Diane Wakoski
Diane Wakoski
Diane Wakoskiis an American poet. Wakoski is primarily associated with the deep image poets, as well as the confessional and Beat poets of the 1960s. She received considerable attention in the 1980s for controversial comments linking New Formalism with Reaganism...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth3 August 1937
CountryUnited States of America
thinking people trying
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.
thinking years interesting
I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.
thinking people together
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.
writing thinking political
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.
thinking current-events use
But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.
reading thinking people
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.
women writing thinking
I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.
women thinking problem
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.
sex attitude thinking
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.
agreed professor university
But, after all, what I feel that I'm teaching, which is why I've agreed to be a university professor all these years, is a tradition.
art possibilities redefining
So, I think that what we're always doing is redefining the possibilities of beauty, but, don't get me wrong, I think that all of art is about beauty.
passing-on long lines
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.
today language sometimes
Sometimes the archaism of the language when it's spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today.
language resilient stills
Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.