Quotes from Diane Wakoski

From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

Learning to live what you're born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life.

It was hard for them to accuse their wives of infidelity when their rival was an invisible man.

Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.

Learning to live what you're born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life.

Forgive me then, if the poems I write are about the fragments, the broken bridges, and unlit fences in my life. For the poet, the poem is not the measure of his love. It is the measure of all he's lost, or never seen, or what has no life, unless he gives it life with words. from "With Words

Women, myself, we need to love a beast, to feel that it could transcend itself for love, for us, for beauty.

I grew up where the family of butterflies the Silver Cloud is native.

Learning to live what you're born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life.

So, I've never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don't want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet.

American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

I write in the first person because I have always wanted to make my life more interesting than it was.

One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.

From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

Other people have noticed more of an evolution than I have and so I'll try to tell you where I'm coming from and also relate it to what I think other people perceive.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

I don't like political poetry, and I don't write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.

I think one of the things that language poets are very involved with is getting away from conventional ideas of beauty, because those ideas contain a certain attitude toward women, certain attitudes toward sex, certain attitudes toward race, etc.

I do not read newspapers. I do not watch television. I am not interested in current events, although I will occasionally discuss them if other people want to discuss them.

Sometimes the archaism of the language when it's spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today.

I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

My poems are almost all written as Diane. I don't have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that's terrific.

PC stuff just lowers the general acceptance of good work and replaces it with bogus poetry that celebrates values that in themselves are probably quite worthy.