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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
Humans
Questioned
Thing
Darker
Good
Trusting
Things
Stranger
Time
Speech
Poetry
Sense
Human

More quotes by 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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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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How infuriating it is to be continually born to war that continues one's whole lifetime, even as one protests it - what futility. It is perhaps a more public epic in this regard, and carries a ritual vocalization.
Anne Waldman
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I don't demonize the downside. As we've seen in Egypt and Tahrir square and other recent event, the adhesiveness through [technology] kinds of communication is extraordinary. Interesting times we live in.
Anne Waldman
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The whole red state/blue state thing is very interesting. Watching that shift over the years.
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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You really felt a radical shift in the advance of a poetics that had really been engendered by [Walt] Whitman. This was very exciting. I wanted to work in this environment.
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 can think for ourselves and we can awaken the world to a greater consciousness.
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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We had much more imagery from Vietnam war. The media was not controlled. The storyline, the master narrative was not controlled. I thin it was some those images really radicalized people and shifted things to some extent. And the Viet Cong also, their tenacity.
Anne Waldman
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Think of the road as a kind of zone and a site of incredible diversity.
Anne Waldman
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My teachers were often very eccentric.
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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I was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism.
Anne Waldman
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I think of the amazing things that were going on. So it's so rich. The doors keep opening.
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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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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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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I think of my father born in this very small, limited situation and then coming out of that. Many people have this story.
Anne Waldman