Anne Waldman: We still have our larynx, we still have our minds and we...

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

Anne Waldman

thirst tradition girl

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

feelings class school

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

Anne Waldman

consciousness world thinking

I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.

Anne Waldman

ambassadors self

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.

Anne Waldman

tribes energy people

Your compassion travels beyond your own inner circle. And then you breathe out an alternative version where you mentally and emotionally and psychologically purify the poisons. So indeed, the generative idea is in the crux of this practice and of my propensity toward poetry, which is a practice of the imagination.

Anne Waldman

circles compassion practice

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."

Anne Waldman

our-world what-matters mirrors

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

lonely dream moving

Refined, intense, wise, stiring, immediate, subtile, all the charmed qualities gather in Dropping the Bow. These translations are precious jewels. Like the erotic moods they investigate, these versions shimmer and startle with a palpable desire to be heard, and a mystical sense of impermanence. This is a transmission of a vital, extraordinary tradition.

Anne Waldman

erotic jewels wise

We pride ourselves at Natrona - I mean, pride {ironically] - on developing a noncompetitive community. That's very important. The values that can come from that kind of meditative work combined with the creative work you do, combined with your activism, can come together.

Anne Waldman

creative pride mean

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

Anne Waldman

efficacy political language

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

identity blood america

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

Anne Waldman

feds felt

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

Anne Waldman

technology use mean

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

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

good-times speech stranger

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

Anne Waldman

darkness writing way

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

Anne Waldman

imagination writing firsts

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

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

We still have our larynx, we still have our minds and we still have our consciousness. We still have this gift to make things with words and images and get outside these preordained tropes and ways of thinking and the master narratives - what's handed to us.