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 WaldmanCertainly 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.
Anne WaldmanI'd like to invoke the Native American Navajo because their word for road is used as a verb. Their whole relationship to road has to do with how you travel it, who you are traveling it with, what the environment might be, where you're headed, in what direction, the weather and so on.
Anne WaldmanMy 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.
Anne WaldmanI 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.
Anne Waldman