From reading a previous answer, you know that I co... -Diane Wakoski

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.

Diane Wakoski Quotes to Explore

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 tradi...

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 America...

Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with refe...

PC stuff just lowers the general acceptance of good work and replaces it with bogus poetry that celebrates values that in themselves are probably quit...

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 a...

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 w...

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

Poetry Quotes to Explore

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up t...

I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now....

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry....

However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propell...

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so....

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it....

All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous be...

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry....

Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be relate...

In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same t...