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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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Anne Waldman
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 2
Poet
Writer
Millville
New Jersey
Possibility
Vocal
Expression
Text
Sound
Possibilities
Wells
Page
Well
Driven
Mouthing
Pages
Bard
Dance
Intentionality
Poet
Bards

More quotes by 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.
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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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 can think for ourselves and we can awaken the world to a greater consciousness.
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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No one begs you to be a poet or write a 1000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction - a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but through you. That doesn't mean that you are unconscious or in trance, but there can be moments like that.
Anne Waldman
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My teachers were often very eccentric.
Anne Waldman
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What I'm after is that wakeful state through language that stays alive.
Anne Waldman
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Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration.
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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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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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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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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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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There's a numbness in our culture to the continuing horrors of genocide.
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'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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I like the idea of the object, the relic. And I see it as a time machine too or a device you plug into a socket that activates a sound and light show.
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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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