Latest Anne Waldman Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.

  Anne Waldman

  Self, Ambassadors

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• In a way, America's the shadow of everything I do, everywhere I go, everything I carry, no matter if I travel to the ends of the earth. And I live frequently on the spine of the continent, near the Great Divide. Then there's the side of it being the real energy center for a truly post-postmodernist poetry mind, which is also archaic, because we can still be close to the land.

  Anne Waldman

  Real, Land, America

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• One has to be cautious and respectful of the power of the "substance" guides. I don't advocate imbibing the "little saint children," as Maria Sabina calls the magic mushrooms, or anything else for everyone. I find that certain substances reconnect me to a primal context of purpose that goes beyond identity and ownership. The writing-when I've worked it this way-is the kind of information you take back from dreams. Or it's hypnotic writing rather than getting off on some sort of pleasure trip or intellectual trip.

  Anne Waldman

  Dream, Children, Writing

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• America's the great conundrum and the great dream and the great fascination: the new land, the new world, the new temple, the new city, and the great mess. The most handguns, bombs, weaponry, violence, the cop of the world etcetera. All the contradictions. Mediocrity versus something like indigenous jazz, one of the most evolved sophisticated musical forms on the planet.

  Anne Waldman

  Dream, Land, Cities

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• The sense of the preciousness of the body - vehicle for poetry.

  Anne Waldman

  Body, Vehicle

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• I hope I'm not implying role of contemporary poet for myself, although there's a kind of resonant paradigm. It's traditionally a difficult role.

  Anne Waldman

  Roles, Kind, Poet

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• Spiritual models for me are the communities of Tibetans living in exile in India, or the banjars of Bali, which exist in times of difficulty, oppression. Alternative spaces-perhaps this kind of communication can take place over the Net? Probably only up to a point as the Net's controlled by the military. But the idea is to live outside multi-national, monocultural, commodification prison, outside the grey areas of power-mad, monied collusion.

  Anne Waldman

  Spiritual, Military, Communication

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• Various random experiments, cut-ups, fold-ins, juxtapositions, timed writings of other kinds, the "objects assignment" which involves dream, adventure, ancestry. Writing outside, writing on moving vehicles. Looking at paintings in the grand museums of the world in a proscribed way.Little strategies to keep the lalita - play or dance - going. Sometimes it's lonely you know, just you and your own imagination.

  Anne Waldman

  Dream, Lonely, Moving

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Ego, Shapes, Stuff

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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

  Anne Waldman

  Alive, Language, States

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• To conjure a particular knowledge you visualize an architectural structure and then you walk around and see the details that then bring back the words or the poetry or the lines of thought. Memory's going extinct because we rely on machines and copies and so on. The idea of working with structures that conjure dreams, personages, history, time, that can be contained in this way as you walk through your mind, is a challenge.

  Anne Waldman

  Dream, Memories, Ideas

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Passion, Color, Principles

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• There's a numbness in our culture to the continuing horrors of genocide.

  Anne Waldman

  Numbness, Culture, Horror

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• The puzzle and conundrums of Emily Dickinson's poetry or The Cantos, by Ezra Pound, is infinitely pleasurable. Or Ronald Johnson's Ark. And the experience extends a whole lifetime. But the intensity of certain vocalized language affects our bodies in a particular way, and that further actualization propels me. The Greeks explored this; there were very particular meters used in making war, different ones for a love chant.

  Anne Waldman

  War, Greek, Ark

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• Obviously, if I'm reading in Vienna or Venezuela or Italy, there's the issue of language, and I will make choices that are more sound oriented. Or I'll try to incorporate those languages and occasions somehow.

  Anne Waldman

  Reading, Issues, Choices

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Waiting, Might, Firsts

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• I'm drawn to the magical efficacies of language as a political act.

  Anne Waldman

  Political, Language, Efficacy

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• 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

  "New York's East Village Ushers In New Year With Feast Of Language". Interview with Tom Vitale, kccu.org. January 2, 2017.

• Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.

  Anne Waldman

  Writing, Darkness, Way

  "Push, Push Against the Darkness: An Interview with Anne Waldman on The Iovis Trilogy". Interview with Jim Cohn, www.raintaxi.com. 2012.

• We need a world-wide Department of Peace.

  Anne Waldman

  Needs, World, Department

  "Push, Push Against The Darkness: An Interview With Anne Waldman On The Iovis Trilogy". Interview with Jim Cohn, www.raintaxi.com. 2012.