dwakoski.com

Someone has hacked my Facebook account. It was on Sept 29, 2017, and now I am shut out of it. If you receive any Facebook messages from me that are dated Sept 29 or ANY DATE AFTER THAT, will you let me know. I would like to figure out how I can reclaim my account and banish the invader pretending to be Diane Wakoski.

To contact Diane, please fill out the contact form here.

In a few months there will be a short film about me, Diane Wakoski, that draws only on my poetry. I am so happy about this project and impressed with the skill and imagination of the young filmmaker, Jesseca Simmons.

Jesseca Simmons, a candidate for the MFA in Documentary Film at Northwestern, will receive her degree this spring (2016), with this experimental film, “Emerald Ice,” as her thesis. She is making imagistic and imaginative narrative about a person, which she calls Docufantasy. Her film, “Emerald Ice,” uses my poetry, the poetry of Diane Wakoski, as my story, my document. It is my voice reading the poetry in the film. The half hour film is not yet complete, but will be available by 2017. This is a “teaser” (shorter even than a trailer) to whet your appetite for the film and to give you some idea of how Docufantasy works.

I will continue to post Jesseca’s progress on this project on this site.

Teaser for Emerald Ice, a docufantasy about Diane Wakoski from Jesseca Simmons on Vimeo.

Poetry Reading–Poetry & Pie Series
April 10, 2014
6:30-8:30 PM
4750 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI
Poetry reading by Diane Wakoski, along with prose writer Susan Messer, 6:30-8:30PM in Mike Liebler’s Poetry and Pie series in Detroit. Heather Bourbeau, who has been at Hannen House all week doing a workshop and readings will also appear briefly. Hope to see some Michigan friends there.

“Marcel, that soufflé is a poem!” This example, given in a Webster’s dictionary of the idiomatic use of the word “poem,” illustrates how far we have come from the traditional definition of poetry, often using the words “poem” or “poetry” to refer to anything exquisite or refined. We sometimes forget that Western poetry until the 20th century was defined by metrical patterns. However, while Poets, like myself, who began writing at mid-century, still write sonnets and other formal poetry, nearly all of us have centered ourselves in free verse, hoping to discover what Ezra Pound called “a new measure.” This is a sampling of my quest to pattern new measures in poetry.

I started in Berkeley in the nineteen-fifties as an undergraduate trying to invent forms that were visible, but not specifically metrical. My first successful poem was designed by anagram. I took the words of my first line and spelled them out as the first letters beginning each line of the poem, which I’ll read now.

Justice Is Reason Enough

He, who once was my brother, is dead by his own hand.
Even now, years later, I see his thin form lying on the sand

where the sheltered sea washes against those cliffs
he chose to die from. Mother took me back there every day for
over a year and asked me, in her whining way, why it had to happen.

over and over again — until I wanted
never to hear of David any more. How
could I tell her of his dream about the gull beating its wings
effortlessly together until they drew blood?

Would it explain anything, and how can I tell
anyone here about the great form and its beating wings. How it
swoops down and covers me, and the dark tension leaves

me with blood on my mouth and thighs. But it was that dream,
you must know, that brought my tight, sullen little

brother to my room that night and pushed his whole taut body
right over mine until I yielded, and together we yielded to the dark tension.
Over a thousand passing years, I will never forget
him, David, who was my brother, who is dead. Mother asked me why
every day for a year; and I told her justice. Justice is
reason enough for anything ugly. It balances the beauty in the world.

c. 1958, reprinted in EMERALD ICE

If you had the poem in front of you, while looking for the anagram, you would notice two failures of pattern. I considered this a flaw because at that time, I did not yet realize the heart of what has become Wakoski poetics – that the pattern, which is important in this poem is not the anagram but the multiple use of trope – especially, that of the gull which is a substitute for a swan in the rape-myth of Leda and the swan – and the beginning of my own personal mythology, the on-going search for beauty, and the mythic twin brother, a part of myself who is lost or has to be destroyed.
**
When I was living in New York City in the sixties, I discovered a traditional form called the sestina, which had originally been an iambic form. But co-opted by many contemporary poets, it became simply a six-stanza poem, each stanza containing six lines, with a 3-line envoi. All the lines of all the stanzas ended with the same six words, in permutation, until they came back to the same order in the envoi and were then repeated. I loved the fact that I could make long or short lines, with my own rhythms, but the pattern was commandingly there, defined by the repeating words, which did not have to rhyme. Listen for the six repeating words.

Sestina From The Home Gardener

These dried-out paint brushes which fell from my lips have been removed
with your departure; they are such minute losses
compared with the light bulb gone from my brain, the sections
of chicken wire from my liver, the precise
silver hammers in my ankles, which delicately banged and pointed
magnetically to you. Love has become unfamiliar

and plenty of time to tend the paint brushes now. Once unfamiliar
with my processes. Once removed
from that sizzling sun, the ego, to burn my poet shadow to the wall, I pointed,
I suppose, only to your own losses,
which made you hate that 200 pound fish called marriage. Precise-
ly, I hate my life, hate its freedom, hate the sections

of fence stripped away, hate the time for endless painting, hate the sections
of my darkened brain that wait for children to snap on the light, the unfamiliar
corridors of my heart with strangers running in them, shouting. The precise
incisions in my hip to extract an image, a dripping pickaxe or palm tree removed,
and each day my paint brushes get softer and cleaner – better tools, and losses
cease to mean loss. Beauty, to each eye, differently pointed.

I admire sign painters and carpenters. I like that black hand pointed
up a drive-way whispering to me, “The Washingtons live in these sections,”
and I explain autobiographically that George Washington is sympathetic to my losses;
His face or name is everywhere. No one is unfamiliar
with the American dollar, and since you’ve been removed
from my life, I can think of nothing else. A precise

replacement for love can’t be found. But art and money are precise-
ly for distraction. The stars popping out of my blood are pointed
nowhere. I have removed
my ankles so that I cannot travel. There are sections
of my brain growing teeth and unfamiliar
hands tie strings through my eyes. But there are losses

of the spirit like vanished bicycle tires and losses
of the body, like the whole bike, every precise
bearing, spoke, gear, even the unfamiliar
handbrakes, vanished. I have pointed
myself in every direction, tried sections
of every map. It’s no use. The real body has been removed.

Removed by the ice tongs. If a puddle remains, what losses
can those sections of glacier be? Perhaps a precise
count of drops will substitute the pointed mountain, far away, unfamiliar?

INSIDE THE BLOOD FACTORY, Doubleday, 1968; reprinted in EMERALD
ICE, Black Sparrow Press, 1988

This poem was written after I had read an article in the NEW YORK TIMES called “George Washington the Home Gardener,” (thus, “Sestina from the Home Gardener”) and because I had started writing what would be the second series of my poems of personal mythology, The George Washington Poems, I had actually engaged in what was to become my primary act of patterning in my poems: creating structures whose tropes were images, metaphors and ideas from traditional mythology that I had co-opted into my own versions of mythic figures. Not only was I using the American myth of Washington as the father of our country but also, in this poem, I was alluding to the largest of all myths in Western civilization, The Garden Myth, the story of our removal from Paradise, which is also for me an archetypal story about the power of women, thus love or the loss of it – that being the theme of the poem.
**

During that decade of the sixties when I lived in New York, I found myself longing for a device or structure, other than traditional metrics, that would make my poetry more obviously musical. Narrative is in the origins of my poetry, but after writing 100 sonnets in high school and deciding that I was not a lyric poet, I still longed for that lyric intensity I found in Robinson Jeffers and Garcia Lorca; that much later, I found in Walt Whitman.

I have always used repetition, a traditional musical device, but when I stumbled on chant and incantation, I knew that this technique was going to be part of my “new measure.” Over the years I have written a number of chant-poems, the most infamous being “Dancing On The Grave of a Son of a Bitch,” and my favorites are “Sun” and “Blue Monday.” However, this poem is an homage to Jerome Rothenberg’s chanting.

Silver Coyote Song

(In the spirit of Jerry Rothenberg)
Well and what were you doing in the woodshed?
Well and what does a fox need with wood?
Well and no, I see you are not a fox.
Well and maybe you are related to a fox.

There is a voice which I heard
in the Southern California hills, when
the gopher snake stretched itself like a branch
across the road, when I ate oranges whose thin skins
were smudged with soot from the earlier cool nights.
not like wolves, or dogs. Not my father’s voice
when he returned across the front yard from his battleship.

The moon has a voice like a silver charm bracelet
and though California is the Golden State, the trail I left
there is silver, slippery like the sled marks of mollusks, and I
heard the moon every night whispering twisted foil
messages. Coyotes in the hills
everyone said, but the voice I heard
had nothing to do with tricks or lobo smiles.

Well and what was he doing
riding his silver motorcycle to your door?
Well and who spoke your name, since you spoke his
with your silver charm bracelet voice?
Well and I don’t believe that coyote
whatever he tells me, Well and I don’t
believe in your Silver Surfer either.

There is a voice, that’s all I can say.
Silver baby shoes, the only charm. Silver
when you open your eyes. Silver
when the coyote slips behind the pepper tree
and runs ashy, grey-eyed, or invisible
away from your yard.
Well and who follows the motorcycle
leaving a vapor of silver feathers in the night?
Silver feathers, silver feathers, silver feathers,
in the night.

From JASON THE SAILOR, 1993

George Washington, the King of Spain, The Motorcycle Betrayer, Jason & Medea, The Diamond Dog, my patterns, my tropes. I’d like to finish this reading of poems that illustrate my lifetime meander to find a new measure through word patterning, through repetition, including chant and incantation, and through creating personal mythologies that function using trope that leads to revelation with two poems that will be included in my new collection, BAY OF ANGELS that will be published in October. This first poem is also one that brings me a bit of pleasure because after all these years of writing, publishing, and being nominated for Pushcart Prizes (for small press publications) but never winning one – this poem got selected and was published in their anthology this year.

“Oysters with Lemon in Monmartre”

I found this line jotted on a scrap of paper, thin as
Dover Sole, written in black fountain pen ink
that made the words seem as if they
had been torn from a letter.

And all this autumn afternoon, with the deciduous
trees glowing like glasses of freshly poured Meursault or
Nouveau Beaujolais, I have smelled the lemon,
picked once in California, then cut into wedges and squeezed over
the oyster, itself bathed in a liqueur
of thick brine,
I, who don’t eat oysters,
yet remembering Brittany, not Monmartre,
and Wilton telling me, as my husband just smiled – knowing me so
well – “Diane, you can’t leave here without tasting
these oysters.”
It was a shower of meteors. Summer Perseids.

Eating an oyster
is like standing in front of a mirror
wearing the Helmet of Darkness
while swallowing your pride – you, a California girl who
got a tan over her oyster-white skin,
but could not swim, who wanted to
change the rules of beauty but could not accept
the consequences.

In any mirror, you always face the loss
of memory; mirrors retain
nothing of what they have seen.
That loss is not only the taste of the oysters in my mouth in Brittany.
It is always imagining the oysters’ textures,
not as old cobwebs, but as
Wilton’s or Robert’s salty slurp,
each mouthful, embellished with the liquid wink of a California lemon.

Those numinous words,
“oysters with lemon in Monmartre,”
like David’s footprints on Pavese’s lawn
are a scrap of the missing
from my un-oystered world,
their black-as-deliquesced-mushrooms-ink,
scripted
on an errant fragment of paper, chalky as the Cliffs of Dover.

My final piece was written after I performed in a poetry festival, hosted at UC, Riverside. While there, I had wandered for a while along the corridors of the English Department building and found them hung with striking, large black and white photos of writers. I was surprised to find one, featuring my long-haired, young-girl-self at some now-forgotten California poetry reading. The experience was enhanced later when going to a reception and emerging suddenly from a dark elevator onto a sunset-flooded lanai along the building because, I guess, I had also forgotten how spectacular a Southern California setting sun can be. The poem — exploring, of course, one of my patterns: William Carlos Williams’ Modernist gift to me, the trope of ascent and descent from Dionysian myth. This is

Persephone Steps Off the Elevator
At the 4th Floor

and emerges again onto the adobe walled landing,
the Southern California horizon wide as an avalanche
exposing parrot-wing cerulean, and cobalt
streaking into the molten crown of evening’s still golden
approach.

Returning to light,
even twilight, makes her shadow gasp with
recognition. Here on the 4th floor she seems still
long-haired and trusting, the speckled-blue egg of her
gaze is open to any invitation, as it was before
she became the Queen of Night,
pomegranate-smeared
and cruel.

If only she had not returned,
ascended to this balcony that obscures the long
corridor, on the walls of which hang photos
showing a girl
holding a blue flower; if
only she didn’t have to look
at the radiant sky, its
beauty reminding her of everything she’s either
lost or never had.

In the moment of stepping into light
she does not know,
for the first time,
if beauty is,
or ever can be
enough.

When I was 65, in 2002, I started thinking about retirement. Needless to say, I wasn’t ready, but I thought I might be in 2005, so I began offering that date as the one. In 2005 I thought, “well, maybe 2007, when I’m 70.” But I still wasn’t ready. I think the straw that finally weighted the “I want to retire” side of the pro/con list was beginning to experience a slight loss of hearing (girl’s high voices, conversation in a crowded restaurant, the sotto voce comments actors would deliver in intimate moments on screen). I decided to make 2011-2012 my last, my Consultantship year, ending with my 75th birthday in August of 2012. Thus, this past spring semester, 2011, has been my last semester of teaching classes.

To celebrate my retirement, a group of former students led by Tim Lane, largely members of my poetry groups, The Sapphos and The Alchemists, “serenaded” me last Wednesday, April 27th. Under my office window at Morrill Hall, they gathered, wearing rain boots and coats, for it had been a cool damp, and rainy April week, and each one read aloud one of my (mostly) “famous” poems.

Don Mowry, Ruth’s husband, had set up a speaker in my office – they knew I wouldn’t be able to hear even their shouting voices from up in my 2nd story window. With the amplification, I heard each poem as clearly as if we were in a recording studio.

During the day, Tim had sent me an email with a riddle in it: I am a beginning. I am the same as leave. I follow ‘get set.’ I rhyme with ‘snow.’ I am the opposite of ‘stop.’ What am I? I had to figure out the answer to it in order to set the reading in motion. The answer to the riddle was “Go,’ and at 6 p.m. Tim read the riddle into the mike and signaled for me to answer it. I shouted “Go” from my window, and the reading began. Tim held the mike for delicate little Angela Vasquez-Giroux, baseball expert, soft-ball player, journalist and mother of an angel-child, who opened the reading with the title poem from my new book, “The Diamond Dog.” Her nuanced but clear reading made me feel the malachite striations in the glacier. Opening the serenade with her meticulous rendition of my desire for strength and clarity set the tone for a unique event.

Tim handed the mike to Angela when she finished reading, so that she could hold it for the next reader in this al fresco theater. I saw the handing of the mike from poet to poet, each holding it for the other in these informal surroundings, then passing it on, as a kind of metphor for their lives, accomplishments, and association in the world of poetry.

Heather Abner, librarian with an Amélie-like spirit of discovery and magic in the world, stepped into the grassy and slightly muddy spot just below my window, which substituted for a podium and read “Apparitions Are Not Singular Occurrences,” as I leaned out of the window, wearing my red turtleneck under a black corduroy suit, leaning on a red scarf to cover the splintering window sill in my dusty office. The Red and the Black, I in the office of benediction. The sleek obelisk of a speaker piped their voices into my space. Elvis, Marilyn, and James Dean framed and looking down from one wall, the young aviator-glasses & leather-jacketed Tom Cruise from Top Gun (script written by MSU film professor, Jim Cash) smiling at me from another.

Diane Wakoski in her office in Morrill Hall. Photo by Ruth Mowry.

Angela passed the mike to Heather, and M.J. Arredondo, newly divorced mother of three small children, wearing a jaunty sassy girl hat and, I am sure, still secretly hiding the Prince tattoo she got on her ankle to the horror of her parents in her senior year, stepped into the circle to read “The Butcher’s Apron,” oddly appropriate since she grew up working in her family’s small grocery store. M.J. then took the mike and held it for Boog Aldrich. Despite his avant garde/Jack Spicer-ish edge, and his somewhat ironic Colin Farrell grin, Boog’s voice was perfectly matched to the poem he chose, “Slicing Oranges For Jeremiah,” which he read with poignant rhetorical force. Microphone from M.J. to Boog, and he held it for Lia Greenwell, a new disciple and graduating senior this year, who was the 1st place winner of this year’s Jim Cash Poetry Award. She read “Call Me Ishmael,” then took the mike and held it for Ruth Mowry.

Ruth, who came late to poetry, as she was raising her family and working as a secretary at MSU, taking classes to finish her BA when she began studying with me, works for the English Department as our academic advisor. Though starting as a poet, she has evolved into a writer of what we might call Creative Non-fiction, reflecting on and chronicling her life daily on a very active blog. Everything she writes is imbued with the spirit of poetry, and even though she no longer meets with us regularly to discuss poetry at my table, she is still part of my posse. A wonderful cook, she appropriately chose to read “Ode To A Lebanese Crock of Olives,” each word crisply uttered and reaching out to me like an offering of savory olives. Ruth then took the mike from Lia, and she held it for beautiful, sensuous Courtney Chapin, now working in the College of Arts & Letters office, helping undergraduates with vocational choices. She read “Blue Monday,” surely more eloquently than I ever have, making us all hear its music. Courtney took the mike and held it out to the final reader Tim Lane, from Flint, father of two talented, soccer-playing teen-agers, and director of Scene Metro Space, who stepped into the reading circle. He chose “The Bowl of Gardenia,” a poem appropriately celebrating family and place, two subjects important to Tim.

(note: Tim has organized for next Thursday, May 12, at Scene Metro Space, an event where all the Sapphos, including Sarah Sword who will come to East Lansing from Minnesota, and Carrie Preston who will fly in from Boston, Kierstyn Lamour from Tennessee, and Troubadours, Geoffrey Bankowsky and Chris Mandenberg, respectively from New York and Chicago will gather and read their own poems in a tribute to me, honoring their long devotion to me and the world of poetry to which I introduced them. I think Korey Hurni, this year’s winner of the first Annie Balocating Prize for Poetry given by the residential arts college, will read one of Craig Cotter’s poems, as Craig lives in LA will not be here. He was a part of an ’80s group of my disciples dubbed “the goon squad” by Ron Padgett when he came to visit. After the reading, there will be a big party at Carrie’s mother’s house in Okemos.)

From L-R, Back row: Korey Hurni, boog, Tim Lane, Lia Greenwell, Diane Wakoski, MJ Arredondo, Ruth Mowry. L-R, Front row: Courtney Chapin, Heather Abner, Angela Vasquez-Giroux. Photo by Don Mowry.

When the Serenade was over, the poets all climbed up to my office, where we reminisced, told funny stories, and then went across the street to Woody’s Oasis to eat, drink, and be merry.

If one must retire, this is the way to go out.

–DW