Anne Waldman

I want the poem to be an experience - for both the listener and for myself.

— Anne Waldman

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

— Anne Waldman

We will have a total chaos without books, literature, and library.

— Anne Waldman

My teachers were often very eccentric.

— Anne Waldman

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

— Anne Waldman

I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.

— Anne Waldman

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

— Anne Waldman

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

— Anne Waldman

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

— Anne Waldman

As a woman I have felt encouraged and fed by and nurtured by the work of [Jack] Kerouac and others.

— Anne Waldman

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

— Anne Waldman

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

— Anne Waldman

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

— Anne Waldman

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

— Anne Waldman

We humans need to do better with our vast minds and alchemical powers. Future radial poetries might be more symbiotic with the…

— Anne Waldman

My mother started taking us to church when I was in seventh or eight grade. That was always a question, Do you…

— 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…

— Anne Waldman

This will be a good time for poetry, you know, when things get darker and stranger and your very speech is being…

— Anne Waldman

The beat literary movement is strong because of those very challenging and individual relationships and styles and contention and so on. So…

— Anne Waldman

I think the idea of the lone tormented artist - which we can apply to others - I think that it needs…

— Anne Waldman

My love of poetry comes from the "actualization" I experienced in the poetry of others. And I was reading it silently and…

— Anne Waldman

There is a pretty interesting document called 'action writing.' Which is not all about spontaneity and first thought, best thought,' but a…

— Anne Waldman

Allen's [Gisberg] loyalty to his friends was extraordinary. And as he was dying he was calling people: "What can I do for…

— Anne Waldman

My father shared the ethos of many of the beat writers and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. Probably for 25 years…

— Anne Waldman

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.…

— Anne Waldman

To conjure a particular knowledge you visualize an architectural structure and then you walk around and see the details that then bring…

— Anne Waldman

In a way, America's the shadow of everything I do, everywhere I go, everything I carry, no matter if I travel to…

— Anne Waldman

When I attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, I was very inspired. The collaboration of many poets from these alternative traditions…

— Anne Waldman

The dichotomies, the brokenness of the culture around things like the Vietnam war, and then a lot of it has to do…

— Anne Waldman

It was a little harder when I first went to Egypt when I was 18 years old and being a white woman…

— Anne Waldman

When students are first at the Kerouac School we harp on Gertrude Stein's very basic poetic insistence that words are things .…

— Anne Waldman

The puzzle and conundrums of Emily Dickinson's poetry or The Cantos, by Ezra Pound, is infinitely pleasurable. Or Ronald Johnson's Ark. And…

— Anne Waldman

We need a world-wide Department of Peace.

— Anne Waldman

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

— Anne Waldman

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

— Anne Waldman

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

— Anne Waldman

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

— Anne Waldman

Connection to Buddhism is strand in my life.

— Anne Waldman

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

— Anne Waldman

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

— Anne Waldman