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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

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Diane Wakoski
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: August 3
Essayist
Poet
Printmaker
University Teacher
Writer
Whittier
California
Literature
Tell
Also
Trying
Noticed
Think
Perceive
Thinking
Relate
People
Evolution
Coming

More quotes by Diane Wakoski

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Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.
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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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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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
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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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American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.
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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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
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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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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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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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Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.
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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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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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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We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.
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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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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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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Poems come from incomplete knowledge.
Diane Wakoski