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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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Diane Wakoski
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: August 3
Essayist
Poet
Printmaker
University Teacher
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Whittier
California
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Poems
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More quotes by Diane Wakoski
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
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
American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
Diane Wakoski
I am not political as a person.
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
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
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
Poems come from incomplete knowledge.
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
But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.
Diane Wakoski
Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.
Diane Wakoski
American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.
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
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
But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.
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
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
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 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
