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

Anne Waldman

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Anne Waldman
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 2
Poet
Writer
Millville
New Jersey
Well
Writing
Poets
Way
Pushing
Poet
Darkness
Write
Keep
Wells

More quotes by Anne Waldman

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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.
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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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
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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.
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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The beat literary movement is strong because of those very challenging and individual relationships and styles and contention and so on. So I just feel blessed by this kind of opportunity that came from it. It was a kind of seed.
Anne Waldman
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My teachers were often very eccentric.
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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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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Obviously, if I'm reading in Vienna or Venezuela or Italy, there's the issue of language, and I will make choices that are more sound oriented. Or I'll try to incorporate those languages and occasions somehow.
Anne Waldman
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I'm curious about other universes, and nonhuman elementals. For me it's still a very lively ethos. It's a kind of practice. It's an ethos that is very sustaining.
Anne Waldman
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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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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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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 need a world-wide Department of Peace.
Anne Waldman
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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
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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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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.
Anne Waldman
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As a woman I have felt encouraged and fed by and nurtured by the work of [Jack] Kerouac and others.
Anne Waldman