Jason the Sailor (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Since the publication of her first book, COINS AND COFFINS, in 1962, Diane Wakoski’s poetry has always included an inventive amalgam of personal mythology with vivid imagery and lyric language. In MEDEA THE SORCERESS and JASON THE SAILOR, Wakoski has begun to explore a hybrid form, a logical extension of her previous interests, creating a kind of evolving personal epic in which poems are interlinked with letters, journal entries, and quotes from a book by Nick Herbert, QUANTUM REALITY: BEYOND THE NEW PHYSICS (1985), to produce a characteristically original response to cultural phenomena and individual perception. The thrust of Herbert’s study is that “There is no deep reality,” and Wakoski uses this position to examine the circumstances of her life in terms of a poetic creation of multiple realities which illuminate relationships, emotions, and the power of art to invest existence with some meaning or significance.

In spite of the philosophical framework operating around and through the volumes in the sequence THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MOVIES AND BOOKS, Wakoski’s unabashed romantic intensity, her openness about her feelings and concerns, and her invitingly conversational tone in the prose entries and the poems give both of the books a congenial feeling and an appealingly disarming voice. Wakoski has often transmuted her own experience into an intricate mythology of fantasy and imagination, using such figures as “George Washington,” “The King of Spain,” “The Motorcycle Betrayer” and versions of herself conceived in terms of the traditional conception of Diana, the Moon Goddess. In JASON THE SAILOR and MEDEA THE SORCERESS, she has narrowed the apparent distance between the “Diane” of the poems and the author so that the mythological parallels function as extensive metaphors more than symbolic transformations, and the autobiographical details of her life in California as a young girl, in New York as an apprentice poet, and currently as a writer in residence at Michigan State University become specific sources for poetic meditation and expression.

In JASON THE SAILOR, particularly, her acknowledgement of the power of romantic desire in her life tends to make the poetry especially evocative, while her unusual mixing of many items from a popular cultural matrix (Tom Cruise, Camille Paglia, teen movies) with a solid humanities education and an impressively developed literary sensibility contributes to a body of work that has been temporarily overshadowed by more trendy writers but which will continue to find interested readers among those not limited by prior conceptions about what poetry is.

Source for Further Study

Library Journal. CXVIII, August, 1993, p.109.