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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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When I got back to NY had the opportunity to work with the beginning years of the poetry project which was founded with money from the OEO under Lyndon Johnson to work with alienated youth on the lower East side. This was extraordinary, to be able to help then to create a culture that would capture the energy that I felt at Berkley.
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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My love of poetry comes from the actualization I experienced in the poetry of others. And I was reading it silently and there is deep pleasure in that intimacy, a mind-to-mind transfer going on. All the music is there, inherently. And mystery as well.
Anne Waldman
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A lot of my father's generation were thinking about communism and had deep liberal and progressive connections. He never admitted whether he was a card-carrying communist party member but I think its possible.
Anne Waldman
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There is a pretty interesting document called 'action writing.' Which is not all about spontaneity and first thought, best thought,' but a certain kind of attention to the smallest increments of the phonemes of language, The kind of power of connection, what he is able to do with language.
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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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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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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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 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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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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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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I still had to correct Allen Ginsberg at times when he called women girls. I'd say. Allen please, it's not politically correct.
Anne Waldman
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I'd like to invoke the Native American Navajo because their word for road is used as a verb. Their whole relationship to road has to do with how you travel it, who you are traveling it with, what the environment might be, where you're headed, in what direction, the weather and so on.
Anne Waldman
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I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.
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
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How can you work on letting your thoughts go and getting synchronized into the moment and questioning your wild imagination. But I say just think of all the great Japanese and Chinese poets and scholars who were also meditators.
Anne Waldman
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The dichotomies, the brokenness of the culture around things like the Vietnam war, and then a lot of it has to do with war and where we put our energy and money and attention. And the military industrial complex, which dominates our whole economy. Even with the vision of democracy in other places we know the dark side.
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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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