Giant Night: Poems

by Anne Waldman

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

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

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems are written by a New Yorker. They have a feeling for this specific time and place, fire escapes, cold-water flats... I wonder if some people are too young to identify with these things. Relationships... a lot of things were different then.

[Stephanie Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've had this book since high school. I read it a few times over during my 70s poetry phase. It was the first time I'd read something contemporary that took such license with form, and I remember feeling like it was basically a permission slip to do whatever I wanted with my words. Because of that, more so than the actual meaning, it had a big impact on my writing life.