Quotes from Anne Waldman

Trump is the worst. I mean, he is like a shape shifter. You can't nail him down. It is like the last gasp, the last bastion of old white males, of white supremacy and hegemony.

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?

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."

We need a world-wide Department of Peace.

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.

I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I know when I go to a poetry reading, I feel purged, exulted. You let the poet guide you through some kind of journey.

I've multiplied, I'm 2. He was part of me he came out of me, he took a part of me He took me apart. I'm 2, he's my art, no, he's separate. He art one. I'm not done & I'm still one. I sing of my son. I've multiplied. My heart's in 2, half to him & half to you, who are also a part of him, & you & he & I make trio of kind congruity.

You are where you are, you don't have to judge it, although some of the old poems might be more interesting than some I might write tomorrow.

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.

Connection to Buddhism is strand in my life.

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

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

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

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.

A lot of my life has involved with helping create cultures that have as their basis this vision of the sharing, the partaking of a certain ethos together.

Certainly the beat writers I've known who carried forward the original, you know, I'd say that came together in the 1940s and 50s. So I was inheriting in a way some of that ethos.

When I attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, I was very inspired. The collaboration of many poets from these alternative traditions - though there were not enough women - who were very much more influenced by, say, Asian forms or by Mantra or by thinking politically through their work in deeper ways really stuck with me.