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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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Diane Wakoski
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: August 3
Essayist
Poet
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University Teacher
Writer
Whittier
California
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More quotes by 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'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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Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.
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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I am not political as a person.
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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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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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 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 poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.
Diane Wakoski
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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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Poems come from incomplete knowledge.
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 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
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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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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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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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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 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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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