Anne Waldman Quotes - Page 1

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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?".

• Anne Waldman / Poet

My teachers were often very eccentric.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

We need a world-wide Department of Peace.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

Connection to Buddhism is strand in my life.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

I was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

We will have a total chaos without books, literature, and library.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

I have students whose fathers are voting for Sarah Palin. It's wild.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

Think of the road as a kind of zone and a site of incredible diversity.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

I want the poem to be an experience - for both the listener and for myself.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

World War II synchronizes things for a lot of people. There's a kind of wakeup call.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

I know when I go to a poetry reading, I feel purged, exulted. You let the poet guide you through some kind of journey.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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?

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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

• Anne Waldman / Poet

For me there is a poesis, a poetics, around the trope of the road that is embedded within many life experiences of the people I've been close to.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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.”

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

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.

• Anne Waldman / Poet

The challenge lies in the fact that the planet has limited time. Be it climate change or nuclear fallout, there is very little time. You have to pick your cause.