Success Quote by Laurie Anderson

The joke lands because it admits two desires at once: the desire to make something impossibly large, and the desire to be forgiven for wanting it. When Laurie Anderson calls her “secret dream” an epic poem, she’s reaching back toward the highest shelf of cultural ambition - Homer, Dante, the whole “civilization in verse” tradition. Then she punctures it with a self-aware wince: “That’s probably the most pretentious thing I’ve said.” It’s a disarming move from an artist whose career has thrived on mixing loftiness with deadpan practicality, conceptual art with the intimacy of a voice in your ear.

The subtext is that “pretentious” is a social deterrent, a word used to police scale and seriousness, especially in contemporary art where irony is often safer than sincerity. Anderson acknowledges the charge before anyone else can level it, which functions like a shield and an invitation. She’s signaling she knows the rules of cool, and she’s also quietly refusing to let them set her ceiling.

Context matters: Anderson built her reputation turning spoken word into pop-adjacent performance, smuggling big questions about power, technology, and grief into loops, violins, and stories. In that light, the “epic poem” isn’t a genre pivot so much as an honest description of what she’s been doing all along: assembling a long-form, lyric record of American life, with the authority of myth and the messiness of everyday speech. The line’s intent isn’t to apologize for ambition; it’s to make ambition sayable again.