top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Poetry quotes
"You need a poetic touch from the outer space? Then you need the moonlight!"
"I love writing poetry because it's pretty. I love writing pretty."
"Good poetry does not exist merely for the sake of itself, but rather, is a byproduct of yearning and growth; great poetry canonizes that yearning for the growth of others."
"The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is."
"A poem can't do its work if you only read snippets of it."
"The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly."
"From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be."
"A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion."
Explore more quotes by Diane Wakoski
"But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
bottom of page