Anne Waldman Quotes

I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.

Writing dark poetry was always my escape.

You're alone with yourself and your own feelings and that gives you deeper access to what you need to get in touch with to write poetry.

The world today is anything but trouble-free.

For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.

My poems are always about my life in one way or another.

I've always used poetry to explain myself to myself. These things just sat in my psyche and then came out.

The state of things and the dispositions of men were then such, that a man could not well tell whom he might trust or whom he might fear.

We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.

It's easy to sort of put a sheen across humanity if you're making a film for people who want to escape their own problems. But sometimes a movie can, in the most cathartic ways, expose those problems.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

So what if right now everything is wrong?

I wasn't quite used to writing a diary - I didn't understand why people did it - but I wrote down notes and they went into a poem.

My view is that we're entering into a situation of enormous instability, insecurity, fragility.

Poetry is a break for freedom.

I don't look at myself on the outside. Sometimes you feel like you're not really there and need one more [take], because I feel like something is coming out. I don't really know what but I need to get it out.

Public life is constantly aware of the volcano.

Hopefully, I write what I don't know.

Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.

Americans are now in disarray

Sometimes there is no way to hold your life together. Sometimes things just have to fall apart.

The torch of doubt and chaos, this is what the sage steers by.

I feel like the world has just become a polyester suit that's smoldering, melting, and at some point we have to figure out how to extinguish it.