Wakoski, Diane (Vol. 2) | Wakoski, Diane 1937–
Wakoski, Diane 1937–
American poet. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 15-16.)
[To Diane Wakoski] must go the prize—the plum, the bay leaf, I wish I had something worth giving—for the [bold] conception…. In her George Washington Poems she has revived the figure of the Father of Our Country as a genuine living fictional personage, but in totally unexpected ways—at least to me. He becomes neither the hero one would not expect, nor the anti-hero one would; neither the historical figure, nor a mythological one; but instead a changeable person, variably George, the General, Mr. President, a father figure, an enlightened aristocrat, and ultimately a projection of the poet herself, slipping back and forth in time, with whom she converses, or to whom she declaims, in the cheerfullest terms imaginable, about her own life, her actual father and husband, her sense of relationship to her country, and many other themes. The...
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