City Lights and the Roxie Theater present a screening of the film
OUTRIDER
Directed by Alystyre Julian
to be followed by a conversation between Alystyre Julian and Anne Waldman
This event will take place at the Roxie Theater, 3125 16th St, San Francisco, CA 94103
Admission: $15.00 (Roxie members $10.00, Senior Discount $11.00)
Visit the Roxie Website to reserve seating.
Alystyre Julian’s Outrider is the first feature-length portrait of Grammy-nominated, epic poet, performer, and activist Anne Waldman. In immersive jaunts of collaboration, the film follows Waldman and her century-crossing lineage of artistic and generative practices. Guided by poetic kinships of the Beat generation and with radical female musicians, Waldman has spent decades generating close communities of kindred spirits, from the downtown New York scene and the founding of the dynamic Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church; to the Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics; to gatherings in Big Sur, Mexico City, Morocco, and beyond.
Through performances, song, and conversation, Outrider collaborates with Waldman as a person woven of poetry, an inimitable creative and social force dedicated to the propulsion of the artistic imagination and the generative practices which form in its wake. The film moves within Waldman’s artistic circles and poetic vortex, to include Patti Smith, Meredith Monk, Bob Dylan, Laurie Anderson, Thurston Moore, Kiki Smith, Pat Steir, Fast Speaking Music, and others. As a visionary word-worker and transcendent presence, Outrider celebrates Waldman as she channels through the ancient, bardic tradition the thunderous power of poetry.
“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
Alystyre Julian is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer, She is the director of Outrider. In 2024, Julian co-curated Language and Light: The Films of Ed Bowes at Anthology Film Archives. She has been the stills photographer on award-winning feature films Diane (2018), Monsters and Men (2018), Goldie (2019), and others, and has directed and worked on numerous short films, videos, and documentary projects. She holds an MFA from Bard College, and previously taught creative writing at Long Island University, Montclair State University, and screenwriting at New York University. Her poems have been featured in publications such as Poetry Project Newsletter, Chain, Talisman, and Pharos. She lives and works in New York City, where she is at work on a new film project related to Black Mountain College.
Anne Waldman is an internationally acclaimed poet and 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. 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.
About Anne Waldman’s new book:
Mesopotopia
By Anne Waldman
Published by Penguin Books
Purchase HERE.
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.
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation