Anne Waldman

Outrider

Essays • Poems • Interviews

200 pages

6 x 8 inches

ISBN: 1-888809-48-5 • 978-1-888809-48-0

$18.00

Anne Waldman has been speaking about the “outrider” tradition since 1974 when she and Allen Ginsberg founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, a Buddhist-inspired university in Boulder, Colorado. This book gathers several essays, poems & rants, an interview with her by Matthew Cooperman, and an interview by her with Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal in an attempt to further articulate a sense of this tradition from Walt Whitman to the present. Not a dry presentation, this book is an fierce and loving look at what poetry can be. Outrider is an iinvocation of “lineage” as a challenge toward examining the practice of poetry and the links of its history. This awareness of lineage encompasses both what has been inherited and what needs be passed on. Waldman’s Outrider will be a provocative contribution to a post-millennium poetics.

“The Outrider holds a premise of imaginative consciousness. The Outrider rides the edge—parallel to the mainstream, is the shadow to the mainstream, is the consciousness or soul of the mainstream whether it recognizes its existence or not. It cannot be co-opted, it cannot be bought. Or rides through the chaos, maintaining a stance of “negative capability”, but also does not give up that projective drive, or its original identity that demands that it intervene on the culture. This is not about being an Outsider. The Outrider might be an outlaw, but not an outsider. Rather, the outrider is a kind of shaman, the true spiritual “insider”. The shaman travels to zones of light and shadow. The shaman travels to edges of madness and death and comes back to tell the stories.”
—from the essay “Premises of Consciousness: Notes on Howl”

In this superb collection of recollections, meditations, interviews, poems, notes, and manifestos, Anne Waldman writes an indispensable chapter in the history of American poetry, one at once brilliant assessment and inspired exhortation. The “outrider,” edgy icon of post-Beat authority, becomes the trope for a poetic pedagogy involving avant-writers from Stein and Olson to Ginsberg and Ernesto Cardenal. And surely the term also invokes the rebel angel Gerard Manley Hopkins — he whose outride syllables “ride forward or backward from the line in another dimension.” Waldman maps this “out” dimension as a visionary poetic landscape where compassion and commitment are still possible.
—Michael Golston

From a life in which every aspect of the day is a radical act of poetry and community emerges — if we are lucky — a documentation of that very life. In Outrider, we encounter a relentless drive to know, revolt, and review with equal parts honesty and abandon, as only Anne Waldman can produce. Take this ride through geographies of ideas and conversations and come out with your hair aflame and your tongue out.
—Renee Gladman

In this dark era of un-ending wars, Outrider reminds us “there is no human dimension in any given period of history without poetry.” Anne Waldman convincingly reaffirms that poetry, essential element of human consciousness, state of mind, can take action as a witness to injustice and “speak to power” effectively. It stands opposite the ignorance of plutocracies that hold power over human life, and offers a rival government that can help save us from the tired, obsolete model of war killing, show us a different version of the world, and the inter-connectedness of all life forms. One comes away from this lucid and extraordinary book knowing — reminded, unforgettably — that poetry is a consciousness that can stop us from being “planetary fools,” if only we will pay attention, and can help humanity chart a necessary journey to a compassionate world in which we take responsibility for where we are going, and where we care for one another and the planet at the same time.
—Daisy Zamora

Anne Waldman, poet, performer, professor, cultural activist holds the lineages of The New American Poetry in her DNA. She is the author of numerous books of poetry including the mini-classic Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights) and the recent volumes In The Room Of Never Grieve (Coffee House Press) and the meditative Structure of the World Compared to A Bubble (Penguin Poets). She is also the editor of The Beat Book, and co-editor of Civil Disobediences: Poetics & Politics in Action. She is the Chair of the Summer Writing Program at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, faculty for New England College's low-residency MFA, and the pedagogical director for Study Abroad On The Bowery in New York City. Her extensive Archive resides at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Allen Ginsberg has called her his "spiritual wife".