Anne Waldman
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.Collection: People
I was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism.Collection: Egalitarianism
Think of the road as a kind of zone and a site of incredible diversity.Collection: Thinking
The dichotomies, the brokenness of the culture around things like the Vietnam war, and then a lot of it has to do with war and where we put our energy and money and attention. And the military industrial complex, which dominates our whole economy. Even with the vision of democracy in other places we know the dark side.Collection: War
I did go to Vietnam in 2000 as a kind of pilgrimage and to feel my generation was very much a part of this. I felt responsible but also connected and empathetic. It was a very complicated relationship we had, whichever side you were on. The shock of being there was very few people my own age - I was primarily in the North in the streets of Hanoi. A whole generation was essentially decimated.Collection: People
I don't demonize the downside. As we've seen in Egypt and Tahrir square and other recent event, the adhesiveness through [technology] kinds of communication is extraordinary. Interesting times we live in.Collection: Communication
How can you work on letting your thoughts go and getting synchronized into the moment and questioning your wild imagination. But I say just think of all the great Japanese and Chinese poets and scholars who were also meditators.Collection: Thinking
There's a kind of training, when you are sitting in a session in the Japanese tradition or any of the Buddhist traditions, taking your lotus posture or whatever it is. That's what you're doing.Collection: Buddhist
I'm concerned about the overuse of spectacular places. And there's no real wilderness left and so there's a heartbreak there. You can go anywhere and be rescued through your cell phone and have some helicopter drop down.Collection: Real
If you can integrate your life to have a kind of meditative practice that is considering others.Collection: Practice
I get very upset when money is being cut and people can't visit the Grand Canyon.Collection: Cutting
I think anything that gets people outside [is good] - I'm a big supporter of public parks and public spaces.Collection: Thinking
I remember being caught in this earthquake in Mexico City and having a sense of people coming before me, of being part of this lineage. I felt similarly when I went to India and South America.Collection: Earthquakes
[Jack] Kerouac looking at the fellaheen worlds. Looking at other cultures. Welcoming it, curious. Really stepping outside his own limited, whatever that narrow world was. It's amazing to think we can do it. We can have that same kind of trajectory of mind.Collection: Thinking
Connection to Buddhism is strand in my life.Collection: Buddhism
It was really hard coming to terms with the Nazi history. Then in my twenties I was traveling to Germany. There was a lot of poetry activity and some of my first readings abroad and trying to relate with people my own age there and what they were discovering and learning had to examine in terms of their backgrounds. Then so many of my friends had family who had either perished in the holocaust or survived in the holocaust. It was very palpable.Collection: Reading
My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel.Collection: Father
I think of my father growing up in South Jersey, the son of second-generation German immigrant glassblowers. The opportunities for him of feeling that aspiration, that yearning, get out of the small town, connect to a larger world, get yourself to New York, wanting to play the piano at every opportunity, bonding with people who were on a similar path, ending up in Provincetown, which was kind of nexus for nonconformity, and artistic dropout reality.Collection: New York
I still had to correct Allen Ginsberg at times when he called women girls. I'd say. Allen please, it's not politically correct.Collection: Girl
My last bedside conversation in the hospital just a few weeks before Allen Ginsberg died was 'please take care of so and so. And the legacy of the Kerouac school.Collection: School
Idea that all the beats are wildly liberal and progressive is ridiculous. You have people thinking for themselves and having certain affinities because of their upbringing and who their family are, their own people who were close to them who fought in these wars and so on. It's complicated. But they had that ability to continue the conversation.Collection: War
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.Collection: Gateways
I think Visions of Cody is the most radical book in terms of poetic stretch and the way Jack Kerouac is able to incorporate documentation and incorporate the live tape recording of Neal and so on.Collection: Book
I think the idea of the lone tormented artist - which we can apply to others - I think that it needs to be revisited. Jack Kerouac needs to be seen in the context of a lot of other artistic activity.Collection: Artist
When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now.Collection: Looks
The sense of traveling this continent, also other continents. The friendship.I would say a non-competitive friendship. That is so amazing to me.Collection: Continents
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Dream
There are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them. And it can be grand and vast and you can create a realm where you can dwell for a while. Where things are perfect symbols of themselves, no manipulation. And that connects to me to the Buddhist view. From that perspective we can wake up on the spot, be conscious of our world, think of others.Collection: Buddhist
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.”Collection: Waiting
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.Collection: War
There's a numbness in our culture to the continuing horrors of genocide.Collection: Numbness
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Roles
There are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them.Collection: Phones
Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration.Collection: Struggle
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.Collection: Light
What I'm after is that wakeful state through language that stays alive.Collection: Alive
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.Collection: Ethos
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Expression
My father shared the ethos of many of the beat writers and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. Probably for 25 years of my father's life, He had been an itinerant piano player and so traveled the road with bands and that sort of thing.Collection: Father
Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Spiritual
How infuriating it is to be continually born to war that continues one's whole lifetime, even as one protests it - what futility. It is perhaps a more public epic in this regard, and carries a ritual vocalization.Collection: War
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.Collection: Ethos