Diane Wakoski Quotes

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

— Diane Wakoski

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

— Diane Wakoski

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

— Diane Wakoski

“If you imagine, friend, that I do not have those
black serpents in the pit of my body,
that I am not crushed in fragments by the tough
butterfly wing
broken and crumpled like a black silk stocking,
if you imagine that my body is not
blackened
burned wood,
then you imagine a false woman.”

— Diane Wakoski

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

— Diane Wakoski

“Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do.”

— Diane Wakoski

“I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.”

— Diane Wakoski

“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.”

— Diane Wakoski

“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.”

— Diane Wakoski

“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.”

— Diane Wakoski

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.

— Diane Wakoski

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

— Diane Wakoski

I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

— Diane Wakoski

“Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins.”

— Diane Wakoski

“I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets.”

— Diane Wakoski

“But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.”

— Diane Wakoski

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

— Diane Wakoski

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.

— Diane Wakoski

“American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.”

— Diane Wakoski

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

— Diane Wakoski

“But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.”

— Diane Wakoski

“High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.”

— Diane Wakoski

“I am not political as a person.”

— 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.”

— Diane Wakoski

“I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.”

— Diane Wakoski

I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.

— Diane Wakoski

“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.”

— Diane Wakoski

“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.”

— Diane Wakoski

“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.”

— Diane Wakoski

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.

— Diane Wakoski

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.

— Diane Wakoski

“American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.”

— Diane Wakoski

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

— Diane Wakoski

“I had been dreaming a complicated dream about helping poets revise their poems, so that each ending would open like a flower. I was not arguing, but engaged in a rousing discussion.”

— Diane Wakoski

“Innocence is suffering
and the loss of that innocence
is something to fear.”

— Diane Wakoski

We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.

— Diane Wakoski

“There are rituals not structures for being a poet, drinking too much, taking too many drugs, being a lady chaser, having your nervous breakdown, being irresponsible about money.”

— Diane Wakoski

The best young writers are convinced they need blurbs from famous writers before an editor will even read the first page of a manuscript. If this is true, then the editorial system that prevails today stinks. And let's start reforming it.

— Diane Wakoski

“Poems come from incomplete knowledge.”

— Diane Wakoski

Poems reveal secrets when they are analyzed. The poet's pleasure in finding ingenious ways to enclose her secrets should be matched by the reader's pleasure in unlocking and revealing these secrets.

— Diane Wakoski

“Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization
carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language ...”

— Diane Wakoski

“What line breaks add to prose prosody is a connection between eye
and ear which emphasizes the nature of the language by ... creating
units of intent and emphasis, and by contouring the meloding pitch
changes in the narrative-line.”

— Diane Wakoski