Four years ago Diane Wakoski let it be known publicly that she thought, "… poetry is the completely personal expression of someone about his feelings and reactions to the world. I think it is only interesting in proportion to how interesting the person who writes it is." There is no poetic power dead or alive to absolve that sort of fatuity; but Diane Wakoski has, amazingly enough, justified all the bravado. If you accept the idea of literature in time, then you will find every literary utterance 'interesting' in its context—much as Plekhanov could find bank statements and prison torture chambers "ochen' interesno." Yeats, Duncan, Aram Saroyan, and John Ciardi are all—to be sure interesting. Wakoski is a fine poet. She is, so far, a first rate poet. And this is not to be confused with first rate poetess (there are plenty of culls in the basket waiting for that grey laurel).

She is a moralist and her tools—excepting her shaky moral authority—are her beautiful wit and her amazing stagecraft. Her subjects are her life and her loves. The tenors of her imagery are arbitrarily selected facts of the world. Since she lives when she does and knows whom she knows they are often the hieratic, the hermitic, and the arcane—the Tarot pack, Egyptian stuff, the birthday of the Buddha. But, of course, there is The George Washington Poems, which is her best book and which, I understand, is all but out of print. She uses these tenors—arcane or commonplace—not to enrich some tradition of symbolism but to decorate her own fine speeches, her revilings of herself, her lovers, husbands, country, for their various failures to satisfy a minimal vision of normal human happiness and decency. Her best poems are usually rather long and in very very free verse. Technically she is amazing because she uses so little of the armory poets have available to them now; she is not interested in sounds or forms or epigrams. Her surface-texture is closer to Whitman than any poet I can think of—but this is a historical propinquity, true but adventitious.

Inside The Blood Factory is a fair selection of her poetry but no selection can give a sense of her cleverness and emotional range with a single image (as The George Washington Poems does). But there are five splendid poems in this book "The Father of My Country," "Rescue Poem," "Filling the Boxes of Joseph Cornell," "Ringless," and "The Ice Eagle." Her effects are built so slowly that it is impossible to quote from these long poems and demonstrate her power. They simply must be read whole. Any one of them is worth the price of the book.

Greed Parts I & II is a high-priced signature. Part I is not bad but it is not the best Wakoski. "Part II, of Accord and Principle," is worse but more 'interesting.' She establishes an image of poets as kissing fish and toys with it at some length. She worries the integrity of poets whose integrity has never been a matter of public record and is never likely to be a matter of concern to history. And then she comes up with this preposterous statement: "But that is the greed of all of us, the poets, who want our play considered work; want to be respected and paid for saying what we think and feel. Such luxury." The moral blindness of that statement is very odd, coming, as it does, from a moralist. In a world where we pay and admire tennis players, baseball players, weapons inventors, surgeons, generously and loudly, why should we not pay and admire poets? And whoever thought that we paid and admired them for their tedious personal agonies? We pay and admire them for writing well.

The Diamond Merchant is, like Greed, one of those instant rarities which are justifiable only because they bring some money to the poet and—I suppose—some pleasure to the collector. The title poem is somewhat thin and forced, but the second poem, "Glass" is a fine and rich poem more surreal than most of Wakoski's published work.

Exhorting people to read Diane Wakoski is rather a thankless task; it is her practice to publish her poems very often in places so obscure that neither moth nor rust has heard of them. The Buddha's birthday poems are in odda tala 2 and odda tala 3 is all Wakoski. odda tala indeed. Even obscurity can be an impertinence.