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I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.

Anne Waldman

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Anne Waldman
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: April 2
Poet
Writer
Millville
New Jersey
Self
Ambassador
Ambassadors
Appointed
Poetry

More quotes by 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.
Anne Waldman
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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.
Anne Waldman
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I was not ever hitchhiking alone. I've done solo train trips but I've never driven myself alone.
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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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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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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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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Contemporary movies just drive me crazy. The violence and the sentimentality and the spiritual materialism and Theism and the incredible indulgence in ignorance is so claustrophobic.
Anne Waldman
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The beat literary movement is strong because of those very challenging and individual relationships and styles and contention and so on. So I just feel blessed by this kind of opportunity that came from it. It was a kind of seed.
Anne Waldman
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Growing up in the fifties, having to wear a dog tag, having to take shelter in a bomb shelter. That turned me toward the road, I did not want to live in fear of that, I was gong to work somehow against what that vision was, and what that horror was. It was poetry, art, music.
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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[Jack] Kerouac looking at the fellaheen worlds. Looking at other cultures. Welcoming it, curious. Really stepping outside his own limited, whatever that narrow world was. It's amazing to think we can do it. We can have that same kind of trajectory of mind.
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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Literal thousands of Americans taking to the road and getting into that green automobile and just going. At the same time there is real incredible work [of art] that comes out of it. Never forget that.
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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I have students whose fathers are voting for Sarah Palin. It's wild.
Anne Waldman
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My teachers were often very eccentric.
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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Personally there is first: imagination second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.
Anne Waldman
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The sense of the preciousness of the body - vehicle for poetry.
Anne Waldman