December 1994

(Tim Bowden (tcbowden@nerdnosh.org) is the founder of Nerdnosh, a really cool storytelling community that meets in various places along the side roads of cyberspace. He met Carolyn Cassady a few years after the death of Carolyn's husband, the legendary Neal. I asked Tim to put his memories into words, and here's what he sent me. -- Levi Asher)

Anne Waldman, born in Millville, New Jersey on April 2, 1945, became a part of the East Village poetry scene in the late 60's. She ran the St. Mark's Church Poetry Project, and gave exuberant, highly physical readings of her own work.

She became a Buddhist, worshiping 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 distinctive and confident poets among the latter-day Beat community. Her confluence of Buddhist concerns and thought-paths with sources of physicality and anger is particularly impressive.

John Clellon Holmes, a sometime-member of the crowd of friends that would become famous as the Beat Generation, wrote the first published works to herald their significance.