Quote

I am not political as a person.

Diane Wakoski

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Diane Wakoski
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: August 3
Essayist
Poet
Printmaker
University Teacher
Writer
Whittier
California
Political
Persons
Person

More quotes by Diane Wakoski

Image
We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.
Diane Wakoski
Image
Poems come from incomplete knowledge.
Diane Wakoski
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.
Diane Wakoski
Image
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
Image
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
Image
But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.
Diane Wakoski
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.
Diane Wakoski
Image
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
Image
But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.
Diane Wakoski
Image
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
Image
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