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

Anne Waldman (New York, 1945) is one of the most important American poets of the second half of the twentieth century and has been honored with the American Book Award and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has published more than sixty books of poetry and has been associated with the second wave of the Beat Generation. A cultural activist, editor, teacher, tireless performer, and global ambassador of poetry, Anne co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University in 1974.

Outrider, the new documentary directed by Alystyre Julian and produced by Martin Scorsese, traces Anne Waldman’s visionary journey as poet, performer, and activist. Through archival footage and new performances, it captures her decades of radical poetic action from New York to Naropa. The film portrays Waldman as a lifelong “outrider” of American poetry—restless, luminous, and uncompromising.

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. No Land draws from the street art of Occupy Wall Street, Steve Cannon’s Tribes Gallery, and Anne Waldman’s outrider poetry community, as well as from countless artists, activists, poets, and elders of her city. 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.

In October 2025, an exhibition dedicated to The Velvet Wire opened at New York Poets’ House —the 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. It will remain open until January 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. 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.”

Here, two artists separated by nearly five decades—Waldman in her eighties, 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.

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, 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. They have led poetry workshops for women in Mexican prisons and collaborated on films, photographic series, and performances rooted in empathy 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.

ENTREVISTA A ANNE WALDMAN Y A 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 in the world. To help keep the world safe for poetry. To keep studying. To help wake the world up to itself. And It is pacifistic vow. Yet fierce. No harm.

I want  to continue to nourish and celebrate and learn from  poetry’s subtle work in the world. How we sicken without poetry.  The poem out of war and suffering. The documentary investigative poem.  The isolated poem.

The mother to her child. A love poem. A dirge.  We live in extreme times.The flora and animalia suffer.  Children caught in a cruel net  die. Blood flows  and floods across the land. Poetry witnesses apocalypse.

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, vision,  library,  alchemy &  telepathy  of poet mind. It is a beautiful objet d’art.  Sensually attuned. It is a place of performance. Motion and gestures.

And language  that needs attention and mind to hear fully. The gesture in ink and paint and photography speak to  possibilities of an ancient and current time. The quality of hand made art and poetry is timeless.

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 and Black Mountain and the New York School

Still still thrive.  We need one another. We need more women and the Queer  acts of  identity. The Poetry Project continues its experimental “wild mind” over 600 years. We founded a  Naropa University  and the Jack Kerouac  School of Disembodied Poetics 50 years ago,

I still feel connected to that more than  several generations of  poetry in a  temporary autonomous zone I helped found.  We learn from the Archive.

Questions for No Land

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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. 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 do 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 & their works for justice and peace are often quite powerful and so they are often considered dangerous by mainstream culture. They exist in odes 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. Creating places like the Kerouac School, as Anne Waldman, Ginsberg, di Prima, and Trunga did– these are practices in generosity, for poets yet to come- so when they arrive on space ship earth, there’s somewhere to go.

***

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.

(For Both)

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 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 approached Anne and I in the depths of the pandemic– she had a hope that we would publish with her 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 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 audit,  in the generative work of shaman Sabina . Shelley’s  youth is a clarion. Bruno is  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. 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, Bruno—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 Milly 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. I think also of 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.

Exhibition of Visual Works by No Land

Off Paradise Gallery, October–November 2024

Text by G. P. Selvaggio