Showing posts with label HOWL HELP Fund. Show all posts
Showing posts with label HOWL HELP Fund. Show all posts

Friday, May 10, 2013

HOWL! Arts and Some Serious Business Present an Evening of Spoken Word in the Raw: Thursday 30 May 2013


MEDIA ALERT                                                                                                                                                         

HOWL! Arts and Some Serious Business Present an Evening of Spoken Word in the Raw
                                                                                                           


Who:               LYDIA LUNCH Hosts DON’T HIDE THE MADNESS
With cohorts Bob Bert, Nicole Blackman, Bibbe Hansen, Zachary Lipez, Edgar Oliver, Tony O'Neill, Phantom Family Halo, and surprise guests. DJ: Linda Rizzo

When:                        Thursday, May 30, 2013 / 7–10 PM

Tickets:          $10 in advance / $15 at the door / Cash only the evening of the show
Tickets available in advance through Brown Paper Tickets http://m.bpt.me/event/378639

What:             A Benefit for HOWL! Emergency Life Project (H.E.L.P.)
*100% of the proceeds from the door go to H.E.L.P.

Where:           Pyramid Cocktail Lounge
101 Ave A (between 6th & 7th Streets), East Village, NYC

East Village—Kicking off the HOWL! Festival weekend in Tompkins Square Park (May 31, June 1–2), Lydia and friends bring their brutal, hilarious, heartbreaking, true tales from America's dark side to the scene of one of Lydia’s first spoken word performances—the quintessential anything-goes Queen of 80s clubdom in the East Village—The Pyramid Cocktail Lounge. Hecklers Welcome.
For information visit http://www.howlfestival.com

In the spirit of the Festival’s namesake Allen Ginsberg, this evening of spoken word and music is a benefit for HOWL! Emergency Life Project (H.E.L.P.), an emergency assistance and health fund providing free healthcare and counseling services for the current and past EV/LES arts community administered by the Actors Fund. HOWL! H.E.L.P.   http://www.actorsfund.org/services-and-programs/howl-emergency-life-project]


Produced for HOWL! Arts by Hattie Hathaway and Susan Martin.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Lydia Lunch
Lydia Lunch is passionate, confrontational and bold. Whether attacking the patriarchy and their pornographic war mongering, turning the sexual into the political or whispering a love song to the broken hearted, her fierce energy and rapid fire delivery lend testament to her warrior nature.

She has released too many musical projects to tally, has been on tour for decades, has published dozens of articles, half a dozen books and simply refuses to just shut up. Brooklyn’s own Akashic Books have published her recent anthology Will Work For Drugs, as well as her outrageous memoir of sexual insanity Paradoxia, A Predator's Diary, which has been translated into seven languages.  Ms. Lunch has contributed to their just released The Heroin Chronicles edited by Jerry Stahl.

In 2012 Rizzoli released her sassy, sexy cookbook The Need To Feed, proving that even food in the right hands can be a dangerous thing.


Bob Bert
Bert initially came to prominence as drummer for the experimental rock band Sonic Youth during the early to mid-1980s. Bert played on the Sonic Youth releases Confusion Is Sex, Kill Yr Idols Ep, Sonic Death, and Bad Moon Rising. After Bad Moon Rising, Bert quit the group. Sonic Youth replaced Bert with drummer Steve Shelley.

Bert contributed during the last half of the 1980s as percussionist for noise band Pussy Galore. At the same time had his own fronted experimental band Bewitched. In the early 1990s, Bert drummed for the Chrome Cranks, and later joined forces with guitarist Kid Congo in the rootsy New York City band Knoxville Girls.

During the late 1990s, Bert (with his wife, artist Linda Wolfe (RIP) began publishing BBGun, a zine that primarily covers the world of underground music & art. In 1998, Bert contributed the liner notes and interviewed Suicide for the reissue of the band's eponymous second album.  turned- In 2011 Thick Syrup Records released the compilation CD: Bewitched - Bob Bert Presents: The Worst Poetry Of 1986 – 1993. He is currently drumming for RETROVIRUS, Lydia Lunch’s all-star cast of sonic brutarians.


Nicole Blackman
Nicole Blackman s involved in the North American goth, spoken word and transgressive literature scenes. Blackman self-published three now out-of-print chapbooks: Pretty, Sweet, and Nice were collected in Akashic Books' Blood Sugar.

Her work as a performance artist include "Bloodwork" performed at The Kitchen/NYC in 2000, where she debuted her blood performance (and shook hands with the audience, bloodying them too), slipped secret messages into the audience's coat pockets, projected text on the street and created audio visual installations. Since then she has performed "Courtesan Tales" at PS122 art space in New York City, at The Andy Warhol Museum/Pittsburgh, and for three years at the Fierce Festival in Birmingham England. The "Courtesan Tales" are performances in which a blindfolded audience of one has a five minute story whispered into their ear. She debuted "Harm's Way" (a multi-media performance of her email diary of working at Ground Zero) as a work in progress in New York.

After being commissioned for an audio work, "Stay Away from Lonely Places," by the British Arts Council for the UK's Art & Architecture Week in July 2006, she was again commissioned by the BAC to create a new work for the Fierce Festival—an audio tour of the Deritend neighborhood of Birmingham.

Blackman also created the piece Beloved, commissioned by the Fierce Festival and British Arts Council as a site-specific performance and installation. The piece was created expressly for the Compton Verney Museum in the British West Midlands in April 2007.

She is also a voice-over performer, and has been used in campaigns for Chrysler, Ford, Blockbuster, Lysol, and Verizon, and channels including Turner Classic Movies, Discovery Health Channel, Cartoon Network, Court TV, PBS and Cinemax

https://twitter.com/nicoleblackman                  

Bibbe Hansen
Bibbe Hansen, born in New York City, 1953, to Fluxus artist Al Hansen and actress Audrey Hansen, began performing professionally at age eleven playing leading child and ingénue roles in prestigious east coast summer stock companies. In New York City, concurrently, she regularly performed in her father's avant-garde theater pieces called "Happenings"
A chance meeting with a record producer at age 13, led to her recording a single for Laurie records with her friends Janet Kerouac (daughter of Jack) and Charlotte Rosenthal. They were called “The Whippets” and their hastily recorded single hit the pop charts in Canada.
After a stint as a delinquent street kid, runaway and truant she became a “guest” of the State of New York at the infamous Spofford Street Youth House and several other NY institutions for child criminals where she was able to refine her survival skills and work on her freestyle group dancing techniques.
Directly following her release, Bibbe met Andy Warhol who suggested they collaborate on a film about her recent experiences. The film was called Prison and stars Bibbe Hansen, Marie Mencken and Edie Sedgwick. Bibbe also made three other films with Warhol and danced briefly with the Velvet Underground.
A random late-60’s sojourn brought Bibbe to Los Angeles where she founded a theater company, acted in "B" movies and participated in the local punk scene as musician, and documenteur. The café became the center of a multicultural renaissance in downtown Los Angeles. Bibbe was born into a creative life and has surrounded herself with artists of every genre which no doubt helped to influence the creative tendencies of her son the musician Beck.
Today Bibbe creates artwork and is represented by Envoy Gallery in New York City. She recently completed the first draft of her memoirs about life in Greenwich Village in the sixties, from Beat baby to prison inmate with Andy Warhol’s Factory as a pit stop. She lectures frequently on art and the creative process.


Zachary Lipez
Zachary Lipez writes the "Adult Problems" column for Noisey/VICE. He is the co-author (along with Nick Zinner and Stacy Wakefield) of Please Take Me Off The Guestlist (Akashic Books), No Seats On The Party Car, and Slept in Beds (Both: Evil Twin Publications). Zachary also writes about music and whatever catches his fancy for MySpace, Volume 1 Brooklyn, and Hazlitt. He used to sing for the NYC band, Freshkills, until they broke the fuck up. His essay on that failure and heartache is forthcoming on Michael Azerrad's new site, The Talkhouse.
Zachary Lipez tends bar at 124 Rabbit Club.


Edgar Oliver
A true Lower East Side icon, Edgar Oliver began his performance career in the mid-1980s at the Pyramid Club, and since then has appeared as an actor in both theater (A Glance At New York, 2007, Axis NYC and Edinburgh Festival Fringe; The Drowning Pages, 2000, La MaMa ETC) and film (Henry May Long, 2008; Gentlemen Broncos, 2009).

Edgar has published numerous stories, as well as three collections of poetry of which The Man Who Loved Plants (2004 Panther Books) is the latest. He frequently contributes to many events sponsored by The Moth, a non-profit NYC group dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. Most recently, Oliver can be seen on television, hosting the Science Channel's documentary/reality program, Odd Folks Home, which began airing in late 2012.

http://www.goodie.org/pantherbooks/oliver.html
http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-02-04/voice-choices/positively-10th-street/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Folks_Home

Tony O’Neill
Tony O’Neill is the author of several novels including Sick City, Down and Out on Murder Mile and Digging the Vein. As a musician he played alongside Marc Almond, Kenickie and The Brian Jonestown Massacre.  His career in music was derailed by a chronic addiction to heroin, and this romance with the needle led to several years of homelessness and bouncing around between treatment centers, short let hotels, the streets and friends’ couches.  When he washed ashore in London in the early 2000’s he wrote a book about his years as a heroin addict in Los Angeles entitled Digging the Vein.  It was published in 2006 and feted by the likes of John Giorno, Dan Fante and Irvine Welsh. 

In his subsequent books Tony has explored themes of addiction, celebrity and the war on drugs.  He has co-written the memoirs of Runaways singer Cherie Currie and heroin addicted NFL player Jason Peter.  His books have been translated into many languages and found an enthusiastic readership in Europe. In all of this his favorite critical notice remains the anonymous amazon reviewer who wondered, “How was this rancid crap ever allowed to be published?”


The Phantom Family Halo
The Phantom Family Halo is an American indie rock band from Louisville in Kentucky notable for music described as having a "post-metal state of ungodly loudness" while managing to achieve a "neat creepy B-movie horror feel. The six-member band, currently based in Brooklyn, has performed with bands such as Black Angels, Black Mountain, Dead Meadow, USAisamonster, Hawkwind, Slint, Damo Suzuki, Acid Mothers Guru Guru, Stormtrippers, Russian Circles, Young Widows, Sapat, The For Carnation, and Bonnie "Prince" Billy. The band signed a recording contract with Knitting Factory Records in 2011.


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About HOWL! Arts, Inc.
HOWL! Festival is a project of the nonprofit organization HOWL! Arts Inc. Like the neighborhood in which it was born, HOWL! Festival is a symbol of untamed creativity and a place to engage and build a strong global arts community. Inspired by the late poet–philosopher Allen Ginsberg, a lifelong spokesperson for peace, justice, and freedom of expression—HOWL! Arts Inc. is the parent of all things HOWL! and embraces his iconoclastic and irreverent legacy as home to “the best minds” of successive generations to inspire and galvanize new artists and audiences. Presenting poetry, music, dance, theater, fine art, and intersections of popular culture, new technologies and artistic expression that defy easy categorization, HOWL! Arts aspires to give the public the tools to join in the creative process and to experience first hand the value of a creative life, the heritage of social justice, and the quality of contemporary culture which are the signatures of this vital community. HOWL! Arts salutes the downtown community whose original perspectives have altered the landscape of fashion, art, music, theater, poetry, and dance worldwide. Howl Arts’ programs are 100% free to the public, as are its services to area artists. 

HOWL! Arts signature events include:
·       HOWL FESTIVAL: 2013 marks the 10th Anniversary of this free three-day festival of poetry, visual arts, music, dance, performance art, theater and Kids Carnival presented in Tompkins Square Park.
·       HOWL! Arts Project: A month-long program of poetry, theater, performance art, music, dance, puppetry and children’s performance to support HOWL! Emergency Life Project (H.E.L.P) an emergency assistance and health fund for the EV/LES arts community administered by the Actors Fund.
·       HOWL! H.E.L.P: An emergency assistance and health fund administered by the Actors Fund, providing free healthcare and counseling services to EV/LES Artists in crisis. 
·       Films in Tompkins: A free public film festival presented each summer on the great lawn in Tompkins Square Park, now in its third year.
·       HOWL! Arts in partnership with the EVCC: September 2013 HOWL! launches its first annual Fall Fashion Show celebrating the couture of the EV/LES design community and fashion district.

X                X                X                X                X

For further information, interviews, and high resolution images, please contact:
Susan Martin, MartinMPR, susan@martinmpr.com, 310 975 9970
Norma Kelly, MartinMPR, norma@martinmpr.com, 818 395 1342

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Clown Kong's Coulrophobic Telethon



HOWL ! ARTS PROJECT 2009: PERFORMANCE ART
45 Bleecker Street Theater

(NE Corner of Lafayette at Mulberry St)
(By subway: #6 train to Bleecker Street Station)

Wednesday, Sept 30 9:00pm - 10:30pm
Clown Kong's Coulrophobic Telethon


For the final night blow-out of the Howl Festival's month-long run at the Bleecker St Theater, Clown Kong hosts a variety show telethon to help raise awareness of the scourge known as Coulrophobia, the fear of clowns. Special guests include actual real-live freaks, twisted performance artists, unusual musical acts, and a foul-mouthed puppet who will attempt to enter the Guiness Book of World Records!

Special Guests include: Fem Appeal,Lil Miss Lixx,The Lady Aye,sideshow sensation Eak The Geek and more. Musical Guests: South Side Slim & That Handsome Devil

Admission $10 to Benefit the HOWL ! HELP Fund
Advance Tickets at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/79364
Cash only tickets will be available at the door one hour before showtime.

Photo credit: Culture Shock Marketing. Used with permission. All rights reserved. Copyright Culture Shock Marketing.

Monday, September 28, 2009

TRY ! TRY ! by Frank O'Hara and CLUTTER by Kristin Prevallet






HOWL ! ARTS PROJECT 2009:
THEATER
45 Bleecker Street Theater

(NE Corner of Lafayette at Mulberry St)
(By subway: #6 train to Bleecker Street Station)

Monday Sept 28, 8:00pm* Talk back with Lytle Shaw
Tuesday Sept 29, 8:00pm* Talk back with Anne Waldman


TRY ! TRY ! and CLUTTER:
Poets Theater – A Double Bill

Featuring: Dan Illian, Andy Kirtland, Elizabeth Ruelas
Verse Theater Manhattan
Directed and produced by Richard Ryan
Sound by Christopher North
Production design by Craig Napoliello
Associate producer Max Woertendyke

TRY ! TRY ! by Frank O’Hara
Frank O’ Hara’s lyrical vignette of love, lust and social disruption.
A man. A woman. An interloper. Frank O'Hara's lyrical vignette of love, lust, and social disruption.

CLUTTER by Kristin Prevallet
A boy. A girl. A radio. Trying to make sense out of chaos.
Kristin Prevallet's contemporary snapshot of spacial claustrophobia and mental rewiring.

Clutter by poet Kristin Prevallet is a black comedy about the Internet's malevolent influence on the minds of Ben and Lacy -- two writers with opposing creative minds. Imagining a time in the not too distant future when we can log in and communicate directly with Google muses who will provide insight into our every thought, Clutter entertains the question: can the Internet to remap our neural circuitry and reprogram our reality? As Nicholas Carr writes in his article Is Google Making Us Stupid, "When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net's image." For Ben and Lacy, resisting getting absorbed is as difficult as trying to maintain order in the apartment when Google -- or someone else -- keeps rearranging the furniture.

*Monday Sept. 28th: talk-back with O’Hara scholar and poet Lytle Shaw.
*Tuesday Sept. 29th: talk back with poet Anne Waldman

Admission $10 to Benefit the HOWL ! HELP Fund
Advance tickets at: www.brownpapertickets.com/event/79140
Cash only tickets available at the door at 6:00pm until showtime.
www.versetheater.org

The poet Frank O’Hara (awarded the National Book Award for Poetry posthumously in 1972) was a key figure in the postwar New York School of poets and painters which includes poets John Ashbery and James Schuyler, and painters Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns. Enormously influential on subsequent generations of American poets, O’Hara’s poetry was at once colloquial and dreamy, embracing high modernism, camp, pop, and surrealism in their uncanny range of styles and influences. His remarkable works for the stage were often originally produced in collaboration with the legendary Living Theater, a seminal force in the downtown arts scene of the 50s and 60s, and are important early examples of performance art as a genre.

Kristin Prevallet’s most recent book is a lyric essay called I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time (Essay Press, 2007). Her previous collections are Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation and Image-text Projects (Skanky Possum, 2006), Perturbation, My Sister (1998) and Shadow Evidence Intelligence (Factory School, 2006). She edited and introduced A Helen Adam Reader (National Poetry Foundation, 2007). Her collaboration with the musician Esfand Poumand is featured on Bowery Poetry Club Records Live! She received a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in poetry and she currently lives in Brooklyn. Clutter is her work for the stage. (Playwright: Clutter)

Verse Theater Manhattan (VTM) is the preeminent theater company in the English speaking world devoted exclusively to verse drama. VTM is devoted to discovering and staging the best of old and new verse drama and bringing it to the widest possible audience. VTM's mission is both practical and high-minded: as producers we coordinate and support the theatrical effort of poets, directors, and performers working to bring verse drama to the stage; as supporters of the New York cultural environment, we unite the city's diverse theatrical and literary community.
VTM is open to all styles, genres, and periods of verse drama. VTM seeks out contemporary and ancient texts, classics and translations. VTM is especially interested in encouraging and promoting the work of living poets working to bring verse to the stage.
www.versetheater.org

Anne Waldman
“She is the fastest, wittiest woman to run with the wolves in some time”- Ken Tucker,
The New York Times

Poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community for over 40 years as writer, sprechstimme performer, professor, editor, magpie scholar, infra-structure and cultural/political activist. She grew up on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village where she still lives, and bi-furcated to Boulder, Colorado in 1974 when she co-founded The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired school in the West, where she currently serves as Artistic Director of its celebrated Summer Writing program. Allen Ginsberg has called her his “spiritual wife”. She is the author of over 40 books of poetry including Kill or Cure, Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and the poetic text: Outrider which includes an interview with Ernesto Cardenal, and essays on Lorine Niedecker and Charles Olson. Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets 2009) is Waldman’s most recent book. She has also the author of the legendary Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, San Francisco), now translated into Italian, Czech and French, as well as the 800 page epic Iovis trilogy (Coffee House Press), forthcoming in 2011. She is editor of The Beat Book (Shambhala Publications) and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary Books), Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (Coffee House) and a comprehensive Beats at Naropa (Coffee House, 2009), with previously unpublished work by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and William Burroughs, among others. A book translated into Chinese is forthcoming in 2010.

Waldman has worked actively for social change, and has been involved with the Rocky Flats Truth Force and was arrested in the 1970s with Daniel Ellsberg & Allen Ginsberg protesting the site of Rocky Flats which was bringing plutonium onto property 10 miles from Boulder for the manufacture of “triggers” for nuclear warheads. She has been involved with clean-up issues and also with Poets Against the War, organizing protests in New York and Washington, D.C. , and with the Poetry Is News events, co-curated with Ammiel Alcalay.She was active in the recent election cycle, along with countless young people and elders and artists. She took a vow at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965 to devote her life to poetry and artistic “community”. She helped found and direct The Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery where she worked as first assistant director and then director a decade. She currently serves on the Board of the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. She has been an editor of several small press venues over the years, including Angel Hair Magazine and Books, Full Court Press, Rocky Ledge, Erudite Fangs and Thuggery & Grace.

She has been a student of Buddhism since 1962, a culturally active feminist, and an ambassador for the oral revival of poetry, appearing on stages from Berlin to Caracas , from Mumbai to Beijing. She has been instrumental in encouraging poetry projects world-wide and has helped organize programs in Vienna and Indonesia. She has also collaborated with artists Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle, Donna Dennis and Pat Steir as well as dancer Douglas Dunn, filmmaker Ed Bowes, and her son, musician/composer Ambrose Bye. Her extensive historical literary, art and tape archive resides at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Some of her performances may be viewed on YouTube.

Some Responses to Anne Waldman’s Poetry:

“It's as if people have ceded both their destinies and their imaginations to "a hopeless gray area of defeat an despair, Anne Waldman comments in Civil Disobediences: Poetic and Politics in Action. Few other American writers have responded to that malaise with as much joy, ferocity and irrepressible charge as Anne Waldman."- Forrest Gander. The Harriet Blog, National Poetry Foundation, Chicago

“Here is a voice from the frontlines of poetry’s improvisational traditions”- Peter Gizzi

“She’s the fastest, wisest woman to run with the wolves in some time.” Ken Tucker, New York Times Book Review

“From St Marks in the early sixties, to her stewardship of Naropa, to her worldwide travels, Anne Waldman has shown herself to be one of the key players on the U.S.A. poetry scene. Her energy, her total commitment to her art, and her cultural work are a wonder to behold. Wherever it happened, Anne was there.” - Marjorie Perloff

All 3 below from an essay by Ravi Shankar, in the Quarterly Conversation 2008:

“The apocryphal rumor that she started – started- the phenomenon of Poetry Slams when she and Ted Berrigan donned shiny trunks and boxing gloves to verbally pummel each other with uppercuts of verbs and roundhouses of metaphor.. Her prodigious proliferation: publishing a book of poems a year, not to mention translations, edited anthologies, sound recordings, cameo appearances in Bob Dylan’s film Renaldo and Clara, performances with Allen Ginsberg, Meredith Monk in the documentary Cooked Diamonds, fried Shoes, collaborations with artists Richard Tuttle and Elizabeth Murray, with musicians Steven Taylor and Steve Lacy, the co-founding with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired educational institution in America, two-time winner of the International championship Poetry Bout in Taos, New Mexico, recipient of many of the country’s major grants and literary awards, onwards…
***
“Waldman is a transpersonalist and Maximalist. [Her] choice of deity is Kali, Hindu goddess of time and ferocity, meat and skulls, remover of the advidya (the ignorance that makes us fear death), a creative and destructive force that wears a girdle of severed arms, a bracelet of cobras, corpse-earrings, and a mouth darkened with blood…Waldman is a Flame.”

“Anne Waldman’s work is the antithesis of stasis. Orality is crucial to her. She is a force of nature. Needed to be in order to hold her own in the male-dominated world of the Beats. And her work is an specially potent example of Helen Cixious’s idea of ecriture feminine, female writing that overcomes the limits of Western logocentrism and male patriarchy, or in Waldman’s own words, “body poetics and politics, right now.” Her erudito, which she wears like a mantle, is deeply eclectic and one feels that all of the turbulent waves of the late 2oth century have washed over her From Olson to Oulipo, from Sappho to Diane di Prima, from apperceptions of genocide to sexual empowerment that enclose menstruation. Waldman’s a sponge who has soaked up art and drips what she’s absorbed into splotches of color. She also leans Eastward, using Buddhist concepts and Sanskrit words in a way that doesn’t feel like dilettantism or mere shrubbery in her poems, but something meditated upon over a course of years, studied and given breath to breathe.”- Ravi Shankar, the Quarterly Conversation
Of IOVIS:

Iovis is a monumental improvisation, epic length, major work by a major poet, Anne Waldman" - Allen Ginsberg

“A marvelous mytho-poetic collage of self-and-other, male an female, in demonstration of a female universe ("open system") packed with seed. The Goddess considers the role and power of Jove in detail, in cosmic gossip and multiple language. Anne Waldman’s vast poem is a net of language and spirit that opens out the possibilities of writing and our enactment of
Archetypes in one long breath” – Gary Snyder

“Waldman’s chapters are fuid and ever-changing-like life. Hers is a pedagogic poetic that teaches as much as it complicates, enlightens as much as it mystifies, is filled with stories and myths, personal reflections and homages. Because the poem moves through time, contained among clusters of practical information are also elegies for the deaths of loved ones, ritual practices, erotic wishes… Waldman is carrying on the 20th century epic tradition…” Poetry Project Newsletter

Of Vow to Poetry
“Waldman’s utopianism a good antidote to current militarism. Vow to Poetry is an enticement to vocalize, to make ideological interventions with language. Deluged as we are by agenda-hiding, mendacious rhetoric of profiteering, I is good time to read Waldman. She has spent a lifetime artfully hexing and arguing against violent territoriality. The utopian imagination is embodied in this stellar poet whose heart has an interstellar wingspan.” The Sunday (Boulder Daily) Camera, Boulder, Co.

Of Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble:

“Waldman accomplishes an open alliance between the bodhisattva path and her radical poetic and artistic determination. In this marvelous volume, Waldman makes a vow to poetry. [The poem] upholds the complexity of being human in the entire bubble-shaped world that it confronts..Waldman leaves her readers with a sense of provisional hope, conditioned by our participation in making the possible world possible.”-The Poetry Project Newsletter
Ambrose Bye, musician (keyboard, guitar, voice) and composer, son of poets Anne Waldman and Reed Bye, grew up in the environment of The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, counting Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs as “poetic” godfathers. He graduated from The University of California, Santa Cruz and is has studied at the music /production program at the Pyramind Institute in San Francisco. He has studied and played Gamelan in Bali and in Santa Cruz. He has performed on stage with Anne Waldman, and Bob Holman in New York’s Issue Project Room in a program that included Steve Buscemi reading from the work of William Burroughs. He accompanied Anne Waldman at The Boulder Theatre’s “Music and Poetry for Progressives” headlined by Thurston Moors of Sonic Youth, and Jello Biafra. His previous composing/ production credits include “In The Room of Never Grieve”, and “The Eye of the Falcon” with poetry by Anne Waldman. Recent shows with poets at the Meridian Gallery, San Francisco, the Manatee/Humanity Show, and at The Poetry Project in NYC. He is working on new project which includes the poet Amiri Baraka.
His Matching Half CD, produced by Farfalla, McMillan & Parrish with Akilah Oliver & Anne Waldman was released in 2009.

Photo credit: Kristin Prevallet courtesy the artist. Used with permission. All rights reserved. Copyright Kristin Prevallet.

Photo credit: Anne Waldman by Greg Fuchs. Used with permission. All rights reserved. Copyright Greg Fuchs.

Photo credit: Elizabeth Ruelas as Violet in a scene from TRY ! TRY ! by Frank O’ Hara.
Photo by Nathaniel Siegel. Used with permission. All rights reserved. Copyright Nathaniel Siegel.

Photo credit: Elizabeth Ruelas and Dan Illian in a scene from TRY ! TRY ! by Frank O’ Hara. Photo by Nathaniel Siegel. Used with permission. All rights reserved. Copyright Nathaniel Siegel.

Photo credit: Clutter by Kristin Prevallet poster design.
Used with permission. All rights reserved.
Copyright Kristin Prevallet.