A Profile of Anne Waldman

Anne Waldman, colossus of countercultural poetics, was sitting on a couch in the lower-level living room of her West Village apartment, dressed in white, a stack of bangles adorning her wrists. The coffee table between us was strewn with books like Songs of the Sons and Daughters of Buddha, a 2020 poetry collection by the earliest Buddhist monks and nuns translated by the Sanskritist Andrew Schelling and Waldman, who is a lifelong advocate of the dharmic arts. On the wall, I glimpse a framed copy of The World, the mimeographed poetry magazine she began editing in the late ’60s, around the time she became the director of the nascent Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. Today, the Poetry Project remains a pillar of the high-consciousness
poetry avant-garde; Waldman, 81, is among its brightest North Stars.

On this weekday morning in the spring of 2025, we had about two hours to dig into the convergence of her past, present, and future. For a heavyweight like Waldman—who has never stopped writing, performing, studying, connecting, traveling the globe, or involving herself politically—there was a lot of ground to cover. As anyone who has seen one of her shamanistic poetry performances over the past half a century can attest, Waldman moves fast. Her unique stature at the intersection of post-Beat counterculture and spiritual life means she’s as likely to reference literary figures such as H. D. (born Hilda Doolittle), Thoreau, and William Carlos Williams as she is to cut into the current humanitarian nightmares in Palestine and Ukraine; just as likely to recall a backstage encounter with Muhammad Ali as a meeting with Thich Nhat Hanh.

As ever, there are so many new Waldman projects to discuss, including the immersive 2025 documentary about her life, Outrider; her 2024 experimental memoir, Bard Kinetic; her latest poetry collection, Mesopotopia; and an upcoming nonfiction work titled Dharma Gaze. (The list will surely have multiplied by the time this story goes to print.) The last book is named for Waldman’s dharma gaze, a concept of seeing the world with eyes wide open, which felt in full effect throughout our interview—showing how the specific and the sweeping are tethered, how the personal is a prism inextricably connected to the universe. “Everything’s so conditional,” Waldman says. “This is what’s exciting about being alive and being these aware kinds of creatures.” She points to the doctrine of pratityasamutpada—of multiple interconnected and dependent realms. Nature, the cosmos, and the dramas unfolding right outside Waldman’s door are all part of the panorama that informs her worldview.

“We’re on some kind of very urgent time here; if we want some things to continue, it’s so overwhelming,” Waldman continues. It’s clear that by “some things” she means humanity itself, or, in her words, the “fierce energy and clarity” required to sustain the most precious parts of earthly life. Her work constantly raises the stakes of the questions that art asks. “How do we get beyond the serotonin mind, and beyond the war mind?” Waldman asks, bluntly. “What side are you on? What do we want to solve? What is compassion? What is true empathy?”

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Waldman was born and raised in what she calls the “spiritual melting pot” of Greenwich Village. Her visionary work and cultural organizing have been informed, for six decades, by the openness and wisdom of her vows to both poetry and Buddhism. “I was always going toward the spiritual text, the Zen poetry, and things that were becoming available in the late ’50s, ’60s, like Alan Watts; all that was of its time,” Waldman says. “I felt we were in it, finally. And why were these things suddenly coming at this time, which was a time of liberation, certainly around gender and race?” By her late teens, Waldman had met the Mongolian lama Geshe Ngawang Wangyal—one of the first Tibetan Buddhist lamas in the US to take American students—at a house in suburban New Jersey. Six years later, she was at a 1970 seminar on Milarepa, at the Vermont spiritual center Tail of the Tiger (now Karme Choling), when Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche first arrived in America. “That was an early wake-up around where the Buddhist teachers were, specifically the Tibetans. How could you get that teaching directly?” she asks. “We were all young seekers.” Jadrel Rinpoche later became her root teacher.

“Everything’s so conditional,” Waldman says. “This is what’s exciting about being alive and being these aware kinds of creatures.”

At Trungpa’s request, Waldman cofounded, with Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Diane di Prima, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at his Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in the summer of 1974. Situated in Boulder, Colorado, Naropa was and remains a fully accredited college inspired by Buddhist principles, but the school is crucially nontheistic. In the mid-’70s, philosophy, psychedelia, and resistance were all converging at Naropa, bound by a common purpose of making sense of the ’60s. “There was so much burnout around Vietnam. You had people in crisis,” Waldman says, before jumping back to the challenges of the present (and invoking the Hindu period of darkness called Kali-yuga). “You know, you feel it now. We’re post-something here—I’m calling it the Age of Demolition. It’s one thing after another.”

Though Naropa started with “very little materially,” in makeshift spaces—classes originally took place in an old bus depot—Trungpa always envisioned the school as a century-long endeavor. “I didn’t know then that we were really going to start what Trungpa was calling a one-hundred-year project,” Waldman says, her voice still animated by awe. “We were talking about things beyond our own lifetimes. There was this concern for the preciousness of teachings actually going out of the world, and maybe never coming back.”

Ginsberg once called Waldman the “muse of Naropa,” and she remains the artistic director of the Jack Kerouac School’s cherished Summer Writing Program. Last year, however, Naropa announced plans to sell and evacuate its main Arapahoe campus sometime after June 2027, beyond which the school will operate online and at its smaller, single-building Nalanda campus.

“It’s very painful losing this sanctified campus—humble, modest, which has been going for over forty years,” Waldman says. Her greatest concern is for the school’s robust archive documenting over fifty years of teaching, a fraction of which makes up 2021’s New Weathers, an anthology of lectures coedited by Waldman. “The Naropa archive is very important and impressive, and we need support there,” she says. “We started recording from the very start, decades of audio and visual. Not all of it is transcribed; it’s not even all digitized. We need to find a home that understands and can take care of audiovisual moving into the future, if there is a future to be had for this kind of preservation.”

According to a university representative, “Naropa remains deeply committed to the preservation and stewardship of its unique history. The majority of the university’s archival materials are already housed off-site in a secure storage facility. We are actively exploring pathways to further digitize and preserve our archives to ensure long-term access and care.”

Equally important to preserve are Naropa’s abiding philosophies. The school was founded on a noncompetitive pedagogical approach, emphasizing sangha (community), contemplation, activism, and interconnectedness. Waldman’s own body of work stands as a testament to the virtues of the collective. Her performances, recordings (start with 2020’s Sciamachy), and more than sixty books have been frequently collaborative—working with fellow poets like Eileen Myles and often with musicians, from the likes of Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson to free-jazz fixtures like William Parker and Daniel Carter, as well as younger New Yorkers like saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and multidisciplinary artist No Land. “I love working with younger people, with my own family, and that’s some part of the message: You’re not static,” Waldman says. In this context, Waldman invokes “dharmadhatu—the qualities of space, beginningless space, beginningless time,” an ongoing continuum.

“I’ve talked about feeling like I’m on assignment, and I feel this now, when everything’s so urgent,” Waldman continues. “In the ’80s, Trungpa was talking to some of the core students about the coming tyrannical thing we’re in now. That was the whole point of Naropa in a way: to be prepared for harder times.”

Conversation with Waldman is rarely linear. Instead, it is thrillingly discursive, filled with spontaneous hairpin turns, unexpected connections, and the on-the-spot charge of improvisation. (Occasionally, she picked up a book to read something she’d written as part of a response to a question.) A mention of feminism reminds Waldman of her earliest LSD experience (Berkeley, 1965) and her travels as a young woman through Mexico and then on to Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu in Peru, “these investigative, sacred places.” Facing the injustices of our time, she mentions the 2025 illegal ICE arrest of Newark mayor Ras Baraka, the son of the late revolutionary poet Amiri Baraka, a fixture of Naropa’s summer program during his lifetime. Discussion of Waldman’s formative experience listening to free-jazz icon Cecil Taylor leads her to reflect on “the roots of mantra” (which she hears in Taylor’s music). “Man means to think, and the suffix tra indicates instrumentality, and it translates as an instrument to think and to contemplate,” she offers, quickly turning to Allen Ginsberg’s mantric history of “going into protest and invoking a battle cry,” a description that likewise befits Waldman’s invigorating style as an orator.

“She works in an ecstatic mode,” says musician Laurie Anderson, who places Waldman’s impassioned and politically astute poetic universe firmly in the lineage of Ginsberg and Walt Whitman. “She’s very proactive. What I admire is her specificity. I can really hear her voice when I read her work on the page.”

Waldman’s repeat attunements to music are no surprise—her poetry practice has long been informed by deep resonances of sound. She once played in a gamelan band at Naropa. In the ’60s, Waldman studied North Indian singing and ritual with drone music pioneer La Monte Young, who also taught avant-garde musicians like John Cale and Rhys Chatham, and was himself a principal student of Pandit Pran Nath. Chant and mantra audibly resound through the textures of Waldman’s voice as poet and performer, though she also made a distinction. “Pran Nath was austere in a way, and I wasn’t. I’ve always been drawn more to cut through things that are cool and icy and maybe remote. I often experience the mind as an instrument in need of tuning to the difficult musical spheres of gnosis—that existence is an aria, that the whole body sings, and mantra continually comes back, circles through over and over, creating a vocalized psychic shield.”

Thurston Moore, the guitarist and cofounder of Sonic Youth, first met Waldman in the late ’90s at Patti Smith’s Manhattan apartment, where they discussed the ’60s Cleveland poetry scene. (It was Waldman who had introduced Smith’s legendary 1971 debut reading at the Poetry Project, before she became a rock icon, and a shared kinetic energy audibly flows between the two.) Waldman eventually invited Moore to teach at Naropa, where he spent eight summers. Today, Moore calls Waldman a mentor and one of the most important people in his life. “She is the great mother for a universe of poetry speaking from the margins,” Moore says. “Her Buddhist studies underline her activism and her distinct engagement with the spiritual essence of poetry, which in itself is the essence of writing, if not language itself. This I gleaned from her.” Waldman remains “instrumental in inspiring the living communitarianism” of the poetry life, Moore adds. “Her writing has never waned as she contemplates ego, politics, love, marriage, womanhood, motherhood, and the experience of the human soul as it dances and dares with its karma.”

Around the time that Waldman was helping Trungpa launch his century-spanning experiment in higher education at Naropa, she was already inching ever closer to the center of pop culture. In 1975, Waldman and Ginsberg were invited to join Bob Dylan’s mythic Rolling Thunder Revue tour. (She was also hired to advise on Dylan’s feature film Renaldo & Clara.) The intimate (and legendarily chaotic) tour was like a traveling circus rolling into each town, a situation befitting Waldman, whose art is deeply informed by her own “endless road trip,” equating wandering and thinking. Waldman embodies the role of the trobairitz, or female troubadour, as she titled one of her books in the 1993.

On Rolling Thunder, Waldman crossed paths with a fellow trobairitz, Joni Mitchell, whom she remains a fan of. Not long after, Mitchell visited Naropa, where she met Trungpa and later penned her song “Refuge of the Roads” about the “I”-obliterating awakening that came from sitting with him. Mitchell eventually gave Waldman a dulcimer, the portable stringed instrument she used to compose her classic Blue. “She thought I could accompany my poetry,” Waldman recalled. “With my guttural voice, it wasn’t really my instrument, but it’s a beautiful sound.” She still has Joni’s dulcimer today.

I asked Waldman whether Rolling Thunder left any other mark on her own sense of possibility for her work. “Allen and I were always in the back talking to people, which is a way to be, if you think about the Shambhala vision of being in the world—a secular version of a spiritual view,” she says. “You’re out with the people, you’re out in the marketplace. What I’ve loved in all these places I’ve traveled is bringing out the feminine energy of the secret inner chamber, where that magic goes on, and bringing it alive. You’re coming out of that ritual triad from Buddhist tradition—sambhogakaya, dharmakaya, and nirmanakaya—and then you’re in the world with the shape of form, the shape of imagination. You’re unborn, you’re in the atmosphere, you’re in the sky, with this boundless possibility of energy.”

Waldman continued to explore the dharma arts as an early contributor to Tricycle in the 1990s. In one essay, “Mind Is Shapely, Art Is Shapely” (Fall 1993), she explored how an artist’s existence is compatible with a life of contemplation. But, owing to Waldman’s fierce independence of spirit and mind, she also confronted certain Buddhist mores that she understood as hostile to art. Specifically, she critiqued the Tibetan Buddhist imperative to surrender one’s imagination, which, in Waldman’s view, also upheld patriarchy. She had witnessed the subjugation of women throughout Buddhist culture, and for her, these two issues were linked. “I reasoned that without an active imagination, things would never change,” Waldman wrote, “that one could never really ‘see’ the other person, that no matter how much compassionate practice you did, unless you could really acknowledge the historical and very particular suffering of women, you would be stuck in a limited version of reality and enlightenment.”

Her essay further explored the idea of writing through the body, and how her “writing seemed inextricably linked to the patterning of my particular female nervous system and the shifts and cycles of female time, not linear, narrative ‘male’ time.” These ideas bring to mind the influential French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous’s The Laugh of the Medusa, published the same year as Waldman’s landmark 1975 City Lights book Fast Speaking Woman—inspired by Mexican saint Maria Sabina, the shape-shifting female body, and the infinitely dimensional female soul.

Waldman’s current work extends her dharmic-arts practice with ever greater political fervor—which says a lot for an artist who spent a quarter-century writing a feminist epic about patriarchy and war, 2011’s The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment. In Outrider, the new film about her life directed by Alystyre Julian, Waldman encourages emergent generations of artists to keep their gaze fixed on the darkness of their times to reflect reality; she frames that darkness as a place for meditation. “Discriminating awareness wisdom is so important—to be vajra-family clear about this stuff,” Waldman tells me, also citing the Tibetan practice of tonglen that entails inhaling pain and exhaling relief.

Her new book, Mesopotopia, opens with a quote from a Palestinian mother, attributed to the thirty-year-old progressive news outlet Democracy Now! (which, I tell Waldman, is one of the few dependable organizations we have in terms of its commitment to truth). “I love Amy Goodman,” Waldman says of the cofounder and host. “She’s like a saint. You could say Amy Goodman is a supreme artist of consciousness in documentary, and telling stories that are coming from deep parts of experience and suffering and war and testimony. The connectivity of everything is important—I’m trying to put together a lot of layers of these different sorts of words and terms and situations and civilizations in this book. It’s very layered with reference to the weave and the web, and the very fabric of an early dream I had about working with Trungpa. It showed a weave of cloth that then opened and brought in the whole night sky.”

The first line of a poem titled “Nocturne: Martyrdom” reads, “Did a movie not really stop the next war? / Never will. apparently not. genocided.” It immediately brings to mind both the stakes and limits of art in the world. “The arts are so key on this cellular level,” Waldman says. “Trungpa once said that every experience you have imprints on you in some way. It’s part of your conglomeration. And you maybe can’t retrieve it, but it’s there.” It will necessarily rise to the fore of expression.

“I’m with art that doesn’t bludgeon you over the head with the political—but I just can’t help it,” Waldman continues. “There’s so much urgency. One of our mottos at the founding of Naropa was, ‘The role of poetry is to help wake the world up to itself.’ And then, ‘Keep the world safe for poetry,’ which was kind of a joke, but our thinking was: ‘If the world is safe for poetry, it would be safe for everything.’ Think of the people you know suffering; see it all as a teaching, however scary it gets. We are in a time when, moment to moment that you are awake and present, you have to meet the path at your best.”