Diane Wakoski Quotes

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

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

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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.

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But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events.

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I am not political as a person.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I came in the back door, so to speak, because my highest degree is a Bachelor's degree, but I've taught at Michigan State University since 1976.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

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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.

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