Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.- Diane Wakoski
Sometimes the archaism of the language when it's spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today.
So, I have never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who do not 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.
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.
Other people have noticed more of an evolution than I have and so I will try to tell you where I am coming from and also relate it to what I think other people perceive.
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.
My poems are almost all written as Diane. I do not have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that is terrific.
I am 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.
I am passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I am another one, and I am hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself.
I think that is 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 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.
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.
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I think I am a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I am 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.
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.
I do not like political poetry, and I do not 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.
