Anne Waldman Quotes

I get very upset when money is being cut and people can't visit the Grand Canyon.

My teachers were often very eccentric.

Think of the road as a kind of zone and a site of incredible diversity.

My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel.

I think anything that gets people outside [is good] - I'm a big supporter of public parks and public spaces.

I still had to correct Allen Ginsberg at times when he called women girls. I'd say. Allen please, it's not politically correct.

We can think for ourselves and we can awaken the world to a greater consciousness.

I think of the amazing things that were going on. So it's so rich. The doors keep opening.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

Any technology is just a skillful means and it's how you use it.

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?

Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration.

As a younger person you can come in through many, many gateways. It's like some huge Mandela. You can enter into this and get refreshed.

For me there is a poesis, a poetics, around the trope of the road that is embedded within many life experiences of the people I've been close to.

I was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism.

If you can integrate your life to have a kind of meditative practice that is considering others.

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

There are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them.

When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now.

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.

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

I was not ever hitchhiking alone. I've done solo train trips but I've never driven myself alone.

We need a world-wide Department of Peace.

For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future.

I think of my father born in this very small, limited situation and then coming out of that. Many people have this story.

World War II synchronizes things for a lot of people. There's a kind of wakeup call.

It's so rich as a trope - the whole idea of the road and it being in terms of language, being an active experience.

For me the road became a zone, in places like Saint Marks poetry Project where I worked for 12 years.

The whole red state/blue state thing is very interesting. Watching that shift over the years.

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.

I have students whose fathers are voting for Sarah Palin. It's wild.

I grew up in New York City in Greenwich Village and had parents who were somewhat bohemian so I was always on the nonconformist side of the equation.

My older brother was involved in the folk movement. We would gather every weekend in Washington Park. The folk songs were so important to my reality.

I like the idea of the object, the relic. And I see it as a time machine too or a device you plug into a socket that activates a sound and light show.