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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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Diane Wakoski
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: August 3
Essayist
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University Teacher
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Whittier
California
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Diane
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More quotes by 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
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 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
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
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
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
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
American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
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
Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.
Diane Wakoski
High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.
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
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
I am not political as a person.
Diane Wakoski
Poems come from incomplete knowledge.
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
We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.
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
