Literary Birthday – 2 April – Anne Waldman

Happy Birthday, Anne Waldman, born on 2 April 1945.

Anne Waldman Quotes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. We need a world-wide Department of Peace.
4. Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.
5. 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.
6. Contemporary movies just drive me crazy. The violence and the sentimentality and the spiritual materialism and Theism and the incredible indulgence in ignorance is so claustrophobic.
7. Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing – and third: the act/act of vocalising.

Anne Waldman is an American poet. She is the author of more than 40 collections of poetry and poetics. She is an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry movement, and has been connected to the Beat movement and the second generation of the New York School. Her work is energetic, passionate, panoramic, fierce at times. Her publications include Fast Speaking Woman, Marriage: A Sentence, and Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born. Waldman is a recipient of the Before Columbus Foundation for Lifetime Achievement, bestowed on her by Ishmael Reed, American Book Award’s Lifetime Achievement, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and has served six years as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Visit her website: www.annewaldman.org and follow her on Instagram.

Source for image: Greg Fuchs for Coffee House Press, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Source for quotes

by Amanda Patterson

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