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HOST: We are out here, outside the Weisman Art Museum, live broadcasting today under a beautiful blue sky. We're right smack in the middle here, actually, I guess. Yeah, we are in the middle of the Highway 61 Revisited symposium, Bob Dylan's Road from Minnesota to the World, a symposium that is part of the larger exhibit running all the way through the end of April, Bob Dylan's American Journey.

Lots of guests, special guests, Dylan authorities, Dylan friends coming from far and wide to talk about what they know about Bob Dylan. And I've got my final guests of the day and saved a wonderful guest for last here today. She was part of the late '60s poetry scene in the East Village, along with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, ran the St. Mark's Church Poetry Project from '66 to '78, gave exuberant, highly-physical readings of her own work. And she was invited by Dylan to be part of his famed Rolling Thunder Revue in the mid 1970s. And as a result, she was also featured in Dylan's experimental film that was made during that tour, Ronaldo and Clara.

Today, she is also co-founder, along with Allen Ginsberg, of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at what is now Naropa University in Boulder, where she is a distinguished professor of poetics. It's my great pleasure to welcome Anne Waldman. Thanks for being here.

ANNE WALDMAN: Thank you so much.

HOST: It's nice to have you. You did a talk here yesterday called Dylan and the Beats, the beat poets.

ANNE WALDMAN: Yes.

HOST: Did you consider Dylan a beat when you first experienced him? Did he feel like a beat? Did he feel like something else?

ANNE WALDMAN: Well, I felt the strands of influence. I mean, he was clearly-- clearly had read Kerouac, certainly had read "Howl." There were things even in the liner notes, that kind of wonderful, run-on, flashing images as they go by. It's like some of Kerouac's texts.

I talked about this yesterday, this sense of having this amazing ear, the whole way that the consonants, and the syllables, and drawing them out into these long phrasings, which is also something Allen Ginsberg got from Kerouac, the long breath line. And I saw this in the writing itself, but also in the sound. And Dylan's incredibly well read, and there are references throughout the work to authors from Dante to Rimbaud to Verlaine.

I mean, it's curious that he doesn't in a lot of his memoir, Chronicles, memo he does talk about his connection to Kerouac and also feeling that that might have been a dead end, the lifestyle that was being-- the hipster lifestyle, the sense of this dead end in someone like, frankly, Neal Cassady's life ending on the railroad tracks dying of an overdose, that kind of thing. So in a way, Dylan is constantly, I think, positioning himself early on when he gets to this amazing zone of Greenwich Village and positioning himself against the beat, what do you want to call it, lifestyle. Beat is a handy word, but it doesn't really tell the whole picture.

And I also had interviews I'd done with David Amram, of course, who knew Kerouac and knows Dylan, with Steven Taylor, who was part of the sessions in California, the Malibu Sessions with Dylan and Allen Ginsberg in 1982, and also unpublished material from the archive at the Jack Kerouac School in Boulder. So I had Michael McClure giving a picture of the '50s and of these, as he calls them, reservations. So you had your situation here in Minnesota and then Dylan coming to the village seeking that alternative zone, what we often refer to as the temporary autonomous zone where you can find yourself. And there was a lot of-- he heard these others.

HOST: Yeah, it's like Dinkytown was-- if I understand it correctly, this area, Dinkytown, was the first temporary autonomous zone where it was-- this is the first reinvention. I was just talking to Greil Marcus a moment ago. And I don't mean to downplay this idea of self reinvention because it's part of the process of self assertion, and self rediscovery, and all this. And then getting to Greenwich village and then there's this whole another explosion of that that happened for him.

ANNE WALDMAN: But I brought up this term yesterday, consociational, that you share this slice of time. You and I are consociational. Although we don't know each other personally, we're influenced by the culture that we're in, the kind of work you're doing artistically with radio, being in touch with the currents of the time, the political situation. So we are very consociational together.

HOST: I suppose so.

ANNE WALDMAN: And you grew up on MacDougal Street so I was consociational with Gregory Corso, who's a bit older than-- who was a bit older than I was with Allen and with others. I was coming of age as they were having their six gallery reading in San Francisco and so on. But we share a lot of the same input.

And it's how we-- and I talked also about hybridization and absorbing these different influences and then their influences and their processed in this new original way. And of course, Ezra Pound was always saying, make it new. You've got to make it new.

HOST: And few did it musically at that time and nobody at that time like Bob Dylan.

ANNE WALDMAN: Exactly.

HOST: Now, I want to ask you because you mentioned something a couple of minutes ago about Ginsberg and these long lines and everything. I can't remember exactly what it was that you said, but I was watching the film a couple of nights ago, again, No Direction Home. And there's two scenes in there where Ginsberg says-- first is the one where he talks about-- there's a moment and he starts crying, first of all. And he's realizing that a torch has been passed to another generation.

ANNE WALDMAN: Exactly.

HOST: It's like this revelation. The other time is when he says-- he's witnessing Dylan and he says it's like he realizes that Dylan has become this column of air. And it's like his body is at one with his breath and things like that. These revelations that Ginsberg is having about Bob Dylan, did you have did you have experiences of your own where it was like you watched him and thought, boy, this is something distinctly different?

ANNE WALDMAN: Well, I felt there was that synchronization of body, speech, and mind that was very powerful in the moment. The column of wind, that he's pure-- Allen and I think both saw it as a dharmic or Buddhist thing where you're there to disappear in a way. It's the irony of being so filled with life and imagination, yet it goes beyond you, beyond the personal self.

And I used-- I have a long text I wrote during the Rolling Thunder called Shaman, which is Shaman Dylan. So I saw him on stage night after night and he had his white face on, his hat with the feather in it. He looked like a kachina doll.

HOST: I was going to say, what was that white face about anyway? Did he explain it to anybody?

ANNE WALDMAN: Well, at one point I remember putting it on myself. It was kind of a totemic thing. And there are lots of images. You could talk about Hindu, tantra, the sadhus who wear that white face. There's a ghost realm, the ghost which you can invoke in the hauntedness of so much of his own work and his psyche.

There was the idea of the Noh theater-- the Noh theater.

HOST: Japanese Noh theater. Yes.

ANNE WALDMAN: Japanese Noh theater. A lot of things spring to mind the way he would move. And of course, noticing how every night was different, the energy, the enunciation, how he would syllable-ize and vocalize the text. This is very interesting to poets that it's not just the same thing done the same way night after night after night.

And so, it was "Idiot Wind" that really turned Allen around at a particular time. And then he wrote a letter to Bob. This is history now. He wrote a letter to Bob about that poem, referencing it to Hart Crane's "Bridge," this promise of America seeing this Buddhist connection.

And it was that letter that inspired Dylan to include him, and to think of Allen, and think of the poets as coming on the tour. And we were poets in residence. It was the best residency I've ever had.

HOST: Heck, yeah! I can only imagine.

ANNE WALDMAN: But just the sense also of the leader, the moving caravan. We were moving through space and time, setting up camp and then dismantling the camp. There was something just mythic about that, like a gypsy camp was--

HOST: And with all of this stuff coming through, be it Japanese Noh theater or all these other things you're talking about, talk about a conduit. And he's sort of like the locus conduit for all this energy and all these different ideas. And I can imagine that the whole Rolling Thunder Revue was just like this giant ball of bristling energy. Is that right?

ANNE WALDMAN: Yeah, that's right.

HOST: Did you feel like what it was?

ANNE WALDMAN: There's a sense of the open system. They talk about dissipative structures and entropy, this notion of people being able to come in and join with it and then fade away. His family was coming on board.

I met his mother. I met his cousin. I met his-- Sarah, of course.

Sarah actually had been down to the Oaxaca area and had visited Maria Sabina, who's been a very important figure in my work, who inspired a long poem called "Fast Speaking Woman." This was a Mazatec Indian shaman who took the mushrooms, guided people through these all-night veladas and Sarah was investigating that stuff. So there were lots of wonderful layers of the discussion and the discourse on the-- but it's also a rock and roll show.

HOST: Well, that's the thing.

ANNE WALDMAN: So you had all that other stuff.

HOST: All that other stuff, too. And where there ever any tensions that came into it because of the circumstances of whatever? The fact that it was this giant traveling rock-and-roll monstrosity.

ANNE WALDMAN: Well, you have all these egos.

HOST: Well, there's the egos.

ANNE WALDMAN: I mean you have all the egos. There was Allen's-- I mean, originally Allen was supposed to read "Howl," and that was taken out of the show, I think, in the beginning.

HOST: Yeah, it's a bit long.

ANNE WALDMAN: What? It would be a little bit long, but he could have done an abbreviated version--

HOST: Sure, right--

ANNE WALDMAN: --or just the holy, holy, holy. But Bob kept promising that he would get to read. And so there was this great moment finally during the Hard Rain Concert in Fort Collins, which was actually shown on TV and was filmed, the Hard Rain Concert. And at one point, it was raining so hard they had to disconnect the electricity. And so I thought, this is a time for Allen to-- the poet can always take the stage and doesn't need all this electrified sound and can just do his thing.

And I thought he was going to come out and read "Howl." But I'd gone back and I said to Bob, let the poet read in the rain.

HOST: I mean, sure, man.

ANNE WALDMAN: So he said, OK, you know, let him read in the rain. Allen went out and read a three line poem "On Neal's Ashes" for Neal Cassady, who, of course, is Dean Moriarty in On the Road. And it's a very short poem that ends, "All ashes, all ashes again." And of course, Neal Cassady had grown up in Denver and was-- we were just miles really, miles away from-- so it was very, very haunting.

HOST: For sure.

ANNE WALDMAN: And this little description of that, I talk about how somehow that purity of Allen, just the lone poet up there, it didn't matter that there weren't all the amps in the world.

HOST: Exactly. One more question for you, how do artists like you and Bob Dylan continue to be inspired for decade after decade? Most people can't do it at all for a decade or so. It looked like Dylan had lost his magic in there for a while. Some people thought, how do you do it? Are there times when you just think, well, that was a time in my life.

ANNE WALDMAN: Well, I just feel inspired still. I helped found this school with Ginsberg. We have a legacy. We have this archive.

There are more new people showing up every day who are curious and interested. It's our job to be guardians and keep it going. And the words just come to me, the songs come to me, the work. I just can't stop doing it. And I'm very happy to be here, too, because Coffeehouse Press is here, which is an alternative press--

HOST: That's right.

ANNE WALDMAN: --in Minneapolis. There's such a good scene here, such a great, creative community. And they have been incredibly loyal to me and my projects. We're working on a new anthology, actually a beat anthology, called "Beats at the Kerouac School," which is a redundant title. And they are-- they've also vowed to publish the third volume of a long, epic poem I've been writing for almost 30 years.

HOST: And we have--

ANNE WALDMAN: But I think Dylan is like a Picasso. It's just it's-- whether it's genetic or not, there's just the more he does, the more he's inspired to do.

HOST: I suppose so. Well, Anne Waldman, it's been incredible talking with you today. This book I'm holding here, as you mentioned, published by a local house, Coffee House Press, In the Room of Never Grieve, New and Selected Poems, 1985 to 2003. And also continuing your work at the Naropa Institute out in Boulder. As you were saying, the titles that you were holding out there as well.

ANNE WALDMAN: Whatever. Artistic director, poet in residence.

HOST: Something like that. But nevertheless--

ANNE WALDMAN: Thank you so much for doing this. And we've been listening to the show and terrific. And what a great scene.

HOST: Thank you so much. It's really been a joy. Anne Waldman, ladies and gentlemen, Thanks so much--

ANNE WALDMAN: Thank you.

HOST: --for being here on 89.3, The Current.