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.
Anne WaldmanObviously, 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.
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 WaldmanThere'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