diane wakoski

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.

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Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

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Poems reveal secrets when they are analyzed. The poet's pleasure in finding ingenious ways to enclose her secrets should be matched by the reader's pleasure in unlocking and revealing these secrets.

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

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

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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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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.

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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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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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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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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 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 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.

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