ON LIGHTNING STRIKING AT THE BOWERY POETRY CLUB
“I went to one particular reading by Anne Waldman and Ann Lauterbach at the Bowery Poetry Club in 2009. That was the impetus. That was the starting point. The two Ann(e)s were reading. Ann Lauterbach is a favorite—I studied with her during my MFA at Bard in ‘98—and I’d heard Anne Waldman read before. I'd already been to Naropa as a young poet, but at this particular reading—lightning struck. I felt this vibration, or maybe it was the frequency she was operating on. The streaming of her language, with her embodied expression of it, struck me, as it did everyone else in the room. It was theatrical. It was performative, obviously. I didn’t have a camera, not even an iPhone. It just felt like this could really lend itself to the screen.”
ON THE LIVES OF THE POETS
“I had seen a documentary, Our City Dreams (2008) by Chiara Clemente, about five different painters: Kiki Smith, Ghada Amer, Swoon, Nancy Spero, Marina Abramovic. So the original idea was to make a film about six poets. To have a story of six interconnected poets who somehow knew each other, and a weaving of their lives and works. But it became so quickly apparent that Anne had so much going on, so many different varieties of events and collaborations, and she welcomed me in with this amount of access. She was like an umbrella to everything that was happening in the poetry scene. She had these interconnections with the other poets I had thought to include—Ann Lauterbach, Alice Notley, Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, Bernadette Mayer, Akilah Oliver, Eileen Myles. Then I started with Anne and found that everyone constellated around her. And anyone who has encountered Anne performing knows the power of that. I have a book somewhere, The Lives of the Poets. It must have been from the Strand. Something about the title—I remember having that in my head before I started the documentary. I just saw the spine and thought, “That’s interesting—The Lives of the Poets. I’d like to see one of those lives. I’d like to go into one of those lives.”
ON RIDING ALONG IN THE SIDECAR
“Anne has had a huge body of work, but this ten-year period I’ve witnessed in the making of this documentary came right after the completion of her epic work The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (2011). I started this project when The Iovis Trilogy was finished. It’s an epic feminist work and three books combined—this trilogy about war and patriarchy. She was also coming off finishing Manatee / Humanity (2009). In this particular period, in each work, there is so much depth around a particular set of themes—whether it’s the endangered species of the manatee, or, in Gossamurmur (2013), her passion for the archive. And then the way it happens on the page. There’s nothing predictive about the way she uses language and the way her poems are. They exist on the page and they exist in her performance in another way entirely. She improvises with the words off the page. The whole thing has been a study. This whole documentation process has been a master class. I’ll be reading her work for the rest of my life. And it feels like I lived it in a really embodied way. Because I was right there—riding in the sidecar.”
ON TANGLING PRACTICES OF LIFE AND WORK
“By documenting Anne I was living with her new works as they came out, and I got to be very immersed in them. I would read them, but I would also hear them performed and spoken about—and I would talk with Anne about them. And even though she wasn’t teaching her books, necessarily, she would talk about her work when she taught, and would always introduce her poems. I began to see just how the themes of all the books were entangled.
With Jaguar Harmonics (2014), her book composed from notes from an Ayahuasca ceremony with the Indigenous Taíno people—she had just gone through cancer at the time. In Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born (2016), Anne is working with Thel, a character from the William Blake poem “The Book of Thel.” She wants to bring the unborn spirit of Thel into experience—into the world—into the Anthropocene generation. So, chronologically, although she had the ceremony experience after she had recovered from cancer, she wrote Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet To Be Born while in recovery. That also becomes part of writing Thel. The whole wide range of everything is contained in each work. And these works allow you to enter them from wherever you’re coming from. You wouldn't have to know any of that. It’s just this unfolding.
I always wanted to make a film that threads her life and her work—and of course they are going to be intertwined—but I think, in Anne’s particular case, it’s about how she practices life and work.”
ON PULLING FROM THE ARCHIVE
“I tried to steer clear of too much archival in the beginning, because I wanted to document freshly. I wanted to generate and accumulate a lot of fresh footage from this particular time period (2012–22) which became a particularly prime period of her work. I wanted it to be of this period. And to only use archival minimally to punctuate, contrast, the present. Since I’ve been a stills photographer and we have so many stills from this project—just the documentation period over the past ten years—that I never thought we were going to need to use anybody else’s photographs. So I didn’t start off with the archival project at first, and then I opened to it. And it kept opening and opening.
I had begun going over to Anne Waldman’s house, all those years, and so I had seen all the art and the poetry artifacts and the photographs—it’s all part of her world. So it was inevitable. The archive became interwoven with the project of the film, and I found myself motivated to search for materials and ask for things, this photo or that photo, or being excited to come upon a photograph I hadn’t seen before. Early on, the artist No Land brought to my attention the film by Bob Dylan Renaldo and Clara (1978), which features a performance by Anne reading her poem “Fast-Speaking Woman.” Ultimately we sourced archival materials from many art, film, poetry, and personal archives. To name a few: Larry Fagin’s Portraits and Home Movies (1968–69), Costanzo Allione’s film Fried Shoes Cooked Diamonds (1978), JA Hinojosa’s Dicen Que Estamos Borrachos (1975), Nathaniel Dorsky’s Hours for Jerome (1982), original Super 8 footage of Anne by poet Lee Ann Brown, cine-poems and recent footage by Natalia Gaia and No Land, The Poetry Project and Naropa Audio Archives, Anne Waldman’s personal family archives, and original artwork by George Schneeman from her home. What I’ve done in this film, in the end—and this hearkens back to the archival question—is gather material. I gathered from what I filmed myself, what I asked other people to film, or from the archives.”
ON MAKING A TIMELESS DOCUMENT
The treasure of having six photographs by Gerard Malanga of Anne in her youth; Anne with her parents. One is on the balcony of the Chelsea Hotel in the white blouse, and it just reads: Poetess. You see, already, the serious work happening in her mind. There are two with her and her mother, Frances, and one with her father and her mother on either side of her. But in all of Malanga’s photographs, the gaze is timeless. I’ve always wanted the film to have some aspects of timelessness. A timeless document.
Another part of the archival project is a different approach to using stills. I was inspired originally by an image in a film by Nathaniel Dorsky, Hours for Jerome (1982). I asked him to use the scene of Anne emerging from the lake—that’s the first image in our film. And Dorsky, understandably, didn’t want to share the moving image, but he made a still image. And he allowed me to use the still. When I first saw that scene, in the theater, when they were first showing that film I thought: “That is a timeless document. And the bar has been set. If our film could just touch that.” I thought it was a minute of her coming out of the lake. But it’s very short—a matter of seconds—not even a minute. But to me it seemed like five minutes. It had that eternal quality.”
ON FIRST MEETING ANNE WALDMAN IN THE NINETIES
“Even though I studied poetry in college in North Carolina, I had not learned about many of the poets I began meeting when I first came to New York, started working at Gotham Book Mart and Grand Street magazine, and started to go to all the poetry readings. So I had gotten wind quickly of Anne Waldman—and then I must have seen that she was doing a workshop at the Poetry Project. So my first encounter with Anne was at The Poetry Project in the early nineties. I don’t remember the exact year but the thing I do remember is she gave an exercise of writing a litany poem—we had to rant our litanies—and we had to do it collaboratively. The Poetry Project Artistic Director at the time was Ed Friedman and he was in the workshop so I got to collaborate with him, and he and I will always remember doing that together. She was living in Boulder most of the year, that’s why I didn't know until later about her childhood home being across the street.”
ON THE ‘JACK KEROUAC SCHOOL OF DISEMBODIED POETICS’
“I found my way to Naropa because I wanted to study with Lyn Hejinian, summer of 1995. And I knew that Anne Waldman was the Artistic Director, and I knew I would encounter her and was excited to see her perform. I would see her walk across the lawn, with Kristin Prevallet and Alan Gilbert, because they had their journal apex of the M (1994–97) at this time. And I just remember thinking: “Wow! Those three.” They just seemed royal.
The Naropa ethos got under my skin—just this wild kind of experimentation—but with respect to history and lineage and all the same poetic structures that I had studied in college. But Naropa takes it to another place. It all gets woven together there. For instance, Lyn Hejinian is known as a Language poet, and so I got to experiment with language, with making poetry that way. Lee Ann Brown showed up and she had been making films—that’s how I first met her—she came into the Lyn Hejinian class. And later we made a little film together called Color Work (1999) where I was more the poet and we used her archival footage and we both edited. There was all this collaboration and mixed media happening. Just going beyond convention. Going beyond academia. Going. Going. Going.
Everything was a little bit more. I felt like everyone was a character. And I made my own friends too. I remember encountering Eleni Sikelianos and Laird Hunt, studying with Norma Cole and others. The poets who I saw read—Lewis Warsh, Julie Patton—just unforgettable. Once you experience what they’re doing with poetry in their own original way you can never forget it. And that becomes part of the texture that you want to explore in your own work.”
ON HER ROLE AS POET-FILMMAKER
“It’s been a huge learning curve both in filmmaking and learning this person. And studying her as a master poet of course. But nothing qualifies you for the path you take. Nothing qualifies me to do this over anyone else. I had already been in the poetry world as a young poet. And I had been out there going to events, and reading myself, before I ever conceived of doing this. As a person who writes, I would always have this connection to this character. I had an innate understanding of this world. And knowing the world and some of the people—that’s helpful. And so I didn’t feel like I was coming in from the outside at any moment, or like I was a voyeur ever. “I’m here because I was already here. And now I have a camera.”
ON CROSSING MACDOUGAL STREET
“I’ll give it away right now. Where I live is across the street from Anne Waldman’s childhood home on MacDougal Street. And because her childhood home is across the street, and because that is her oft-headquarters for bringing books together, I did once time myself and film the walk over. To capture everything that came in between. That’s not why I chose to make the film, I didn’t know about her childhood home until long after I knew her, and so that was not any part of the idea to start this documentary. But it became representative of what has happened so many times over the past decade. Walking from my door to hers. And that scene eventually made its way into the film—me walking into Anne’s house, it has this lush, drunken quality, full of art, it’s her radio, playing opera, Pavarotti or something, and then the two of us sitting down together. I kept it and I didn’t try to reshoot it, even though I could have just because of a couple elements, like the opera and the background noise. That seemed like an outtake for a while, or something that should never be used. But I think it gives just the right amount of context for the rest of the film. And also I became interested in that kind of removing the fourth wall, from one particular cinematographer, Kirsten Johnson, who has made a practice of showing her mistakes. That those moments are part of the act of documentation.
Kirsten Johnson made a whole entire film called Cameraperson (2016)—she usually works with filmmakers like Laura Poitras as a cinematographer—but in this case, she had so much material that was never used in the films of directors she had worked with that she decided to make a film from that footage. Very, very difficult and poignant footage that never got used, or talking to herself setting up, or a scene in a rural area with a family, and a child picks up an axe, or wards where babies are being born. Moments where something has fallen, some piece of equipment, or they realize they are being spied on, or having an interview with someone who reveals something very vulnerable that just never gets used—it’s just her own fallibility and instances that were almost too raw to be used. So just that raw quality, or that quality of making mistakes, the idea of that being itself documentary-worthy.”
ON DOCUMENTING AS WIDE A PUBLIC AS POSSIBLE
“I didn’t know the making of this film would take ten years. I didn’t start out setting a timeline for it—but it spans ten years exactly, and that felt like a good time to end it. It’s strange, because everything was on the table for it to be quick. There was so much going on. The first year I started filming, Anne was writing the libretto for Red Noir, a play directed by Judith Malina at the Living Theatre, The Iovis Trilogy was coming out, she was doing Manatee / Humanity at Dixon Place, and she was traveling, directing Naropa and the Poetry Project at St Mark's Church, and improvising with musicians. This constant stream of action to follow. Someone could wrap that up quickly, if they wanted to. But I think I always wanted to go for something that had this sense of endurance, or duration, or accumulated depth. Because that’s what time does. And it takes time, that relational building. To create the openness. It requires a certain tenacity, at some point. To always be showing up. To everything.
I began filming hundreds of poetry readings, performances, poet gatherings, collaborations. Every Poetry Project event. Went consecutive summers to the Summer Writing Program at Naropa. I conducted significant interviews with artists, musicians, writers, activists, and students, family, and friends of Anne’s—Cedar Sigo, Emma Gomis, Vincent Broqua, Omar Berrada, Ed Bowes, Eleni Sikelianos, Devin Waldman, Ambrose Bye, Cecilia Vicuña, Lee Ann Brown, and others. And then there are performances and archival footage in the film of Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Diane di Prima, John Giorno, Laurie Anderson, Bernadette Mayer, Meredith Monk, Alice Notley, Ted Berrigan, Patti Smith, Eileen Myles, Cedar Sigo, Cecilia Vicuña, Thurston Moore, Daniel Carter, Pat Steir, Randa Haines, Douglas Dunn, James Brandon Lewis, No Land, M. NourbeSe Philip, Lewis Warsh, Erica Hunt, Anthony Roth Costanzo. Some things were magical and I never could have imagined, and had a life of their own—like being invited to go along to Morocco with Anne as she was working and teaching there. That proximity and living together, it opened up a whole new relational space for us to go from there. And in the past year, it’s been more of a friendship—one where I don't film her.”
ON WORKING WITH THE EDITOR MELISSA HUFFSMITH-ROTH
“It’s been a really grounded collaboration. I feel she’s had my back in many ways. It was one of my first times experiencing that, because of the nature of the way we worked together, at one point I was able to imagine something. And she created it on the spot. I would riff on something I was visualizing. She was really encouraging of that. And it just opened something up where I felt confident about following my intuition and what I was envisioning.
We talked about visual textures the whole way through the time we worked together. For instance, there was already a light flare in the footage, and she would reverberate that. And also reverberate that light flare in other places in the film. I wanted to illustrate something visually about the idea of “Colors in the Mechanisms of Concealment.” To give a visual to that idea from Anne’s Iovis Trilogy, which has that as its secondary title. Because it’s hard to wrap your mind around that term, but I think having a visual allows you to get into the work. That was an instance where I uploaded my imagination, and Melissa took it on and just created it. We just tried different things until it reached a place where it could illustrate that idea.
I also want to express my gratitude to Sarah Enid Hagey, my first editor, for working intensely and imaginatively with me during COVID. And to remember editor Kristen Huntley (1957–2022), who also contributed editing to Outrider.”
ON LIGHT AND COLOR
“The Maitri rooms at Naropa, which Anne walks us through—which are a part of Buddhist psychology, five differently colored rooms representing five Buddha-Family traits, which intensify different wisdom energies and psychological states of deep awareness in you—we already had the colored rooms, that evocative visual poetry of light, color, that transforms your awareness. But with Melissa’s application, we get more distressed visual textures of color. These anemones. I think Eleni Sikelianos was calling them “sea creatures.” The flickering of a film. That allows you to get into that experiential space a little bit more. To experience what the mind experiences when you’re in a space like that. And there are other places of visual poetry where you see Melissa’s hand as well.
There is a lot with light in the film—and that was just something that emerged naturally. I don’t know where it started. We knew we wanted to include the lines from Outrider, Anne’s collection of essays, interviews, poems, and rants that became a manifesto for her whole concept of the “Outrider” lineage of poets. So we figured out some of the lines from the book we were going to use. We had used typing previously—both myself and the artist No Land—we both had used that idea of filming the typing as a visual motif. But Melissa thought it would be better, rather than just finding the right font or graphic, to have the actual physical presence of typing out the lines by hand. I decided I wanted to procure the exact typewriter that Anne had used, because she had used one to write for a long time, and it was an Olivetti. I procured that from a friend, filmmaker Hugo Perez. And so I had great fun typing the lines on that. And I knew that this light aspect—I wanted to have light playing on the page. And Melissa was able to bring a layer of light that was on a book or a page and bring it into a separate scene. So the light on the page became a motif in other scenes as well. Just the way the light was playing. Interspersing light where there was no light before.”
ON ANNE WALDMAN’S DHARMIC PATH
“The Maitri rooms—people seem to really love them or not like them at all. If you’re a spiritual person, they’re a great place of instruction on how to be. And, for others, some people don’t want to be instructed in any kind of way. But it’s all part of her training. It’s part of her dharmic path. And that runs parallel to her path as a poet. But I did want the magic of the word to be at the forefront. Yes, she has this Buddhist training and she is working with all these themes around how to work with difficulties—in another interview she talks about the practice of Tonglen meditation, of taking in the pain of others with every breath and sending them relief in return, and all the Buddhist practices she works with and is trained in. But, at the forefront, I wanted it to be about the word. Her role as a poet.”
ON THE LONG DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
“Some of the most intimate moments—the part where her granddaughter is born at the beginning of the pandemic. And just Anne’s raw vulnerability, working through the night that her granddaughter is born. She couldn’t be there in person because of COVID, so she was grieving a lot. She talks about those times when you feel paralyzed. It’s one of her themes. If you feel paralyzed—how do you work with that? And her way of working with that night is just: You do what you do. And for Anne that is: to write, make tribute, to have a ritual, to have a ceremony, to enact it in some way, to mouth, to orally move it out into the world in some way. It was one of the first times that she actually called me to document her. “Bring the camera.” Whereas before I was always trying not to annoy her too much. “Here I am again.” That moment was like a shift. “Come over—can you film this?” And I feel like that is one of those moments where it feels like everything is lost but all is not lost. She’s just moving through it. And I feel it’s helpful to know how someone moves through it.”
ON ANNE WALDMAN’S SIGNATURE DESIRE
“She says that it’s an adventure story. And that she wants to take the whole ride. That’s like a tattoo on the whole film. Her desire. Her desire is the throughline of the whole film. In a way, not her desire for, just her desire. Period. It comes up in the film a lot. She was asked in 1978: What is your desire? And she answered that question. She desires all these things: Activism. The Practice of Poetry. There’s two whole paragraphs in which she answers it. And then it’s everything that her life has been, in a way. She did create her own reality.
In a way, we all have that. We all have that desire that carries us forward. But hers is very particular—to her practices. It’s just her originality, her particularity, her signature desire. Like her son says: She just never stops. There’s nothing wrong with reflection, and I’m sure she reflects as part of her practice. But I think Anne is constantly carried forward because it is just part of her nature, to be restless. Just to continue to create and make things. In the documentary she does say: “I identify with action and speed, even if there is no point to it, just keep moving things forward.” For other people, it might be perfectionism, but it’s not that for her. It’s just being generative. Not sitting on your laurels. And not stopping. Just continuing to write and perform.”
—Alystyre Julian