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What I'm after is that wakeful state through language that stays alive.

Anne Waldman

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Anne Waldman
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 2
Poet
Writer
Millville
New Jersey
Wakeful
Stays
Alive
State
Language
States

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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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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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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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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We still have our larynx, we still have our minds and we still have our consciousness. We still have this gift to make things with words and images and get outside these preordained tropes and ways of thinking and the master narratives - what's handed to us.
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
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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.
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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For me the road became a zone, in places like Saint Marks poetry Project where I worked for 12 years.
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'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 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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Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration.
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 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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Connection to Buddhism is strand in my life.
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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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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I have students whose fathers are voting for Sarah Palin. It's wild.
Anne Waldman