Diane Wakoski

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”