Executive Producer Martin Scorsese presents
Outrider:
Anne Waldman
Debut feature from Director Alystyre Julian, OUTRIDER is a portal into poet Anne Waldman’s vortex, as she creates vibrant communities of poets, performers, and activists everywhere she goes, from Greenwich Village, St. Marks and the downtown poetry scene, to Naropa University ‘Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,’ birthing books all along the way. Guided by ancestors of the Beat generation and inspired by poetic kinships with fellow radical female musicians—Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk—OUTRIDER captures Waldman’s role as a visionary word-worker and cultural force.
“A flash of lightning in the dark night.”
— Eleni Sikelianos
“A film unlike anything previous—a poem that creates itself.”
— Bob Holman
“Precise and dreamlike.”
— Safaa Fathy
“Anne Waldman is more Rock ‘n’ Roll than any Rock ‘n’ Roll performer I know.”
— Thurston Moore
“What an immersion—Poetry in dance! Poetry in music! Poetry in art! Poetry in poetry!"
— Regina Weinreich
Director’s Statement
Outrider is love letter to the lightning strike of poets in performance. As a decades-long participant in the New York downtown poetry scene, I had a deep connection to Anne Waldman as a driving force. I conceived of a film that would depict her life and work in the Outrider lineage of poets. With Waldman at the center, I honed in on the kinetic variety in her performances. In our first year of filming alone, she was writing the libretto for Red Noir at the Living Theater; her monumental feminist epic Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment had just being released; downtown at Dixon Place she was performing Manatee/Humanity; she was traveling to Morocco, performing and giving workshops alongside other artists in Casablanca; in Boulder, she was directing a writing program for young poets; at home on MacDougal Street she was improvising with dozens of musicians locally. What emerged is a filmic study in Waldman’s documentary poetics, simultaneously discovering the “Outrider” in Waldman and exploring the Outrider path of art-making and radical living. I wanted to channel this visionary energy, led by Waldman’s words, voice, and embodiment, a gathering of the mosaic pieces of a “person woven from poetry.”
Internationally acclaimed poet Anne Waldman is the founder of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she has helped nurture over four decades. She is the author of more than sixty books, including Fast Speaking Woman: Chants and Essays (1996), The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (2011), and Bard, Kinetic (2023).
She is a founder and former director of the The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, and along with contemporaries Allen Ginsberg and Diane DiPrima, founded the ‘Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics’ at Naropa University.
She has edited numerous anthologies and collections amassed from the riches of the Naropa audio archives of including Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (2004), Beats at Naropa (2009), and Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics (2014), as well as New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (2022), representing an ongoing lineage of experimental poetry.
Her poetry belongs to the lineages of the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain Movements of New American Poetry. As a feminist, social activist, and powerful performer, she has read in the streets and literary institutions worldwide and continues to teach poetics all over the world.
