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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.

Anne Waldman

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Anne Waldman
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 2
Poet
Writer
Millville
New Jersey
Human
Humans
Questioned
Thing
Darker
Good
Trusting
Things
Stranger
Time
Speech
Poetry
Sense

More quotes by Anne Waldman

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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.
Anne Waldman
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I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.
Anne Waldman
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I have students whose fathers are voting for Sarah Palin. It's wild.
Anne Waldman
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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.
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.
Anne Waldman
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I get very upset when money is being cut and people can't visit the Grand Canyon.
Anne Waldman
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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.
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 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.
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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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.
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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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 think anything that gets people outside [is good] - I'm a big supporter of public parks and public spaces.
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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[Jack] Kerouac looking at the fellaheen worlds. Looking at other cultures. Welcoming it, curious. Really stepping outside his own limited, whatever that narrow world was. It's amazing to think we can do it. We can have that same kind of trajectory of mind.
Anne Waldman
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I think for me in terms of this kind of dichotomy you have to hold the sense of negative capability in your mind - which is Keats line about being able to hold two different ideas 'without any irritable reach after fact or reason.'
Anne Waldman
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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
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For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future.
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