Diane Wakoski Quotes

I have been in love with Emily Dickinson's poetry since I was 13, and, like an anonymous post on findagrave.com says, 'Dear Emily - I hope I have understood.' Emily's poems are sometimes difficult, often abstract, on occasion flippant, but her mind is inside them.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.

I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.

A writer's work may be a coded autobiography, but only a very close friend could decipher it.

I see 'Hansel and Gretel' as a breakthrough book for me, and one of the reasons is because I started to apply meaning to the hidden details.

I felt a little green, because Shakespeare writes the thought process within the text; it was tricky not to think of what to say and then say it, and instead just deliver the lines.

People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity. Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.

For people who know McQueen, there is always an underlying message. It's usually only the intellectual ones who understand what's going on in what I do.

I'm an old English major from way back, so I do have fun tearing apart texts and trying to find the hidden secrets and the subtexts in there.

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

I like Beryl Bainbridge a great deal, and she is a writer who absolutely demands to be read a second, third, and fourth time. I admire her great courage in leaving so much unsaid and asking the reader to really engage her brain.

In terms of the secrets that imbue and underlie 'Fall on Your Knees', they were as much of a mystery to me as I was creating the story as they are to the readers.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.

With Shakespeare, the hard work is to find out why he said it and how it can relate to the audience.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

When you make illustrations, you're supposed to have a subtext; you're not just communicating words - you're actually adding another story altogether.