Diane Wakoski Quotes

• Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.

  Diane Wakoski

  Topics in Art

  Tags in Poetry

• Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

  Diane Wakoski

• Sometimes the archaism of the language when it’s spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today.

  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

• PC stuff just lowers the general acceptance of good work and replaces it with bogus poetry that celebrates values that in themselves are probably quite worthy.

  Diane Wakoski

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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.

  Diane Wakoski

• 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

• 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 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.

  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

• 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

• 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 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

• 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

• I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

  Diane Wakoski

• I am not political as a person.

  Diane Wakoski

• High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.

  Diane Wakoski

Diane Wakoski (27)

Birth:	3rd August, 1937
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Poet

About

Diane Wakoski was born in Whittier, California. She is an American poet. She is primarily associated with the deep image poets, as well as the confessional and Beat poets of the 1960s. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley and graduated in 1960 with a Bachelor of Arts. Her selected poems, Emerald Ice, won the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America in 1989. She is best known for a series of poems collectively known as "The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems."

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Today's Anniversary - 5th January

Births

• 1923 - Samuel Cornelius Phillips
• 1909 - Stephen Cole Kleene
• 1932 - Raisa Gorbachova
• 1979 - Zebulon Pike
• 1835 - Olympia Brown

Deaths

• 1988 - Pete Maravich
• 1970 - Max Born
• 2003 - Roy Jenkins
• 1994 - Thomas P. O'Neill
• 2010 - Kenneth Noland