Diane Wakoski Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Diane Wakoski

  Art, Mean, Poetry Is

  45 Copy quote

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

  Diane Wakoski

  Knowing Who You Are, Born, Process

  Diane Wakoski (1988). “Emerald Ice: Selected Poems, 1962-1987”, p.136, David R. Godine Publisher

  15 Copy quote

• Innocence is suffering
  and the loss of that innocence
  is something to fear.

  Diane Wakoski

  Loss, Suffering, Innocence

  Diane Wakoski (1988). “Emerald Ice: Selected Poems, 1962-1987”, p.102, David R. Godine Publisher

  4 Copy quote

• Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

  Diane Wakoski

  Incomplete Knowledge, Poetry, Incomplete

  Diane Wakoski (1988). “Emerald Ice: Selected Poems, 1962-1987”, p.132, David R. Godine Publisher

  4 Copy quote

• We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.

  Diane Wakoski

  Substance, Source, Concerned

  Diane Wakoski (1973). “Smudging”

  4 Copy quote

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

  Diane Wakoski

  Essence, Civilization, Essentials

  4 Copy quote

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

  Diane Wakoski

  Language, Resilient, Stills

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Diane Wakoski

  Sex, Attitude, Thinking

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Diane Wakoski

  Thinking, People, Together

  4 Copy quote

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

  Diane Wakoski

  Writing, Interesting, Firsts

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

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Diane Wakoski

  War, People, Black

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Diane Wakoski

  Secret, Unlocking, Way

  7 Copy quote

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

  Diane Wakoski

  Art, Together, Culture

  16 Copy quote

• 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.

  Diane Wakoski

  Writing, Thinking, Political

  52 Copy quote

• 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.

  Diane Wakoski

  Eye, Creating, Add

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Diane Wakoski

  Thinking, Years, Interesting

  4 Copy quote

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

  Diane Wakoski

  Different, Literature, Defining

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Diane Wakoski

  Voice, Literature, Narrative

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Drinking, Drug, Too Much

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Editors, Needs, Pages

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Diane Wakoski

  Book, Numbers, Long

  24 Copy quote

• 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.

  Diane Wakoski

  Acceptance, Stuff, Good Work

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Diane Wakoski

  Thinking, People, Trying

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Diane Wakoski

  People, Events, Watches

  18 Copy quote

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

  Diane Wakoski

  Literature, Today, Language

  4 Copy quote

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