Anne Waldman Quotes

If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions. I'm the girl with the unquenchable thirst.

We can think for ourselves and we can awaken the world to a greater consciousness.

I took my vow to poetry; this is where I'm going to be. These are my people; this is my tribe. This is where I'm going to put my energy.

Our need to reimagine our world through the vibratory larynx, that's what matters. Re-awaken the world to itself. Through ideas, pictures, sounds. Hold the mirror up to "nature."

As a woman I have felt encouraged and fed by and nurtured by the work of [Jack] Kerouac and others.

We need a world-wide Department of Peace.

A lot of my life has involved with helping create cultures that have as their basis this vision of the sharing, the partaking of a certain ethos together.

My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel.

I was going to public school in the post-World War II, the grey doldrum years. But I was in this extraordinary environment of Manhattan, of Greenwich Village, of bohemian parents.

I was not ever hitchhiking alone. I've done solo train trips but I've never driven myself alone.

My mother started taking us to church when I was in seventh or eight grade. That was always a question, Do you believe in God?

I think of my father born in this very small, limited situation and then coming out of that. Many people have this story.

Contemporary movies just drive me crazy. The violence and the sentimentality and the spiritual materialism and Theism and the incredible indulgence in ignorance is so claustrophobic.

My older brother was involved in the folk movement. We would gather every weekend in Washington Park. The folk songs were so important to my reality.

My last bedside conversation in the hospital just a few weeks before Allen Ginsberg died was 'please take care of so and so. And the legacy of the Kerouac school.

I still had to correct Allen Ginsberg at times when he called women girls. I'd say. Allen please, it's not politically correct.

Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.

Certainly the beat writers I've known who carried forward the original, you know, I'd say that came together in the 1940s and 50s. So I was inheriting in a way some of that ethos.

I grew up in New York City in Greenwich Village and had parents who were somewhat bohemian so I was always on the nonconformist side of the equation.

There's a numbness in our culture to the continuing horrors of genocide.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

This will be a good time for poetry, you know, when things get darker and stranger and your very speech is being questioned and the sense of trusting that human thing.

When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now.

As a younger person you can come in through many, many gateways. It's like some huge Mandela. You can enter into this and get refreshed.

Allen's [Gisberg] loyalty to his friends was extraordinary. And as he was dying he was calling people: "What can I do for you before I die? Do you need money? What can I do?".

The sense of traveling this continent, also other continents. The friendship.I would say a non-competitive friendship. That is so amazing to me.

For me the road became a zone, in places like Saint Marks poetry Project where I worked for 12 years.

What I'm after is that wakeful state through language that stays alive.

It's so rich as a trope - the whole idea of the road and it being in terms of language, being an active experience.

I hope I'm not implying role of contemporary poet for myself, although there's a kind of resonant paradigm. It's traditionally a difficult role.

Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration.

I think of the amazing things that were going on. So it's so rich. The doors keep opening.

I like the idea of the object, the relic. And I see it as a time machine too or a device you plug into a socket that activates a sound and light show.

I remember being caught in this earthquake in Mexico City and having a sense of people coming before me, of being part of this lineage. I felt similarly when I went to India and South America.

My teachers were often very eccentric.

We humans need to do better with our vast minds and alchemical powers. Future radial poetries might be more symbiotic with the rest of consciousness.

There are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them.

The whole red state/blue state thing is very interesting. Watching that shift over the years.

You really felt a radical shift in the advance of a poetics that had really been engendered by [Walt] Whitman. This was very exciting. I wanted to work in this environment.

The music is notated first, the text follows. I might have to wait until the right kind of text or form arises. I often see the poems as “scores.”

If you can integrate your life to have a kind of meditative practice that is considering others.

I think anything that gets people outside [is good] - I'm a big supporter of public parks and public spaces.

I am a poet, bard, scop, minnesinger, trobairitz who is driven by sound and the possibilities for vocal expression, the mouthing of text as well as intentionality or dance on the page.

For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future.

The sense of the preciousness of the body - vehicle for poetry.

I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.

Any technology is just a skillful means and it's how you use it.

There's a kind of training, when you are sitting in a session in the Japanese tradition or any of the Buddhist traditions, taking your lotus posture or whatever it is. That's what you're doing.

I'm drawn to the magical efficacies of language as a political act.

I get very upset when money is being cut and people can't visit the Grand Canyon.