Wakoski, Diane (Vol. 9) | Wakoski, Diane 1937–
Wakoski, Diane 1937–
Wakoski is an American poet much admired for her poetry of personal experience made powerful through the use of vivid language and imagery. She writes poetry because "I care more about communication than almost anyone I ever met." (See also CLC, Vols. 2, 4, 7, and Contemporary Authors, Vols. 13-16, rev. ed.)
Wakoski, though she's a poet of unusual talent and vitality, seems to me to display a tendency toward staleness, flatness, repetitiveness in [Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch], a tendency, in other words, to self-parody. A fabulist, a weaver of gorgeous webs of imagery and a teller of archetypically glamorous tales, she's always attempted self-definition through self-mythologizing. "The poems were a way of inventing myself into a new life," she has said. Similarly, she's always tried to define the world by developing—to borrow Jerome Rothenberg's phrase—a technology of the sacred. But where...
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