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.
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.
language resilient stills
Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.
acceptance stuff good-work
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.
book numbers long
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.
incomplete-knowledge poetry incomplete
Poems come from incomplete knowledge.
essence civilization tribes
... poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization -- carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language ...
substance source concerned
We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.
editors pages today
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.
drinking drug too-much
There are rituals not structures for being a poet, drinking too much, taking too many drugs, being a lady chaser, having your nervous breakdown, being irresponsible about money.
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.
loss suffering innocence
Innocence is suffering and the loss of that innocence is something to fear.
art together culture
High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.