Top Diane Wakoski Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Diane Wakoski Biography

Diane Wakoski (born August 3, 1937) is 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.

Read about Diane Wakoski in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Diane Wakoski Quotes

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

Art, Culture, Poetry, Together

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

Events, Political, Sense, Way

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

Art, Mean, Poetry, Poetry Is

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.

Poetry, Thinking, Women, Write, Writing

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.

Hoping, Literature, Long, Part, Passing On, Younger

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

Irish, Language, Literature, Love, Today

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.

Drinking, Drug, Lady, Nervous, Structures, Too Much

Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

Come, Incomplete, Incomplete Knowledge, Knowledge, Poetry

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.

Point, Pointing, Political, Think, Thinking, Writing

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.

Attitude, Race, Sex, Things, Thinking

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

Body, Celebrate, Celebrate Life, Hymns, Poets, Whitman

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

Firsts, Interesting, Make, Person, Writing

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.

Call, Come, Literature, Narrative, Personal, Voice

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.

Answers, Aspects, Literature, Myth, Poetry, Reading

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

Individuality, Like, Literature, Painting, Poet

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.

Blurbs, Convinced, Editors, Needs, Page, Pages

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.

Cultural, Landscape, Myths, Race, Sometimes, Written

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.

Finding, Revealing, Secret, Unlocking, Way

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

Break, Defining, Different, Literature, Taboos

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

Born, Involvement, Knowing Who You Are, Live, Process

1