Outrider
Anne Waldman
Executive Producer Martin Scorsese presents
Feature film by Alystyre Julian, Outrider is a portal into fast-speaking poet Anne Waldman and her six decades birthing vibrant communities of poets, performers, and activists—from Greenwich Village, St. Mark's Poetry Project, and Naropa University 'Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,' onwards to Mexico City, Casablanca, and more. Guided by ancestors of the Beat generation and poetic kinships with radical female musicians—Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Cecilia Vicuña, Meredith Monk—Outrider celebrates Waldman's role as a visionary word-worker and a transcendent presence, singing out in the ancient, bardic tradition the thunderous power of poetry.
“Outrider is a flash of lightning in the dark night, aglow with the life force of Anne Waldman. If you want to sneak up on the secret trajectory of U.S. culture, if you want to know the true, deep possibilities for art in our times—this is your poet. Waldman’s blazing, capacious soul is here at work and this portrait captures the restless luminosity of a whole poetry community in action. You can see the streaks of energy streaming across the screen. This is the work we need to witness now to carry us forward and through.”
— Eleni Sikelianos, poet
“Anne Waldman is one of the most important and irreducible living American poets.”
— Nick Sturm, Poetry Foundation
“Alystyre Julian, having given herself so totally and selflessly, disappearing into the dark to allow the light of all galaxies to illuminate, creates a film on Anne Waldman unlike everything previous—a poem that creates itself. The performances in Outrider allow Bard, Kinetic to bop pixel kernels and dance to the language of the ever-ch-c-change and become the poem of the page off the page—why the words, themselves, are dancing! And there Laurie Anderson and Meredith Monk, the witches, are calling all music, throat, rock, whistle, shriek, moon of it into the Eleni Sikelianos, the No Land of it all, and how Allen Ginsberg is present, as are Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, but no one is Anne.”
— Bob Holman, founder of the Bowery Poetry Club
“Singular and personal vision—visual sentience unlike any film I can recall. Outrider is a shared and sharing voice of so many voices and so many confluences—the galaxy of Anne Waldman, poetry as devotion, and life.”
— Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth
“Literally breathtaking. Magnificent. Inspiring. It moved me to the edge of tears. I found solace. I found parts of myself that I have lost. I found consolation for them there with Anne Waldman in the film. I found my dream. I found energy to live. Outrider is so precise and so dreamlike at the same time.”
— Safaa Fathy, poet-filmmaker
“What an immersion—poetry in dance! Poetry in music! Poetry in art! Poetry in poetry! How valuable it is to have documentation of a bygone world. Many years from now, we will see its importance grow. Anne’s legacy is much enhanced by such a lively and smart film.”
— Regina Weinreich, scholar of the Beat Generation
“William Parker often says to me: Music is as close as people can get to magic. When I saw Anne Waldman perform for the first time, I thought: Her words are as close as poetry can get to magic.”
—Cisco Bradley, historian
