An Interview with Diane Wakoski

Abstract

Recently, Diane Wakoski reiterated an idea she admits she has been touting for a few years now-that a woman writing today, whether novelist or poet, should speak as an artist rather than as a woman. She emphasized that poetry is a human art and claims that her overriding concern is not merely the subject of the woman writer but the larger issue of being an intellectual and a poet in a world where this effort is not uniformly encouraged or accepted. Sympathetic to, yet repelled by, the self-destructive acts of other modern poets like Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Hart Crane, and Anne Sexton, Wakoski insists that, despite the unequivocal and perceptible ugliness of the world, there is something beautiful in being alive. Perhaps Wakoski is in tune with the music of elementary awareness that M. L. Rosenthal describes in Poetry and the Common Life, for she maintains that her poetry parallels life. Her search for beauty has become increasingly important to her, and as a poet and lately a critic, she is concerned with the creative processes in art. Along with Wallace Stevens, whom she admires and to an extent tries to imitate, her aesthetic considerations are manifested in her search for beauty. For her, beauty is revealed as it is filtered through the mind and body, but she is of the opinion that the world of poetry eventually resides in the internal world of the emotions. Such are her persuasions. Reared in the creative writing workshop at Berkeley, Diane Wakoski developed during the San Francisco poetry renaissance and