While we honor the 100th birthday of William S. Burroughs and mourn the loss of Amiri Baraka, one of their old colleagues, Anne Waldman, will be celebrated in an forthcoming documentary. But the filmmaker needs some help to make it happen.
An Indiegogo campaign seeks to raise $17,000 for the production of Outrider. For six years, filmmaker Alystyre Julian, a former student of Waldman, has been following the poet everywhere from California to Morocco, and documenting her performances and talks at Lower East Side locales like Dixon Place and The Living Theatre as well as at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Colorado, which she co-founded with Allen Ginsberg and others in 1974.
Ginsberg was one of Waldman’s many fans (another is Patti Smith, who credits Waldman with “continuing [Ginsberg’s] work as a poet, activist and teacher”). In the fundraiser video, above, he marvels at Waldman’s “affairs with ancient Christian churches, like St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery” (where she served as the Poetry Project‘s director during the ’60s and ’70s) and confesses, “She knocks me out, she thrills my bones.” Another fan (and collaborator) is Thurston Moore, who describes her writing as “really layered and deep and interesting and fun. It’s, like, more rock and roll than just about any rock and roll band that’s playing around these days.”
Check out the Indiegogo perks and read more about the doc, due out in 2015, here — high rollers get to dine with Waldman at a restaurant on MacDougal Street, where she was raised. And if you want to catch the poet and force of nature in person, she’s part of a tribute to the late Akilah Oliver happening in Greenwich Village next Wednesday — and she’ll be part of the William S. Burroughs centenary in April.