WAKOSKI, Diane

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Nationality: American. Born: Whittier, California, 3 August 1937. Education: University of California, Berkeley, B.A. in English 1960. Family: Married 1) S. Shepard Sherbell in 1965 (divorced 1967); 2) Michael Watterlond in 1973 (divorced 1975); 3) Robert J. Turney in 1982. Career: Clerk, British Book Centre, New York, 1960–63; English teacher, Junior High School 22, New York, 1963–66; lecturer, New School for Social Research, New York, 1969. Poet-inresidence, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, spring 1972; University of Virginia, Charlottesville, autumn 1972–73; Willamette University Salem, Oregon, spring 1974; University of California, Irvine, fall 1974; Hollins College, Virginia, 1974; Lake Forest College, Illinois, 1974; Colorado College, Colorado Springs, 1974; Macalester College, St. Paul, 1975; Michigan State University, East Lansing, spring 1975; University of Wisconsin, Madison, fall 1975; Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, fall 1976; University of Washington, Seattle, spring-summer 1977; University of Hawaii, Honolulu, fall 1978; and Emory University, Atlanta 1980–81. United States Information Agency lecturer, Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, 1976. Since 1976, writer-in-residence, Michigan State University. Awards: Bread Loaf Writers Conference Robert Frost fellowship, 1966; Cassandra Foundation award, 1970; New York State Council on the Arts grant, 1971; Guggenheim grant, 1972; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1973; Fulbright fellowship, 1984; Michigan Arts Council grant, 1988; Michigan Arts Foundation award, 1989; William Carlos Williams prize, 1989; University Distinguished Professorship, 1990; honorary member Phi Beta Kappa, 1998. Address: 607 Division, East Lansing, Michigan 48823, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Coins and Coffins. New York, Hawk's Well Press, 1962.

Four Young Lady Poets, with others, edited by LeRoi Jones. NewYork, Totem-Corinth, 1962.

Dream Sheet. New York, Software Press, 1965.

Discrepancies and Apparitions. New York, Doubleday, 1966.

The George Washington Poems. New York, Riverrun Press, 1967.

Greed Parts One and Two. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1968.

The Diamond Merchant. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sans Souci Press, 1968.

Inside the Blood Factory. New York, Doubleday, 1968.

A Play and Two Poems, with Robert Kelly and Ron Loewinsohn. LosAngeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1968.

Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons. Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, Perishable Press, 1969.

Greed Parts 3 and 4. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1969.

The Moon Has a Complicated Geography. Palo Alto, California, Odda Tala Press, 1969.

The Magellanic Clouds. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1970.

Greed Parts 5–7. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1970.

The Lament of the Lady Bank Dick. Cambridge, Massachusetts, SansSouci Press, 1970.

Love, You Big Fat Snail. San Francisco, Tenth Muse, 1970.

Black Dream Ditty for Billy "The Kid" Seen in Dr. Generosity's Bar Recruiting for Hell's Angels and Black Mafia. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1970.

The Wise Men Drawn to Kneel in Wonder at the Fact So of Itself. LosAngeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1970.

Exorcism. Boston, My Dukes, 1971.

This Water Baby: For Tony. Santa Barbara, California, Unicorn Press. 1971.

On Barbara's Shore. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1971.

The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1971.

The Pumpkin Pie, Or Reassurances Are Always False, Tho We Love Them, Only Physics Counts. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1972.

The Purple Finch Song. Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, Perishable Press, 1972.

Sometimes a Poet Will Hijack the Moon. Providence, Rhode Island, Burning Deck, 1972.

Smudging. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1972.

The Owl and the Snake: A Fable. Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, Perishable Press, 1973.

Greed Parts 8, 9, 11. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1973.

Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch. Los Angeles, BlackSparrow Press, 1973.

Stilllife: Michael, Silver, Flute, and Violets. Storrs, University of Connecticut, 1973.

Winter Sequences. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1973.

Trilogy: Coins and Coffins, Discrepancies and Apparitions, The George Washington Poems. New York, Doubleday, 1974.

Looking for the King of Spain. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1974.

The Wandering Tattler. Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, Perishable Press, 1974.

Abalone. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1974.

Virtuoso Literature for Two and Four Hands. New York, Doubleday, 1975.

The Fable of the Lion and the Scorpion. Milwaukee, Pentagram Press, 1975.

Waiting for the King of Spain. Santa Barbara, California, BlackSparrow Press, 1976.

The Laguna Contract of Diane Wakoski. Madison, Wisconsin, Crepuscular Press, 1976.

George Washington's Camp Cups. Madison, Wisconsin, Red Ozier Press, 1976.

The Last Poem, with Tough Company, by Charles Bukowski. SantaBarbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1976.

The Ring. Santa Barbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1977.

Overnight Projects with Wood. Madison, Wisconsin, Red Ozier Press, 1977.

Spending Christmas with the Man from Receiving at Sears. SantaBarbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1977.

The Man Who Shook Hands. New York, Doubleday, 1978.

Pachelbel's Canon. Santa Barbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1978.

Trophies. Santa Barbara, California, Black Sparrow, Press, 1979.

Cap of Darkness, Including Looking for the King of Spain and Pachelbel's Canon. Santa Barbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1980.

Making a Sacher Torte: Nine Poems, Twelve Illustrations, with EllenLanyon. Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, Perishable Press, 1981.

Saturn's Rings. New York, Targ, 1982.

The Lady Who Drove Me to the Airport. Worcester, Massachusetts, Metacom Press, 1982.

Divers. N.p., Barbarian Press, 1982.

The Magician's Feastletters. Santa Barbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1982.

Looking for Beethoven in Las Vegas. New York, Red Ozier Press, 1983.

The Collected Greed: Parts 1–13. Santa Barbara, California, BlackSparrow Press, 1984.

The Managed World. New York, Red Ozier Press, 1985.

Why My Mother Likes Liberace. Tucson, Arizona, Sun/Gemini Press, 1985.

The Rings of Saturn. Santa Barbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1986.

Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962–1987. Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1988.

The Archaeology of Movies and Books:Medea the Sorceress. Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press. 1991.

Jason the Sailor. Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1993.

The Emerald City of Las Vegas. Santa Rosa, California, BlackSparrow Press, 1995.

The Ice Queen. Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Parallel Editions, 1994.

Jason the Sailor. Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1993.

The Emerald City of Las Vegas. Santa Rosa, California, BlackSparrow Press, 1995.

Argonaut Rose. Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1998.

Trying to Convince Robert That a Woman He Doesn't Like Is Beautiful. Fresno, California, Wake Up Heavy Press, 2000.

The Butcher's Apron: New and Selected Poems. Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press, 2000.

Other

Form Is an Extension of Content. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1972.

Creating a Personal Mythology. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1975.

Variations on a Theme. Santa Barbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1976.

Toward a New Poetry. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1980.

Unveilings, photographs by Lynn Stern. New York, Hudson Hill Press, 1989.

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Manuscript Collection: University of Arizona Library, Tucson.

Critical Studies: "A Terrible War: A Conversation with Diane Wakoski" by Philip Gerber and Robert Gemmett, in Far Point 4 (Winnipeg), Spring-Summer 1970; "Symposium on Diane Wakoski," in Margins (Milwaukee), January/February/March 1976; "Diane Wakoski's Personal Mythology: Dionysian Music, Created Presence" by Taffy Wynne Martin, in Boundary 2 (Binghamton, New York), 10(3), Spring 1982; "Diane Wakoski: Disentangling the Woman from the Moon," in Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth-Century Women, by Estella Lauter, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984; "Wakoski's Poems: Moving Past Confession" by Linda W. Wagner, in Still the Frame Holds, edited by Sheila Roberts, San Bernardino, Borgo Press, 1993; "Language: The Poet as Master and Servant" by David Young, in A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, edited by Stuart Friebert, David Walker, and Young, Oberlin, Ohio, Oberlin College, 1997; "Diane Wakoski" by Joanne Allred, in Updating the Literary West, Fort Worth, Texas, Western Literature Association, 1997; "Gods and Heroes Revised: Mythological Concepts of Masculinity in Contemporary Women's Poetry" by Christa Buschendorf, in Amerikastudien (Mainz, Germany), 43(4), 1998.

Diane Wakoski comments:

I think of myself as a narrative poet, a poet creating both a personal narrative and a personal mythology. I write long poems and emotional ones. My themes are loss, imprecise perception, justice, truth, the duality of the world, and the possibilities of magic, transformation, and the creation of beauty out of ugliness. My language is dramatic, oral, and as American as I can make it, with the appropriate plain surfaces and rich vocabulary. I am impatient with stupidity, bureaucracy, and organizations. Poetry, for me, is the supreme art of the individual using a huge, magnificent range of language to show how special, different, and wonderful his perceptions are. With verve and finesse. With discursive precision. And with utter contempt for pettiness of imagination or spirit.

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One of the most important and controversial poets in the United States, Diane Wakoski is also one of the most prolific. Early appraisals of her work as a product of her association with the deep image poets of New York and later efforts to discount it as confessional or angry and self-pitying have all proved inadequate or unjust. Like Whitman, she uses the autobiographical self to create an American voice, but, like Wallace Stevens, she has made the human imagination the real subject of her work. In her efforts to show how the mind may work to acknowledge or create beauty in virtually any situation, she has found the storyteller's narration as useful as the image and the actor's use of masks and roles more telling than the cri de coeur. The self in her body of work has become an instrument to awaken the imaginative consciousness of others. Paradoxically, this intellectual poet, who makes no secret of her love for classical music or her wide-ranging interests in science and mythology, is well received, not because she "spills her guts" (to use Anne Sexton's famous phrase), but because her digressive style allows so many points of entry into the webs of thought and feeling she creates.

Wakoski has devised an idiosyncratic form of the long poem that allows her to be discursive or imagistic, factual or mythical, mundane or visionary, and to shift from one of these levels to another without losing her audience by relying primarily on common language and ordinary rhythms of speech. Varying line lengths are used to make melody, determine tempo, and draw attention to key words. In her series titled The Archaeology of Movies and Books, which uses the Greek tales of Jason and Medea and the city of Las Vegas as focal points, she includes not only her trademark poems but also intersperses excerpts from books on quantum physics and gambling. In addition, there are prose letters to presumably fictional men, Jonathan and Craig, wherein "Diane," as Postmistress, Moon Woman, Lady of the Light, can discuss anything she considers relevant to the poems or the quoted passages. In Argonaut Rose Wakoski links cafés from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Vienna to Point Dume, exploring a connection between Medea's story and her own decision as a teenage single mother to give up her children. As she reports telling one young man late in the book, "'human is anger, and also / living beyond anger.'" The books are Foucaultian not only in their digging for the personal and cultural elements (both classical and popular) that have shaped the consciousness of "Diane" as an American but also in laying bare the "discipline of self" she pursues so actively and self-consciously on our behalf.

From the beginning Wakoski has been interested in mythology as a source of identity, a target for critique, and an ongoing creative enterprise. Her best works have always engaged the most enduring problems of the relationships between ourselves and other human beings, nature, or the cultural ideas (such as justice, power, or beauty) that order human lives. One of her most ambitious books, The Collected Greed, containing poems that had appeared in chapbooks from 1968 to 1984, shows both the continuity of her poetic interests and the seriousness of her effort to develop a distinctive aesthetic stance (analogous to Baudelaire's "aesthetique du mal") capable of treating the less attractive sides of human lives. Her poems confronting "the man's world" in the historical figure of George Washington and her singular creation of a fantasy figure called the "King of Spain" are only the most obvious manifestations of a pervasive tendency to filter ordinary experience through the perspective of mythic characters. Although her later poems are still filled with real and imagined people, Wakoski has taken increasing pleasure in the phenomena of nature, for example, in the lady slipper that she loves "more than jewels or gold or men" or in the mushroom's inky "cap of darkness." (The latter is a phrase she has also used to refer to her invisible Athena-like helmet for combating the ghost of greed, which she defines as the inability to choose.) The title poem of her 1988 collection of selected poems, "Emerald Ice," presents a jewel the color of fresh basil with the "liquid hardness" of ice to epitomize her poetry of the previous thirty years.

Perhaps Wakoski's most impressive achievement has been to imagine a female self who is painfully aware of imperfections—her own as well as her culture's—but who can nonetheless celebrate the adequacy of the poet's imagination and also dream of a poetic "territory" that is "inexorably" her own. Wakoski's talent, courage, conscience, breadth of vision, and insight into human weakness seem likely to make this remarkably coherent oeuvre one of the hallmarks of our time.

—Estella Lauter