Diane Wakoski Quotes

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All quotes by Diane Wakoski: Language Literature Myth Writing more...
  • 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.

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

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

  • I write in the first person because I have always wanted to make my life more interesting than it was.

    Diane Wakoski (1974). “Trilogy: Coins & Coffins: Discrepancies and Apparitions; The George Washington Poems”
  • 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.

  • American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.

  • From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

    Diane Wakoski (1988). “Emerald Ice: Selected Poems, 1962-1987”, p.162, David R. Godine Publisher
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

    Diane Wakoski (1988). “Emerald Ice: Selected Poems, 1962-1987”, p.132, David R. Godine Publisher
  • We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.

    Diane Wakoski (1973). “Smudging”
  • But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.

  • 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 (1980). “Toward a new poetry”, Univ of Michigan Pr
  • 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.

  • Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.

  • 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.

  • Learning to live what you're born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life.

    Diane Wakoski (1988). “Emerald Ice: Selected Poems, 1962-1987”, p.136, David R. Godine Publisher
  • But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

  • 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.

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

  • American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 39 quotes from the Poet Diane Wakoski, starting from August 3, 1937! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Diane Wakoski quotes about: Language Literature Myth Writing