Anne Waldman reads from new work
This event will also be broadcast on zoom. Use this link to attend:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83025568520
City Lights and the Penguin Poets Series celebrate the publication of
Mesopotopia
By Anne Waldman
Published by Penguin Books
From “one of the most important and irreducible living American poets” (Poetry Foundation) comes a powerful and prophetic collection of epic scope and vision
Mesopotopia explores the vast sweep of our accelerating, precipitous world. From the cradle to the grave, from the mysterious poetic origins of Mesopotamia to our own dystopias of the twenty-first century, Anne Waldman crafts a singular, radical investigation into the syncretic layers of quantum space and dreamtime. She invokes “studying” as the most compelling ritual and tool for evolution and travels to various fellaheen worlds, treading metabolic pathways and ancient “antitheses realities,” and gleans sacred texts that speak urgently through the transports and telepathies of poetry. Troubadour dawn songs, pyramid texts, Buddhist mantras, canonical hours of Judeo-Christian tradition, Persian prayers, Druid sorcery, and the wild, gnarly syntax and modal structure of Waldman’s particular performative passion and wit are all conjured here.
What emerges is a meditation on the salient words of the French poet Antonin Artaud contemplating the destruction and rubble post–World War II: “We are not yet born, we are not yet in the world, there is not yet a world, things have not been made, the reason for being has not yet been found.” Mesopotopia—mythic maelstrom, rhythmic rite of passage, protolanguage trance dance—moves toward release and gnosis.
Anne Waldman is a revered poet, performer, professor, editor, and cultural activist. She is the author of more than forty-five books, including Gossamurmur, Manatee/Humanity, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and the feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy, which won the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. The recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Before Columbus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Waldman makes her home in New York City and in Boulder, Colorado, where she is a Distinguished Professor of Writing and Poetics and artistic director of the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University.
Anne will also be appearing at The Roxie Theater, 3125 16th St, San Francisco, CA 94103 on Saturday, December 6, 2025, 12:15 pm for a film screening of OUTRIDER (directed by Alystyre Julian) – Visit this LINK to learn more.
Advance Praise for the work of Anne Waldman
“To understand the radiance of the poetry world you have to look at Anne. In Mesopotopia I’m struck by the fact she is such a good writer, her tone so rich & embodied, so frank you could hang anything on it and she does—in a moment when nobody knows what to do Anne extends us this canny oracular, a streaming prayer cobbled from every direction – in a grown up in NYC way, Mesopotopia is today’s lucky read, gorgeous and full.” —Eileen Myles, author of A Working Life
“The poem as an archive of histories and myths, an outlet for political rage, an inscape of universal compassion, a score for performance, an account of things touched and seen and dreamed, an atlas of the natural world, the language of a tribe: for sixty years, Anne Waldman has been taking us to what poetry was meant to be.” —Eliot Weinberger, author of The Life of Tu Fu
“Anne Waldman’s Mesopotopia unfolds in layered, palimpsestic compositions, forming potent murmurations of language: coordinated, shape-shifting, and spectacular. With an epic vision, these poems address complex themes, dreaming and unraveling threads of history and myth. It’s an enveloping performance, an urgent invocation. An utterly astonishing collection.” —Hoa Nguyen, author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
“Shattered light in search of sprung lyric: with boundless energy, Anne Waldman has forged an epochal poem in the seams and veils of hermetic unfoldings. Mesopotopia is a restless, wrestling, rousing, terracotta (earthen) anti-war warrior.” —Charles Bernstein, author of The Kinds of Poetry I Want
This event made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation