Visionary Poetry in The Velvet Wire, by Anne Waldman and No Land

Anne Waldman (New York, 1945) is one of America’s most prolific and experimental writers and performers of poetry. She is also a founder and editor and librettist and longtime faculty at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder Colorado. She is the author most recently of MESOPOTOPIA, Penguin 2025, Archivist Scissors, Staircase 2025, Bard, Kinetic, 2023, a memoir with poetry, essays, interviews, and co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive, 2022. The Grammy-nominated Burroughs-ian opera Black Lodge with music by David T. Little and libretto by Waldman premiered at Opera Philadelphia in 2022. Waldman recently collaborated on a sonic poetry album called “Your Devotee in Rags” with Andrew Whiteman of Broken Social Scene (Siren Recordings, 2025). She has had many honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Waldman has published over 60 books of poetry, including the 1,000 page feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors The Mechanism of Concealment which won the PEN Center Literary Award for poetry. She is one of the founders and a former Director of The Poetry Project at St Marks Church In-the-Bowery and a founder of the Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder, CO where she is the Artistic Director of the annual Summer Writing Program.

The film about Anne Waldman OUTRIDER directed by Alystyre Julian, and produced by Tamaas Foundation, and executive producer Martin Scorsese premiered at Anthology Film Archives in April 2025 and is traveling the world.

No Land (New York, 1991) is a poet, photographer, performer, and multidisciplinary artist whose work continues the tradition of New York counterculture. Her paintings, drawings, photojournalistic works, films, and poetic performances alongside musicians reveal a devotion to the sacred and the mysterious. As a poet, she has performed at the Whitney Museum, William Burroughs’ Bunker (Giorno Poetry Systems), and The Poetry Project. Her visual art has been exhibited in numerous museums, including the Fotografiska Museum. Her fine-art & poem book collaboration with Anne Waldman, The Velvet Wire, was published in 2024 by Granary Books. She was awarded a commission from Roulette in 2025 for her sonic-poem piece Double Twilight.

In October 2025, an exhibition dedicated to The Velvet Wire opened at Poets House — New York City’s most important cultural center devoted to poetry, which functions both as an extensive library and a vital meeting place for writers and lovers of the word. The exhibition, Mercy-Eyed Down the Triple Highway, is on view at Poets House gallery in New York City until February 7th, 2026.

The story of The Velvet Wire reaches back to the early 1970s. In 1970, Angus MacLise, drummer for the Velvet Underground, and Ira Cohen, poet and photographer, launched Bardo Matrix Press in Kathmandu, publishing handmade rice-paper editions of works by key figures in the American avant-garde. Among their authors were Diane di Prima, Paul Bowles, and Charles Henri Ford.

In 1974 they released Way Out: A Poem in Discord by Gregory Corso—one of the Beat Generation’s most mercurial voices. Only 500 copies were printed. The poem, written in the early 1950s, was hand-delivered to the Kathmandu editors by Alan Zion, who had safeguarded it in Paris for two decades.

Half a century later, Waldman and No Land pay homage to that lineage with The Velvet Wire (2024), a rare and exquisitely crafted book fusing poetry, photography, and visual art. Published by Granary Books, only thirty-three copies exist, priced at $2,000 each—a relic of devotion and collaboration. A few copies can be found at the New York Public Library and in select university archives. As musician Oliver Ray of Patti Smith’s band puts it, “The Velvet Wire is sacred because it isn’t for sale.” (No Land did create a subsequent, handmade, facsimile version through her press Translucent Flower and copies are available.)

Here, two artists separated by nearly five decades—Waldman, eighty years, No Land in her thirties— carry the Beat tradition forward in its most visionary and experimental form. Both are poetic activists and symbols of cultural resistance against gentrification, dehumanization, and the commodification of art. They have lived and worked in New York since their chance encounter in 2012, when they exchanged a flower and a few words on the street during a May day protest.

Since then, they have created more than forty collaborative works across poetry, film, photography, performance, and activism. The Velvet Wire serves as a kind of reliquary, a vessel holding fragments of devotion, imagery, and correspondence. In its pages, Waldman and No Land write to one another, exchanging poems and meditations. No Land’s photographs illuminate Waldman’s kinetic, empathic verse; their dialogue flows through devotional texts, travel journals, and reflections on the poet’s calling.

The ghosts of earlier artists—Gregory Corso, Giordano Bruno, William Blake, Bob Dylan, Percy Bysshe Shelley, María Sabina, and others—drift through its pages. The book feels as though composed through the eye of a cinematic taxi, humming through the streets of Mexico City, Colorado, and New York—the three poles of their creative geography.

Since that first encounter, Waldman and No Land have woven a shared history of socially engaged art projects spanning continents. Alongside a group called RIZOMA,  they have led poetry workshops for women in a prison in Mexico City and collaborated on films, photographic series, and performances rooted in the ethos of mercy and transformation. Their bond is not merely artistic or personal—it is, as Waldman might say, “a field of radiant action.”

To trace the essence of the poetic tradition living within The Velvet Wire—a book its authors describe as both “magical and humble”—we spoke with them about the vision that sustains their work and their belief in poetry as a force of resistance and renewal.

INTERVIEW WITH ANNE WALDMAN AND NO LAND

Anne, What does the poet’s vow mean to you today, in this fractured and fast-moving world? How is that spiritual commitment renewed in The Velvet Wire?

AW: My vow is to my own capacity and skillful means in the world.  To Keep making my work and continuing a practice of Buddhist study. To help keep the world safe for poetry and build community. To take care of the archive for poets and artists and scholars of the future. To keep studying. To help wake the world up to itself. It’s a pacifistic vow. Do no harm.

I want  to continue to nourish and celebrate poetry’s subtle work in the world from time immemorial. I know we sicken without poetry.  The poem comes out of war, suffering, beauty, tenderness, observation of the phenomenal world. The documentary investigative poem might be a historical record.  The isolated poem. “Poetry is news that stays news.”

A love poem. A dirge.  We live in extreme times.The flora and animalia suffer.  Children caught in cruel nets  die. Blood flows  and floods across the land. Poetry witnesses apocalypse. We need to bare witness and act and work with original language. Pay attention to vision and dream. Writing a mercurial epic (Manatee/Humanity) is a cry for attention to this.

Your poetry has long stood at the crossroads of resistance and ritual. In your view, how does The Velvet Wire carry the charge of poetry as an act of resistance?

AW: The Velvet Wire  is concrete  thru  texture, color, alchemy &  telepathy  of poet- mind. It is a beautiful objet d’art. A graceful act sensually attuned. It is a place of performance, of motion and gestures and prayer.  And a testament to a generous collaboration of sensibilities through friendship and attention.

The gesture in ink and paint and photography speak to  possibilities to both an ancient and current time. The quality of hand made art and poetry is endlessly innovative.

Poeisis means “making”. The textures of paper, the ink, the cut up.   The tools of the imagination and the cobbler. The mid-wife, the raging  feminist.

Your work has always been deeply rooted in the idea of a poetic tribe—collaborative, intergenerational, and resistant. What does it mean for you to create within a community of voices, especially in times of crisis?

AW: The community of artist voices is a kind of sangha of mind and a record of that consciousness in a time of strife under the Capitalocene. The lineages of the Beats, Black Mountain and the New York School and language poets still thrive. There’s a huge legacy among sonic work.  We need one another. We have women and the Queer  acts of  identity and power stepping up. The Poetry Project continues its experimental “wild mind” over 60 years. We founded Naropa University and the Jack Kerouac  School of Disembodied Poetics 51 years ago. I still feel connected to that through several generations of  poetry in a “temporary autonomous zone” I helped nurture with many often inspired infra-structure poets!

(Questions for No Land)

Your visual and written work seems guided by an oracular perception of the world. How does the image converse with the invisible in The Velvet Wire?

NL: For me the impulse to create or work seems driven by a feeling that something is hidden, secret, being asked to come forth. Words or lines of poetry or visions that are transcribed into art forms appear as if hanging in the ether already. To create, one must pull them from space. Or sometimes leave them where they are.

In a world increasingly flooded with noise and spectacle, how do you see poetry—especially the kind you weave with images—as a quiet form of rebellion, a way of preserving mystery and truth?

NL: Poetry may preserve what has been called “slow time.” Where dreams can pool & melt into our waking space. Within ubiquitous capitalistic consciousness– this other way of being in the world seems a treasure more and more rare, a type of mind one seeks out amongst confidantes. One desires to be in understanding with other poets who also seek this other mode of being. Poets may see all times happen simultaneously. The news or compassion-studies of the era may affect a poet, however, one seeks a sense of timelessness– preserving access to a different relationship to time, ancient, future. You are refusing the idea that poets “know” – and slip as if porous into a state of seeking.

You spent formative time in spaces like Occupy Wall Street and Tribes Gallery and have taught at the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. How have those territories of resistance shaped the way you see and compose the world?

NL: These temporary autonomous zones– whether protest spaces or literary spaces or monasteries– create alternatives to what we are often told is the only mode of mainstream existence. These zones create frequencies, communities, relationships which echo the needs of the human heart and the imagination – in ways society tells us to live without. Those who cultivate these spaces are consciously trying to nourish a different kind of world in which dreaming is a practical use of one’s time. As they contemplate justice and peace- these zones are often quite powerful and so they are often considered dangerous by mainstream culture. They exist in modes of fragility and precarity, which is a form of sacred struggle. I am writing in a more spiritual location, but I would not have had the path I’ve had without the cultivation of these zones, the generosity of the elders before me and the work of my peers. Creating places like the Kerouac School, as Anne Waldman, Ginsberg, di Prima, and Trungpa did– these are practices in generosity, for poets yet to come- so when they arrive on spaceship earth, there’s somewhere to go!

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The Velvet Wire explores the profound artistic and personal bond between Anne Waldman and No Land. The artists move beyond a teacher-disciple dynamic, at times appearing as mother and daughter, or as sisters. Through a rich symbolism of threads, wires, and woven textures, the book portrays their connection as a subtle act of activism—one that challenges the individualism of contemporary society and extends the legacy of Waldman, her peers (some now gone), and her predecessors.

At its core, the work functions as both a channel and an archive for “mind-to-mind” creation, offering its deepest lesson in the power of mutual strength: the understanding that human connection itself is the most radical form of resistance.

(Questions For Both Artists)

Anne, No Land, was there a seed vision or intuitive spark that initiated The Velvet Wire? A moment, an image, a line, or a shared silence that made you realize you were weaving a reliquary?

AW: In The Velvet Wire we honor meeting at a protest march  in NYC. No Land offers a red rose. We spend time at a Buddhist stupa. We travel together in Mexico.  No Land’s work grows more musical. I see her images in a dream.

NL: When M.C. Kinniburgh of Granary Books, working with Steve Clay, approached Anne and I in the depths of the pandemic– she had a hope that we would publish an intergenerational document of our collaborations and relationship. The book took on many different forms. At one point, it was a reliquary in the aim to archive every single one of our 40+ collaborations in performance, cine-poem, art-works, and photography– however The Velvet Wire shapeshifted into a more of a visual poem and devotional texts to one another. We highlight the initial moment of our mysterious meeting on the street where we exchanged a flower which marked the beginning of all of our collaborative work. I trust in the divine spirit that led us to one another. Auspicious & fateful.

(For both) The Velvet Wire seems like a poetic dialogue unfolding across time and space. How has your bond—as intergenerational collaborators, as poetic sisters—shaped the voice of this book? Have you discovered anything in each other’s language that you didn’t know you were seeking?

AW: It is quotidian, lists of desires, tasks. It is also cinematic and circular. Objects have sentience. Intergenerational  cellular  work is powerful and shifting.There is no power control or absolutely authority. It carries the struggle for humanity in a dark time. And it carries the TANGIBILITY of those we celebrate. We recognize the tenderness and vulnerability  in the poete maudit,  in the generative work of curandera Maria Sabina. Keats and Shelley’s  youth is a clarion for a younger generation. Giordano Bruno is a  guide of investigation as alchemist. 

NL: We blend voices, we speak to the others’ work and inhabit it, we reference vintage and new poems in the same sentence. The work keeps collaging, layering, devoting. The Velvet Wire covers a range of our different voices- poems, letters, rhymes, emails in the night where Anne is encouraging me to practice my bodhisattva vow and the next day asked me if i’ve eaten anything and also contains chants & poem correspondence where we speak in code and telepathies. It is this range of modes that point to what it means to be a poet in 21st century New York City where one must survive the realities and preserve one’s poetic identity. Our relationship deepens as collaborators the more we create & we are currently working on a cinema version of The Velvet Wire.

The spirits of bygone elders—Corso, Sabina, Shelley—seem to hover throughout The Velvet Wire. What is their role in your poetic constellation? Are they guides, ghosts, collaborators, witnesses? How do they shape the energy and direction of your work together?

AW: Occult magic time.We look for signs that  continue the choiceless path.  Blake’s Book of Thel, the Unborn  seen through my book “ Voice’s Daughter of A Heart Yet To Be born” is an inspiration for both of us. I take Thel into Life and experience, but she also is an adept of the shadow worlds of innocence.  Experience is the way we look back.  We can write letters to one another. We are supported by a dedicated poetry press: Granary. And its craft work.  Telepathy pinpoints the heart’s location looking up at the sky. We see the Milky Way, and the deeper paths to Liberation. We get caught in the Outrider vision as a movie as a continuity. We perform night rituals with our friends.

NL: I like to remember that we are not singular spirits, contained by bodily perimeters, but composed of one another’s breaths, trajectories, lineages, visions.  Maria Sabina– the inspiration for Anne Waldman’s “Fast Speaking Woman”– is an elder we pay homage to. The Velvet Wire mentions the Maria Sabina chant “santo santo (praying by the window.” Anne’s line “flowers that clean as i go” echoes the Sabina sentiment that we are guided by all creation. Poetic lineages are like tributaries in that they find their way down the lines to younger poets not yet born. The Velvet Wire concludes with the Corso poem “I Held a Shelley Manuscript.” Homage to the ancestors. And Corso’s Bardo Matrix book called “Way Out” .. I first saw it hidden on a library shelf in Oliver Ray’s archive- and even though it was so tiny it leapt out at me …called to me. Things are mysterious.

Written by Annalisa Marí Pegrum