Anne Waldman famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions. I'm the girl with the unquenchable thirst.
-- Anne Waldman

#Girl #Tradition #Thirst
We can think for ourselves and we can awaken the world to a greater consciousness.
-- Anne Waldman

#Thinking #World #Consciousness
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

#Thinking #Mind #Narrative
I took my vow to poetry; this is where I'm going to be. These are my people; this is my tribe. This is where I'm going to put my energy.
-- Anne Waldman

#People #Energy #Tribes
Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.
-- Anne Waldman

#Writing #Darkness #Way
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

#Compassion #Practice #Circles
We need a world-wide Department of Peace.
-- Anne Waldman

#Needs #World #Department
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

#Speech #Good Times #Stranger
I'm drawn to the magical efficacies of language as a political act.
-- Anne Waldman

#Political #Language #Efficacy
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

#Dog #Art #Growing Up
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

#What Matters #Mirrors #Our World
When students are first at the Kerouac School we harp on Gertrude Stein's very basic poetic insistence that words are things . Not to invalidate your experience or all the great feelings you have, I tell them. Although poetry may be good for you, it's not therapy. You're making something with words which are visceral, muscular, active, not just markers of how you feel. And we have classes studying William Blake, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Stein.
-- Anne Waldman

#School #Class #Feelings
Any technology is just a skillful means and it's how you use it.
-- Anne Waldman

#Mean #Technology #Use
Refined, intense, wise, stiring, immediate, subtile, all the charmed qualities gather in Dropping the Bow. These translations are precious jewels. Like the erotic moods they investigate, these versions shimmer and startle with a palpable desire to be heard, and a mystical sense of impermanence. This is a transmission of a vital, extraordinary tradition.
-- Anne Waldman

#Wise #Jewels #Erotic
I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.
-- Anne Waldman

#Self #Ambassadors
For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future.
-- Anne Waldman

#Done #Wells #Vibrate
The sense of the preciousness of the body - vehicle for poetry.
-- Anne Waldman

#Body #Vehicle
We had much more imagery from Vietnam war. The media was not controlled. The storyline, the master narrative was not controlled. I thin it was some those images really radicalized people and shifted things to some extent. And the Viet Cong also, their tenacity.
-- Anne Waldman

#War #Media #People
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

#Mean #Pride #Creative
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

#Spiritual #Crazy #Ignorance
As a woman I have felt encouraged and fed by and nurtured by the work of [Jack] Kerouac and others.
-- Anne Waldman

#Feds #Felt
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

#Reading #Mind #Mystery
There's that older poem of John Ashbery's-"America"-with the pun "I'm a wrecker," so wreckage and building out of the ashes of that. We're haunted by the genocide that is America, the decimation of so many native cultures. As a mix-blood European ancestry American, you're a nexus of all those violences, and yet there's a relative personal identity as well.
-- Anne Waldman

#Blood #America #Identity
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

#Book #Watches #Television
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

#Expression #Sound #Pages

You may also like: