Quote

Growing up in the fifties, having to wear a dog tag, having to take shelter in a bomb shelter. That turned me toward the road, I did not want to live in fear of that, I was gong to work somehow against what that vision was, and what that horror was. It was poetry, art, music.

Anne Waldman

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Anne Waldman
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 2
Poet
Writer
Millville
New Jersey
Art
Wear
Fifties
Music
Dog
Tag
Live
Road
Bomb
Take
Toward
Shelter
Work
Poetry
Bombs
Vision
Somehow
Growing
Horror
Gong
Fear
Turned
Gongs

More quotes by Anne Waldman

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We need a world-wide Department of Peace.
Anne Waldman
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When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now.
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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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
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My father shared the ethos of many of the beat writers and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. Probably for 25 years of my father's life, He had been an itinerant piano player and so traveled the road with bands and that sort of thing.
Anne Waldman
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I was not ever hitchhiking alone. I've done solo train trips but I've never driven myself alone.
Anne Waldman
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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
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The sense of the preciousness of the body - vehicle for poetry.
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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I'm concerned about the overuse of spectacular places. And there's no real wilderness left and so there's a heartbreak there. You can go anywhere and be rescued through your cell phone and have some helicopter drop down.
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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Idea that all the beats are wildly liberal and progressive is ridiculous. You have people thinking for themselves and having certain affinities because of their upbringing and who their family are, their own people who were close to them who fought in these wars and so on. It's complicated. But they had that ability to continue the conversation.
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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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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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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My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel.
Anne Waldman
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I was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism.
Anne Waldman
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I invoke that sense of the particulars of that kind of literal travel and what that has meant historically in terms of diasporas, in terms of the migrations of immigrants coming to this [U.S.] country with a real vision of finding the promised land.
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 whole red state/blue state thing is very interesting. Watching that shift over the years.
Anne Waldman