Executive Producer Martin Scorsese presents
Outrider:
Anne Waldman
“Anne Waldman is one of the most important and irreducible living American poets.” -Nick Sturm, Poetry Foundation, 2023
“…being poet ones, magic ones, because we could ride out in another century and bring the past along”
—Anne Waldman, Manatee Humanity
OUTRIDER is an experimental portrait of fast speaking poet/performer, Grammy-nominated librettist, artistic director , and cultural activist Anne Waldman. Outrider is a portal to the path of her imagination, her vow to poetry and activism, constellating around Waldman’s life and legacy as she creates vibrant communities and collaborations everywhere she goes, from city of her poems-New York’s Greenwich Village, St. Marks and the downtown poetry scene-to Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and outwards to Morocco and Mexico, 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, Cecilia Vicuña, Meredith Monk—OUTRIDER is a story of transmutation through making art, when dark times call for poetic vision, and what it means to be a poet now. Outrider celebrates Waldman’s role as a visionary word-worker, her transcendent presence, and her vocal fortitude as she sings out, in the ancient, bardic tradition-the thunderous power of poetry.
“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 a 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 Marrakech; in Boulder, she was directing and programming the writing program she had co-founded in 1974; at home on MacDougal Street she improvised with dozens of musicians locally. The “Outrider” in Waldman’s documentary poetics and the Outrider path of art-making and radical living merge. I wanted the film to be a cinematic channel for 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.
