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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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Diane Wakoski
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: August 3
Essayist
Poet
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University Teacher
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Whittier
California
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More quotes by 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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American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
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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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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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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High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.
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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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
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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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I am not political as a person.
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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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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Poems come from incomplete knowledge.
Diane Wakoski
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American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.
Diane Wakoski
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American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.
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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We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.
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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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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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