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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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Anne Waldman
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 2
Poet
Writer
Millville
New Jersey
Maybe
Revolutionary
Read
Poet
Monoculture
Book
Watches
Life
Watch
Fossil
Goes
Fossils
Television
Propose
Least
Grain
Days
Fuel
More quotes by Anne Waldman
There are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them.
Anne Waldman
Idea that all the beats are wildly liberal and progressive is ridiculous. You have people thinking for themselves and having certain affinities because of their upbringing and who their family are, their own people who were close to them who fought in these wars and so on. It's complicated. But they had that ability to continue the conversation.
Anne Waldman
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
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
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
There's a kind of training, when you are sitting in a session in the Japanese tradition or any of the Buddhist traditions, taking your lotus posture or whatever it is. That's what you're doing.
Anne Waldman
Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.
Anne Waldman
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
I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.
Anne Waldman
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
I have students whose fathers are voting for Sarah Palin. It's wild.
Anne Waldman
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
For me the road became a zone, in places like Saint Marks poetry Project where I worked for 12 years.
Anne Waldman
My teachers were often very eccentric.
Anne Waldman
The whole red state/blue state thing is very interesting. Watching that shift over the years.
Anne Waldman
Connection to Buddhism is strand in my life.
Anne Waldman
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
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
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
The color red is symbolic of passion and action, so this Vajrayogini, as she's called, comes with a mantra and she comes with these various weapons and accouterments that are all symbolic of the kind of activity that this principle, as it were, this psychological principle, does or activates in the world. And there's text and mantra as well.
Anne Waldman
