Diane Wakoski Quotes

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

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

Sour Milk

You can't make it
turn sweet
again.
Once
it was an innocent color
like the flowers of wild strawberries,
and its texture was simple
would pass through a clean cheesecloth,
its taste was fresh.
And now
with nothing more guilty that the passage of time
to chide it with,
the same substance
has turned sour and lumpy.

The sour milk
makes interesting & delicious doughs,
can be carried to a further state of bacterial action
to create new foods,
can in its own right
be considered complicated and more interesting in texture
to one who studies it closely,
like a map of the world.

But
to most of us:
it is spoiled.
Sour.
We throw it out,
down the drain-not in the backyard-
careful not to spill any
because the smell is strong.
A good cook
would be shocked
with the waste.
But we do not live in a world of good cooks.

I am the milk.
Time passes.
You cannot make it
turn sweet
again.
I sit guiltily on the refrigerator shelf
trembling with hope for a cook
who dreams of waffles,
biscuits, dumplings
and other delicious breads
fearing the modern housewife
who will lift me off the shelf and with one deft twist
of a wrist...
you know the rest.

You are the milk.
When it is your turn
remember,
there

It was hard for them to accuse their wives of infidelity when their rival was an invisible man.

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

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.

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

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

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

If you imagine, friend, that I do not have those
black serpents in the pit of my body,
that I am not crushed in fragments by the tough
butterfly wing
broken and crumpled like a black silk stocking,
if you imagine that my body is not
blackened
burned wood,
then you imagine a false woman.

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

Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

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.

I am not political as a person.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I grew up
where the family of butterflies
the Silver Cloud
is native.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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