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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

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Diane Wakoski
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: August 3
Essayist
Poet
Printmaker
University Teacher
Writer
Whittier
California
Think
American
Active
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Towards
Like
Comes
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Write
Writers
Political
Missing
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Poetry
Apolitical
Even
Question
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More quotes by Diane Wakoski

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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
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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
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Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.
Diane Wakoski
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Poems come from incomplete knowledge.
Diane Wakoski
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.
Diane Wakoski
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American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.
Diane Wakoski
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.
Diane Wakoski
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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
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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
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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