Not all guiding artists at CMS were musicians. There were poets and dancers also. Anne Waldman was one of those poets.
Here is a brief bio on her from Naropa University, where she teaches writing and poetics:
“Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community for over 40 years as writer, sprechstimme performer, professor, editor, magpie scholar, infra-structure and cultural/political activist. She co-founded The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University and currently serves as Artistic Director of the Summer Writing program. She is the author of over 40 books of poetry including Manatee/Humanity, Kill or Cure, Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and the poetic text Outrider. She is also the author of the legendary Fast Speaking Woman, now translated into Italian, Czech and French, as well as the 800-page epic Iovis Trilogy, forthcoming in 2011. She is editor of The Beat Book and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology, Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, and a comprehensive Beats at Naropa, with previously unpublished work by Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and William Burroughs, among others. She was an assistant director (1966–1968) and the director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project (1968–1978) as well as the director of curriculum for the Schule fur Dichtung in Vienna in the fall of 1999. Her play RED NOIR played two and a half months on off off Broadway in New York City in 2009/10. Recent conferences and festivals include China, Berlin, Rome, Quebec, Luxembourg, Prague, Vienna, Britain, Spain, London, Italy, Prague, Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico. She was a fellow at The Bellagio Center and a Civitella Ranieri Fellow in Umbria as well as a recipient of a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation and is a winner of The Shelley Memorial Award for poetry. Anne Waldman’s considerable literary archives reside at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan.”
If you’re ever in Ann Arbor, look me up and we can go peruse those archives.
In the meantime, here are a couple of videos of Anne in Ann Arbor on different occasions, 2002 and 2009: