Diane Wakoski Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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

I had been dreaming a complicated dream about helping poets revise their poems, so that each ending would open like a flower. I was not arguing, but engaged in a rousing discussion.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.