Outrider: Essays, Poems, Interviews

by Anne Waldman

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 essays, poems and 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 a fierce and loving look at what poetry can be. Outrider is an invocation 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 Notes on 'Howl'"

Genres: Poetry

178 pages, Paperback

First published December 16, 2006

About the author

Anne Waldman was part of the late Sixties poetry scene in the East Village. She ran the St. Mark's Church Poetry Project, and gave exuberant, highly physical readings of her own work.

She became a Buddhist, worshipping with the Tibetan Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who would also become Allen Ginsberg's guru. She and Ginsberg worked together to create a poetry school, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, at Trungpa's Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Anne Waldman is one of the most interesting, vibrant and unpredictable members of the post-Beat poetry community. Her confluence of Buddhist concerns and thought-paths with sources of physicality and anger is particularly impressive (did you get all that?).

She was featured in Bob Dylan's experimental film 'Renaldo and Clara.'

Reviews

[Gloria · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's some overly-abstruse stuff here but the long poem/essay 'Outrider' is utterly great and honest, generous, assessment of the work of poetry in the world. I LOVE IT.

[Matthew Stolte · Rating 5 out of 5]

AW gets me to do my homework!

[Doralee Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up after a reading, and I'm glad that I did. It feels like a family album you peruse remembering and also becoming acquainted and reacquainted with significant situations in a life of poetic art.

I found a number of poets here to read and think about, people like Jack Spicer and Lorine Niedecker. There's a page-long list of women poets to read. This is a thick album of a book, a lot of history.

Waldman has a poem or two in the March 2014 issue of poetry along with many other poets who write about social and cultural connections.