Quote

The music is notated first, the text follows. I might have to wait until the right kind of text or form arises. I often see the poems as “scores.”

Anne Waldman

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Anne Waldman
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 2
Poet
Writer
Millville
New Jersey
Kind
Waiting
Scores
Often
Arises
Form
Text
Music
Follows
Might
Poems
Firsts
Score
First
Arise
Right
Wait

More quotes by 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.
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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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We can think for ourselves and we can awaken the world to a greater consciousness.
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My teachers were often very eccentric.
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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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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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We need a world-wide Department of Peace.
Anne Waldman
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For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future.
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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.
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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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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.
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Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration.
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There's a numbness in our culture to the continuing horrors of genocide.
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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If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions. I'm the girl with the unquenchable thirst.
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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.
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I think the idea of the lone tormented artist - which we can apply to others - I think that it needs to be revisited. Jack Kerouac needs to be seen in the context of a lot of other artistic activity.
Anne Waldman
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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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It's so rich as a trope - the whole idea of the road and it being in terms of language, being an active experience.
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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