
Sorry, Anne,
You didn’t really have to put up that guy!
He was Allen van Newkirk
Just kidding
At 33 St. Mark’s Place
Everyone was poets
Even the drug dealers
They conducted circular missions
wide circles that touched
on other circles
of painters & musicians
& Andy Warhol’s crowd
all the way uptown to Lita Hornick’s
& to the Hamptons
& vertically in time to other bohemias
that had just gotten tired
absolutely nobody was ever tired at 33 St. Mark’s Place
and amid this current & historic rebel splendor
was Anne cool classical beautiful
energetic, intelligent & in charge
everyone was in love with her
it was the summer of love Anne Waldman
there wasn’t anybody who didn’t love Anne Waldman
the Establishment didn’t love any of us
but even the Establishment
if we had let the Establishment
anywhere near us
would have loved Anne Waldman
but Anne Waldman didn’t love the Establishment
she was a “Dark Commando”
“private property that’s why
you can’t snuggle up to someone else’s trees”
(Giant Night, 1970, p. 62)
and she went to the store to buy:
1. PRINCE fast drying RUBBER CEMENT
2. airmail envelopes
3. brown wrapping paper
4. a light blue washcloth
and she declared these things “necessary to my daily life / as love sex happiness joy”
now there was a Pop credo
there was faith
there was a hood
as in the next breath she thought about her friends, “Martha in Vermont,” “Ted in Maine,” and “all the people everywhere in the country / surrounded by trees / &water&birds&the song of the birds / heard in our land / America America America,”
quite breathlessly
and if you went back of that list you’d find that the Rubber Cement was for gluing Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Wales Visitation” cut from the New Yorker, and her annoyance at people who use Elmer’s to do that
and from there to missing her friends
to total pantheism
& the pickle of American policy
there was only a wave of breath the same breath
Of course we were young
& we had a lot of breath
and a new mission that included
1. taking nothing for granted
& 2. making sure everyone was in love with you
& 3. vanquishing the masters of war
& 4. staying high
& 5. making a new art & literature
and amazingly
we accomplished all that
esp. 2 & 4
but when I met Anne I felt very young indeed
awkward
Ted seemed to me an ancient — he was at least 28
Dick Gallup — a man from centuries past — 27 at least
And Anne
Anne was only a year older than me
But she was sophisticated
Elegant
She was Olympian
Essence of cool
Totally American
& all these New York poets who knew each other so well
were also rich
or so it seemed to me still stealing cans from the A&P
& deploying my accent
I’m still deploying that but I have a couple of credit cards now
These Americans scared me
They were so American!
And Anne was the most American!
She even put brand names in her poems!
Elmer’s! The Mets! The NY Times!
I was brooding and seething with philosophy
but I had one thing over them
my secret weapon
my belief that I had taken acid
at least five months before anybody
in the New York School 2nd generation had
This was my firm belief
At least until a month ago when I talked to Anne
& we ascertained that yes, indeed,
I had taken acid in the spring of 1966 in Rome
But that she was only a month or two behind
A difference that by 1968 meant nothing
Since by then we had all taken acid —
Still, there was this class thing —
Bohemian pedigree
I never quite felt at home at 33 St. Mark’s Place
I thought that people were laughing at me
They probably were
I made some jokes
They weren’t laughing at those
But I do feel home now at 33 St. Mark’s Place
Because Ted Berrigan wrote this:
It begins
“It’s just another April almost morning, at St. Mark’s Place / Harris and Alice are sleeping in beds; it’s far too early / For a scientific massage, on St. Mark’s Place, though it’s / The RIGHT place if you feel so inclined.”
and it ends:
“Calling right from where you are, in Anne’s place, / As to your heart’s delight, here comes sunlight.”
Ted wrote that in 1971 or 72 so I’ve felt at home at 33 St. Mark’s place ever since.
I had one of my graduate assistants
Go through Ted’s complete works to find out
How many times Anne’s name appears in his poems:
438 times!
Mine only appears twice
In 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972 my poems appeared in The World. Not just one poem but many. And everyone on the scene had not one poem but many in The World. We could appear as rich as we wanted to be, knowing that the bar was set high, the standards quite elevated. Culture.
Anne Waldman was my publisher.
Anne liked my poems.
I know, maybe it was Lewis who REALLY liked my poems
But I preferred to think that it was Anne who really really liked my poems.
The word “counterculture” had just come into vogue
A word I never liked
Il s’agit of culture pure and simple
What’s this counter all about? Is this a store? 2nd generation? What?
The counterculture had utilitarian aspects indeed
And insofar as we were rebel poets we were serving this counterculture
By making joyous noises wherever we went
And angry noises too, but joyously
The readings at St. Mark’s place
At public meetings
At anti-war rallies
In the parks
Everything had a grand scheme like a big top over it
But the New York poets were not like that
Well, some of them weren’t
Ted was about as apolitical
& pro-American as you can get
he wrote “fuck communism” and mentioned the passing parade
because it was there
not because he was against the war
in fact I never heard him mention it
but he got off on cheeseburgers
both in poems and in life
(when he could afford them)
and those attitudes & appetites drove the peaceniks & the vegetarians crazy
so that this “counterculture” might have been catering to some Big Ideas
but many of us poets still stole from the store
even The Diggers store
which was “free”
& the appeal of the New York School in the Sixties
was precisely its apolitical feel
that allowed that art is art only
& only art
that it’s not bombs or propaganda
until that attitude became a propaganda of its own
but that’s another story
& the New York School was a refuge also for midwesterners and finns and romanians and escapees of every sort even for some categories of people who had no ID tags yet
I would call this the apolitical stage of the New York School
For those in the audience
Who know Anne’s amazing activist career
After 1970 or so
& first her vice-presidency of the Counterculture
under President Ginsberg
& then her Presidency of the Counterculture
& while the personal was certainly political
it was a lot more personal than political back then
we were just amazed to be alive at such an interesting time
& Anne was breathless and a busy bee
making The World
the St. Mark’s readings
her own poems
& all the lives I knew nothing about —
the word “community” might mean more than “counterculture”
but I think that “family” fits better La Famiglia La Cosa Nostra
because we had some major ties & were up many nights writing
together & keeping up the dark shift until the radiators hissed “Basta!”
there were so many people in this family
I won’t name names
Because I am no longer a New York School poet
I’m a New Orleans poet
First generation
The only way not to be in the New York School back then
Was to not want to be a New York School poet
Either that or not to know Ted or Anne
I remember Bill Knott reading a nasty poem about the New York School
At St. Mark’s Church one time
He said “the New York school is a spigot on a corpse”
Or some such thing & Ted shouted from the back of the room,
“Bill, you can be in the New York School now!”
Anne & Ted wrote a poem together
“Memorial Day Poem,”
and it was such a great poem
we read it over and over
and many people still read it
it’s still a great poem
it was a love poem to America & to all of us
that poem was a masterful collaboration
in a collaborative age and place
that was a small pool swarming with life
current & past life
from which sprang many streams
that are now flowing everywhere in America
stocked with all kinds of fish that were never
even born in 1967
Ted Berrigan was the Prime Mover
Eminence Grise & Pink & White
And sometimes deus ex machina
But Anne was the Goddess Machina
She was the whole machine
The little engine that could
The Total Goddess of Work
& when she drove people too hard
they ran off to Poppa Ted and he severely critiqued their verses
& made them pay for the check
& then the members of the family
began dispersing, and making families
of their own, in Bolinas, in Colorado,
in San Francisco, in Jersey, and in England
but never forgetting to pay tribute to Anne
& send their poems to The World
& read at the Church at least once a year
At least I did —
Anne went on to inhabit two states
The State of New York
And The State of Colorado
States of Mind with buildings on them
“the community we are developing at Naropa
is already very strong
and continues as a webwork
extending into the planet at large”
interviewed by Randy Roark 1991
(Vow to Poetry, 2001, p. 108)
The planetary business
The Allen Ginsberg business
“The new deeper voice
The poet’s path
Voice and wisdom
The tough tongue of a crone”
These are all Anne’s words
But also:
“Heady talk in La Garona restaurant after poetry show
Cathars argue separatism”
That was “2 AM in Toulouse,” Kill or Cure, 1994, p. 101
Anne’s genius then as always
To give back in talk
What the world gave her in sound
Texture fact gossip and news
Intense talk
Thick with the density of various streams
Not just language hoping to win the lottery
The magnetized Olsonian field
Through which one travels
Gathering intensities
Throwing body and soul into the dance
Anne’s New York family
Made alliances with other families
& there were great familial reunions
& great familial tragedies
& truly down moments
like the Naropa Poetry Wars
when Anne told me apropos of Tom Clark’s
book about it:
“the family umbrella’s shredding”
and that was such a fine Cold War metaphor
for all of us still under the atomic umbrella
but the family just kept getting bigger
with or without an umbrella
because Anne’s interests got bigger
and there was a whole tent city
where the umbrella stood
And she moved into Annes
Some of whom I knew some of whom I didn’t
One Anne after another
I kept up with Anne in books
And once or twice a year in person
So I do know of Anne the traveler
Anne the dream journalist
Anne the raw-feeling lyricist
Anne the keeper of the record
Anne the epistolary
— I have about a hundred cards scribbled by Anne,
all of them ending, “Love, Anne” —
Anne the Naropa builder
Anne the Shaman
Anne the Performing Shaman
Anne the Heavyweight Poetry Champion of the World in Taos
Anne the teacher
Anne the student
Anne the flirt
Anne the interviewer
Anne the interviewee
Anne the essayist
Anne the historian
Anne the Mourner
Anne the Protester
Anne the refusednik
Anne the propagandist
Anne the Environmentalist
Anne the Gringa
Anne the Mother
Anne the Daughter
Anne the Founding Father
Anne the Witch
Anne the Buddhist
Anne the Feminist
Anne the Lover
Anne the Wife
Anne the patient
Anne the Therapist
Anne-with-Allen Anne
Anne-in-meetings Anne
Professional Anne
Amateur Anne
Rolling Thunder Review Anne
Anti Mega-Mega Bomb Anne
Anne at West Point Anne
I heard about them
I read them
I do know Anne-in-stories Anne
I know Anne stories
I know what X,Y,Z said about Anne
And I’ve seen little Annes
Perform nationwide at slams
I know the I-am-a-little-scared-of-Anne Anne
I’m a little scared of Anne
But I’m not sure which Anne I’m scared of
Anne’s always been a good friend to me
& that’s Anne-my-friend Anne
and this is Anne — the List
Alpha-bibliographical Anne
Kill or Cure dreams nightmares
Congresses with the Muse the male/ female personae
There is Iovis Anne
Some scary dude
And the tractatus on the sentence of marriage
Ten to life if you’re not careful
Baby breakdowns & grownup tantrums
& the more I read the less I know Anne
In some of these books Anne is a state more than a person
It’s Anne-land
& you best go there in the summer
Anne-land is big
Is like Ginsberg-land
Or Yevtushenko-land
A regular country with seasons
& a foreign policy
relations with Italy and the Czech Republic are good
but since Heider Austria’s not so hot
and I actually feel the pathos of a thousand readings
or performances a thousand late-night colloquia
the ocean of talk
the wordless chasms between faces
the everwidening sea of humanity with its center
in Anne
Anne cannot be lost
That “vow to poetry” is to be everpresent
A tough job
& even Anne needs some sleep now and then
I can identify with that
& with such magnitude comes a bedrock solitude
I know about that
& the dead sometimes appear
more alive than the living
being awake more natural than being asleep
“Listen to the fragmented buildings
and the decorum of traffic getting somewhere.”
(Kill or Cure, p. 198)
the dead fly in
like big patching bees to patch the family umbrella
I think the idea of Ted as a big fat bee patching
The family umbrella
Is quite funny
& I can see Allen in that role, too,
with a big darning needle
but others just hang out
watching Ted & Allen work
& just shout “Go!”
I’m probably being unfair to a hundred of the hard-working dead
Be kinder to the dead
They work just as hard
Anne, materialist and utopian,
At times:
“They laid me out on the table all decked out,
scratched me with their metal & I bled &
they began sucking & eating. And you were the
last to partake & that was when I didn’t care
anymore, love or hate. And you were going to
love me when we abolished hunger.” (Kill or Cure, p. 150)
Note that this is utopianism
Not merely in the service of ending hunger
But eternally hopeful of tasting good
Even as a corpse
Love, Anne’s major theme,
And work, her major praxis
In the tent city the young are hard at work
& Anne is Queen of the Young
while some of us as Ted once said to Tom Clark
are still just “majors in the army of the young.”
Fielding Dawson, recently dead,
Wrote in House Organ, no. 37
“the influence of the Hag in her performance art
who I first witnessed at Naropa in 1978
an unforgettable experience
for I was seeing my mother before my very eyes.”
It’s not the first time Fielding saw his mother
At a performance I’m sure
But Anne sure scared him
I did find Anne on stage pretty scary
At the Taos Heavyweight Poetry Bout
My money was on Anne
I can’t even remember who the challenger was
He just wasn’t fast enough
For fast-talking woman
The world gets faster it’s a fact
News from Hubble
It’s giving pause to the Big Bang Boys
Who thought that the universe is taking it easy
Post-Bang
And the longer we live
The more we know without speaking
We are standing
In a room full of ghosts
That’s not scary
That’s now
& when we stop standing
there will be shelves of us
standing for us
at the U of M
but not very well
Getting old is everyone’s private business
Staying young is a collective affair
& it’s nice to have a place for your papers
& so I sat with a stack of Anne’s books by me
opening them at random
for some oracular clues to this
wholly other kind of performance
where Anne is at the center but not on stage
which must be very unusual
Forgive me for trying your patience, Anne
I’m of the same school
I can dish it but I have a hard time taking it
& I came up with this
(from Kill or Cure, pp. 83-84):
“put in:
commodities
put in new-found seas
put in courtesy & wit
put in groveling wit
put in symmetry
put in coffin cords & a bell
put in extreme breathing
put in a cosmic image
put in a feminine image
put in politics, brass-tacks level
put in how he was in love with Turkish eyes
put in is this machine recording
put in like footprints of a bird on the sky
put in lifting arms embargo
put in when you are cherished
put in still a little bit up in the air,”
and I think that I put in a bit of all that, except for “the arms embargo,” and maybe I didn’t say anything — or too little — about being in love with Anne’s Turkish eyes, but I certainly put in some extreme breathing and, I hope, some courtesy and wit. I mostly wanted to put in where she is cherished, because she is. I certainly put in “still a little bit up in the air,” which is how I hope we stay this entire conference, though not off the wall or without feet on the ground.
March 5-11, 2002
Baton Rouge
Andrei Codrescu
Andrei Codrescu was born in Sibiu, Romania, and emigrated to the United States in 1966 at age 19. He is a poet, novelist, and essayist, and the current MacCurdy Professor of English at LSU in Baton Rouge. He is a regular commentator on NPR, and edits Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Life & Letters, online at http://www.corpse.org. His latest book is Wakefield, a novel, and his first poems in English were published in 1967 in The World, edited by Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh.
it is made available here without charge for personal use only, and it may not be
stored, displayed, published, reproduced, or used for any other purpose
This material is copyright © Andrei Codrescu and Jacket magazine 2005
The Internet address of this page is
http://jacketmagazine.com/27/w-codr.html