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

Anne Waldman

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Anne Waldman
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 2
Poet
Writer
Millville
New Jersey
Think
Writer
Thinking
Novel
American
Father
Write
Wanted
Great
Writing
Frustrated

More quotes by Anne Waldman

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For me the road became a zone, in places like Saint Marks poetry Project where I worked for 12 years.
Anne Waldman
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I had parents who were attentive to what was going on politically. There was the Greek connection, a sense of a larger world. People coming in from abroad. There was a sense of community around ideas: a discourse and an adhesiveness which is my favorite word from [Walt] Whitman.
Anne Waldman
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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
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Your compassion travels beyond your own inner circle. And then you breathe out an alternative version where you mentally and emotionally and psychologically purify the poisons. So indeed, the generative idea is in the crux of this practice and of my propensity toward poetry, which is a practice of the imagination.
Anne Waldman
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I had a student some years ago whose father had worked on the Manhattan Project. I had a student who had to escape this very intense, born-again fundamentalist Christian background that was very much like a cult and of course they struggle to get to Naropa. And they have cut themselves off. They don't look back.
Anne Waldman
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I don't think it is as a trope or as something in our psyches. There's very little wilderness out there but there is wild mind, and the Wild mind that actually, as Gary Snyder says, wants to take care of things. There's an elegant quality to the wild mind.
Anne Waldman
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We pride ourselves at Natrona - I mean, pride {ironically] - on developing a noncompetitive community. That's very important. The values that can come from that kind of meditative work combined with the creative work you do, combined with your activism, can come together.
Anne Waldman
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We still have our larynx, we still have our minds and we still have our consciousness. We still have this gift to make things with words and images and get outside these preordained tropes and ways of thinking and the master narratives - what's handed to us.
Anne Waldman
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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
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World War II synchronizes things for a lot of people. There's a kind of wakeup call.
Anne Waldman
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What I propose for the life of a poet goes against the grain of the fossil fuel monoculture. Maybe the most revolutionary act these days is not to watch television and to read a book a day at least.
Anne Waldman
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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
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There's a numbness in our culture to the continuing horrors of genocide.
Anne Waldman
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The text for me is the musical score. I'm the instrument. My voice is the instrument. My voice is articulating the sounds which are coming through the imaginings and visitations in my head, and I'm making these sounds but I've selected them from an ocean of sound.
Anne Waldman
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My mother actually left American in 1929 to be part of an alternative community of bohemians around her then father-in-law who was a well-known Greek poet. This group of people were living in this semi-Luddite reality and weaving their own clothes - proto-hippies in a way- -but around an artistic vision.
Anne Waldman
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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.
Anne Waldman
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Personally there is first: imagination second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.
Anne Waldman
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Any technology is just a skillful means and it's how you use it.
Anne Waldman
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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
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Literal thousands of Americans taking to the road and getting into that green automobile and just going. At the same time there is real incredible work [of art] that comes out of it. Never forget that.
Anne Waldman