Literary Birthday – 3 August – Diane Wakoski

Happy Birthday, Diane Wakoski, born on 3 August 1937.

Diane Wakoski Quotes

1. Poetry is the art of saying what you mean but disguising it.
2. Learning to live what you’re born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life.
3. Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.
4. 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.
5. 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.

Diane Wakoski is an American poet. She was known for her deeply personal poetry, which explored themes of loss, pain, and sexual desire. Her work often drew on events and fantasies from her own turbulent life. She is primarily associated with the deep image poets, as well as the confessional and Beat poets of the 1960s. Wakoski received the William Carlos Williams Award for Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987.

Source for Image: Elsa Dorfman, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diane_Wakowski.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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