Critical Praise for
Ken Waldman, in this new book, takes his readers to the heart of an America that we met long ago through Whitman and Kerouac. It's an America rich with the nuances and details of our everyday lives, and then some, because his life hasn't been like yours and mine. Waldman is a storyteller. Take some time, park yourself in a good spot, and read this beautiful collection.
— M. L. Liebler, author of The Moon, The Box
Waldman's poems are rich with lively imagery and characters, and deeply engaging in their immediacy. I love his keen sense of narrative, his use of spoken voice and offbeat detail. He's a music-man in more ways than one.
— Naomi Shihab Nye
Waldman's multifaceted show is based on a somewhat weird concept, but it works beautifully. Picture William Carlos Williams behind a dogsled, Walt Whitman jamming with the Carter Family. . . . When all spliced together - the vividly spoken words, the lively fiddling and the rustic Alaskan details - it makes for a highly compelling, fun-filled performance.
— Michael MillerThe State, Columbia, SC
Reviews
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Ken Waldman, in this new book, takes his readers to the heart of an America that we met long ago through Whitman and Kerouac. It's an America rich with the nuances and details of our everyday lives, and then some, because his life hasn't been like yours and mine. Waldman is a storyteller. Take some time, park yourself in a good spot, and read this beautiful collection. -- M.L. Liebler, author of The Moon, A Box
Waldman's poems are rich with lively imagery and characters, and deeply engaging in their immediacy. I love his keen sense of narrative, his use of spoken voice and offbeat detail. He's a music-man in more ways than one. -- Naomi Shihab Nye
From "Beyond the Book" on WOAI.com: (Review by Angela Mercedes Becerra)
To live is to experience, accept, peel back the layers. -- from Ken Waldman's "The Inner Wreck"
One snowy day in Alaska, a small plane went down, skipping against a hillside. In that plane was Ken Waldman, the man now known as "Alaska's Fiddling Poet" (self-proclaimed, he says). Since that time Waldman has been living the life of a nomad, driving his van endlessly from one end of the continent to the other, a modern-day traveling bard excitedly reading his poems and wailing away on his fiddle.
I talked to Waldman about his plane crash experience during a recent chat we had about his new book from Wings Press in San Antonio, The Secret Visitor's Guide. It's the kind of story everyone wants to ask about--the kind of story that comes to define or identify you in a certain sense. But as I listened to him talk about the crash and a long illness in the time leading up to it, I realized that despite the dramatic, life-altering nature of the experience, the crash is certainly not what put the poet in Ken Waldman. As he talks in his bright, joyful way about his travels, his music and the times he shares as a writer with young and old, it's clear that the Fiddling Poet was always in Ken Waldman, just waiting to break out into the full, life-embracing form we see today.
Waldman is incredibly prolific, both with his music and his writing. He has several CDs out, including some geared toward kids, along with two other poetry collections. During his travels he hops from schools to festivals, from the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage to clubs and pubs. He was recently here in San Antonio for an evening of poetry and music, fiddle in hand as he gave out little postcards of his poems to the audience.
After meeting Waldman I can see that he is just like the poems he writes in The Secret Visitor's Guide. The term "down-to-earth" is often over-used, but rarely is it so applicable. Waldman's poems are firmly rooted in daily life, the land over which he has journeyed, and the people he has met along the way. Strikingly real images are scattered among anecdotes, one-liners ("... epic discontent in a state/where men were so abundant/led her to grumble that/though the odds were good/the goods were odd.") and musical reveries. Playfulness and internal music carry the words swinging and dancing from line to line, and that's before you even get to the fiddle and music poems. One of my favorites is "Music Party:"
This one's got drunk howling mariachis perched on rainy porchsteps, an insistent cat screeching operatic harmony, wanting in. Front hall, the swing session: an elfin redhead in pink neon socks croons a sassy-sweet Tea For Two above jazzy mando riffs, violin cutting in like a jive car horn, her own tiptoe-y bass...
The Secret Visitor's Guide is not only about the fun. The collection includes a series of poems Waldman wrote after 9-11, one each month for a year on every 11th day. He may come off as happy-go-lucky, but Waldman is not that simple. His writing reveals sensitive introspection and thoughtfulness about real issues, real life:
...Don't quit your day job, I say to everybody who claims my life romantic. And point to erratic schedule and pay, occasional audience, the lack of a love life. It's the latter that's the killer, I think, as I walk a half-dozen blocks in the rain, grateful today I have the freedom and resources to complain only of this. "April 11, 2002"
As I listened to Waldman during our interview, I felt myself catching some of his optimism. Waldman is a man deeply in tune with his sense of fun, milking life for all it's worth, and he transfers that eclectic mix of joyfulness, serenity and seriousness as much through his poems and songs as he does to everyone he comes in contact with him. In writing and in life, Alaska's Fiddling Poet is just plain contagious.
Be sure to watch my "Beyond the Book" interview with Ken Waldman in the woai.com Media Center. He talks about his traveling life, his plane crash, reads his poems, and even plays the fiddle!
© 2006 CLEAR CHANNEL BROADCASTING, INC.
From the Chicago Reader:
Ken Waldman works hard at evoking his home state, as if he were the only man charged with bringing its tales down to the lower 48. (He also tours like he really has that mandate.) In his new volume of poetry, The Secret Visitor's Guide, he reflects on his journeys into the wilderness from his Anchorage base and the long trips he's made back, balancing a weathered humanism with his grief and confusion over post-9/11 politics. -- Monica Kendrick, Chicago Reader
From the Boston Globe:
Known as "Alaska's Fiddling Poet," Ken Waldman is a former college professor with a resume that includes more than 400 published stories and poems. His concerts of fiddle tunes, poems, and stories about life in Alaska might tempt you to plan a road trip with a journal tucked under one arm and a fiddle under the other!
From The New Yorker:
WALDMAN'S FOLLY: After the Secretary of State William H. Seward arranged for the U.S. to buy Alaska from Russia in 1867, the sizable purchase became known as "Seward's Folly." That was long before statehood, the discovery of oil, and the arrival of Ken Waldman, a self-proclaimed fiddling poet. Waldman, a former college professor and Philadelphia native, moved to Alaska twenty years ago and has been a traveling minstrel for more than ten years. He brings his instrument, a few fellow musicians, and his poems about surviving a plane crash (locals once called him "a walking dead man"), watching grizzlies feed in a garbage dump, and other adventures in the forty-ninth state . . .
Waldman combines a vital, raw-edged Appalachian-styled fiddle with unpretentious, conversational poem-stories of everyday Alaskan life. The poetry and musical establishments may not know what to think of Waldman's genre-merging, but the calm sense of wonder he engenders is easily accessible. -- Dan Gewertz, Boston Herald
He is like a living soundtrack to an American epic: by turns pioneering and traditional, earthy and urbane, somehow unsuppressably cheerful even after seeing so many miles of this country's rich and ravaged landscape. -- Birmingham Weekly
In the tradition of the late John Hartford. -- Joe Nickell, The Missoulian
Ken Waldman, Alaska's Fiddling Poet, is back in town with a new CD and his wondrous energy. Local Jerry Hagins accompanies on banjo. Feels like a Ken Burns movie. So American. Imagine an America that can hold Eminem and Waldman. Sweet, as my girls say. Always recommended. -- Austin Chronicle, Austin, Texas
Waldman's multifaceted show is based on a somewhat weird concept, but it works beautifully. Picture William Carlos Williams behind a dogsled, Walt Whitman jamming with the Carter Family. . . . When all spliced together - the vividly spoken words, the lively fiddling and the rustic Alaskan details - it makes for a highly compelling, fun-filled performance. -- Michael Miller, The State, Columbia, SC
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From "Beyond the Book" on WOAI.com
© 2006 Clear Channel Broadcasting, Inc.2006
To live is to experience, accept, peel back the layers. -- from Ken Waldman's "The Inner Wreck"
One snowy day in Alaska, a small plane went down, skipping against a hillside. In that plane was Ken Waldman, the man now known as "Alaska's Fiddling Poet" (self-proclaimed, he says). Since that time Waldman has been living the life of a nomad, driving his van endlessly from one end of the continent to the other, a modern-day traveling bard excitedly reading his poems and wailing away on his fiddle.
I talked to Waldman about his plane crash experience during a recent chat we had about his new book from Wings Press in San Antonio, The Secret Visitor's Guide. It's the kind of story everyone wants to ask about--the kind of story that comes to define or identify you in a certain sense. But as I listened to him talk about the crash and a long illness in the time leading up to it, I realized that despite the dramatic, life-altering nature of the experience, the crash is certainly not what put the poet in Ken Waldman. As he talks in his bright, joyful way about his travels, his music and the times he shares as a writer with young and old, it's clear that the Fiddling Poet was always in Ken Waldman, just waiting to break out into the full, life-embracing form we see today.
Waldman is incredibly prolific, both with his music and his writing. He has several CDs out, including some geared toward kids, along with two other poetry collections. During his travels he hops from schools to festivals, from the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage to clubs and pubs. He was recently here in San Antonio for an evening of poetry and music, fiddle in hand as he gave out little postcards of his poems to the audience.
After meeting Waldman I can see that he is just like the poems he writes in The Secret Visitor's Guide. The term "down-to-earth" is often over-used, but rarely is it so applicable. Waldman's poems are firmly rooted in daily life, the land over which he has journeyed, and the people he has met along the way. Strikingly real images are scattered among anecdotes, one-liners ("... epic discontent in a state/where men were so abundant/led her to grumble that/though the odds were good/the goods were odd.") and musical reveries. Playfulness and internal music carry the words swinging and dancing from line to line, and that's before you even get to the fiddle and music poems. One of my favorites is "Music Party:"
This one's got drunk howling mariachis perched on rainy porchsteps, an insistent cat screeching operatic harmony, wanting in. Front hall, the swing session: an elfin redhead in pink neon socks croons a sassy-sweet Tea For Two above jazzy mando riffs, violin cutting in like a jive car horn, her own tiptoe-y bass...
The Secret Visitor's Guide is not only about the fun. The collection includes a series of poems Waldman wrote after 9-11, one each month for a year on every 11th day. He may come off as happy-go-lucky, but Waldman is not that simple. His writing reveals sensitive introspection and thoughtfulness about real issues, real life:
...Don't quit your day job, I say to everybody who claims my life romantic. And point to erratic schedule and pay, occasional audience, the lack of a love life. It's the latter that's the killer, I think, as I walk a half-dozen blocks in the rain, grateful today I have the freedom and resources to complain only of this. "April 11, 2002"
As I listened to Waldman during our interview, I felt myself catching some of his optimism. Waldman is a man deeply in tune with his sense of fun, milking life for all it's worth, and he transfers that eclectic mix of joyfulness, serenity and seriousness as much through his poems and songs as he does to everyone he comes in contact with him. In writing and in life, Alaska's Fiddling Poet is just plain contagious.
Be sure to watch my "Beyond the Book" interview with Ken Waldman in the woai.com Media Center. He talks about his traveling life, his plane crash, reads his poems, and even plays the fiddle!
-
Chicago Reader
Ken Waldman works hard at evoking his home state, as if he were the only man charged with bringing its tales down to the lower 48. (He also tours like he really has that mandate.) In his new volume of poetry, The Secret Visitor's Guide, he reflects on his journeys into the wilderness from his Anchorage base and the long trips he's made back, balancing a weathered humanism with his grief and confusion over post-9/11 politics.
-
Birmingham Weekly
He is like a living soundtrack to an American epic: by turns pioneering and traditional, earthy and urbane, somehow unsuppressably cheerful even after seeing so many miles of this country's rich and ravaged landscape.
-
The Missoulian
In the tradition of the late John Hartford.
-
Austin Chronicle
Ken Waldman, Alaska's Fiddling Poet, is back in town with a new CD and his wondrous energy. Local Jerry Hagins accompanies on banjo. Feels like a Ken Burns movie. So American. Imagine an America that can hold Eminem and Waldman. Sweet, as my girls say. Always recommended.
-
Boston Herald
Waldman combines a vital, raw-edged Appalachian-styled fiddle with unpretentious, conversational poem-stories of everyday Alaskan life. The poetry and musical establishments may not know what to think of Waldman's genre-merging, but the calm sense of wonder he engenders is easily accessible.
-
Waldman's Folly
New Yorker
After the Secretary of State William H. Seward arranged for the U.S. to buy Alaska from Russia in 1867, the sizable purchase became known as "Seward's Folly." That was long before statehood, the discovery of oil, and the arrival of Ken Waldman, a self-proclaimed fiddling poet. Waldman, a former college professor and Philadelphia native, moved to Alaska twenty years ago and has been a traveling minstrel for more than ten years. He brings his instrument, a few fellow musicians, and his poems about surviving a plane crash (locals once called him "a walking dead man"), watching grizzlies feed in a garbage dump, and other adventures in the forty-ninth state . . .
