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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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Anne Waldman
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 2
Poet
Writer
Millville
New Jersey
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Projects
Manhattan
Born
Worked
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Father
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More quotes by Anne Waldman

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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.
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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.
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For me the road became a zone, in places like Saint Marks poetry Project where I worked for 12 years.
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It's so rich as a trope - the whole idea of the road and it being in terms of language, being an active experience.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Personally there is first: imagination second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.
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For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future.
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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.
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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.
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Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration.
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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.
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The formal stuff feels old and windy. Not to say you shouldn't know prosody. But it's a wonderful time for exploratory poetics. Contemporary poets are inventing all kinds of wild, complex shapes for poetry, as we see. It's a wonderful time, less ego-centered.
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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.
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The sense of the preciousness of the body - vehicle for poetry.
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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.
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I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.
Anne Waldman
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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.
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If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions. I'm the girl with the unquenchable thirst.
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