Growing up under the threat of a “nuclear holocaust” was probably what turned Anne Waldman into a poet. “We had to become artists,” he says. “I think other people of my generation would say the same thing.” He is the last member of that group of writers who, in the 1950s, rejected classical American values. The Beat Generation was “outside the mainstream and the American thought of being above everything, believing themselves to be the winner,” especially after World War II. Waldman (New Jersey, 80) has become more than just a poet. Allen Ginsberg – one of the main references of that generation – described her as a person who “adventures with books, writes, publishes, teaches to listen like Plato. A person who left him breathless and made his bones tremble”. It begins with this statement Treadthe documentary film that traces the artist’s life in the form of a mosaic and which opened the Poetas 2025 festival in Madrid on Thursday, with the presence of the writer.
The energy Waldman maintains doesn’t match that of someone who has devoted his entire life to poetry. While posing for this newspaper’s photographer, he makes gestures and exclamations about how “he is happy to visit Madrid” and how much he “likes the student residence” where he is staying and the interview takes place. The brick exterior is reminiscent of New York’s Greenwich neighborhood, where the author of Tread OR Woman speaking fast—: “A more accessible place for artists and writers.” A “very bohemian” part of New York, the city of his poems, full of cafés and jazz clubs, where one could speak of “clandestine readings” in the basement: “I think I did one of my first readings there, in a small bookshop”, he recalls.
World War II “is truly a turning point.” Waldman recognizes the provocation of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno when he stated that poetry no longer made sense after Auschwitz. Now that the world seems to be heading towards an apocalyptic drift – just browse through the archive of this year’s international newspapers to understand it – it responds by asking: “What else could we do?” He believes that poets should “function as a barometer of human consciousness in an age when language is under attack from leaders who use insults and fear”: “We have a president who is ruthless with his language, who insults you, and who may even include the word “kill” in his speech.”
To resist discourses that fuel fear, Waldman highlights the importance of artists, keeping in mind that “in the poet’s mind all times are contemporary”. Especially when there is “a regression of rights and forms of tyranny that return.” It’s one of the questions the documentary – directed by Alystyre Julian – addresses: “How are we contemporary to our time? This is something social and goes beyond politics,” says Waldman, “it’s an ethos.” He says that a few weeks ago he was asked to write a poem during a demonstration in Washington against Donald Trump where the word democracy was an ice sculpture that melted as the hours passed. The author prefers to write about precariousness: “The feeling of living on the edge of the abyss. Poetry”, she says, “should sound like an alarm”.
Even in the current situation in which he lives, Waldman has a “utopia”: “That we are aware of the world we live in,” he emphasizes. “It’s the interconnectedness of everything, like, who made this chair (that she’s sitting on)?” he explains, “the comfort, the extraordinaryness of what we have created”. Although the United States has impressive landscapes and indigenous cultures, when you explore ancient civilizations you understand that their great constructions and advancements were built on the effort and suffering of others, such as slaves. This allows us to better understand the history and paths that these societies have taken.” From a very young age, Waldman felt an “inclination towards Buddhism”: “I was attracted to that idea of self-sufficiency: everything depends on you, your mind and your observation,” he points out. “It poses this conundrum: what does it mean to be a person? What does your existence consist of? Why are we here?”
“I don’t think poetry is exactly therapy,” Waldman confesses. “It requires you to wake up a little more, it makes you curious.” Sometimes he thinks it makes “less sense” to do it now, after seeing the massacre in Gaza and the deaths in Ukraine, the victims in places where the climate has become “unbearable”: “We should have learned a long time ago,” he laments. “All countries face difficulties and don’t know how to handle them. In the United States we seem to be going backwards,” he says. “And even though it may seem in vain and everything is about to explode, you deal with it every day.”
If the possibility of a nuclear attack had transformed her into an artist in the middle of the last century, Waldman assures that, had she grown up in the present, she would undoubtedly have become a poet “more than ever.” She must remain hopeful, for the new generations, for the world in which her granddaughter will grow up.
