Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.

- Diane Wakoski

High and low culture come together in all Post Modern art, and American poetry is not excluded from this.

- Diane Wakoski

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

- Diane Wakoski

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 ide…

- Diane Wakoski

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

- Diane Wakoski

Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

- Diane Wakoski

Learning to live what you're born with is the process, the involvement, the making of a life.

- Diane Wakoski

I write in the first person because I have always wanted to make my life more interesting than it was.

- Diane Wakoski

Poems reveal secrets when they are analyzed. The poet's pleasure in finding ingenious ways to enclose her secrets should be matched by the reader's p…

- Diane Wakoski