Interview: Diane Wakoski
The poetry of Diane Wakoski has affinities with that of Beat poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg: it alternates long and short lines, is frankly personal and wildly humorous, and expresses a mindset in stark opposition to Americans’ materialism and moralistic rigidity. Her conception of poetry as a deeply human and natural activity is reflected in her prolific production—over 40 collections published—while her “physiological imagery” of the female body has spoken powerfully to feminists. (Bio adapted from poetryoutloud.org).
TCJWW: Could you tell us about writing Bay of Angels? You were inspired by cinema... any favorite films?
Wakoski: I think I'll answer those questions in reverse order. I began to take film as one of my objectivations around the beginning of the 90s when I started working on the quartet of books called The Archaeology of Movies and Books. In the first volume, Medea the Sorceress, in the poem called, "The Archaeology of Movies and Books," I give some poetic biography, citing some of my sources starting from the California desert where I was born and grew up and which sent me on a quest for water (l'eau de vie i.e. the water of life) that led me to Michigan, where I live now, and which is a state full of bodies of water. I say
"what is she,/ in this desert? Not the Water Comissioner's
daughter, that rich beautiful woman of silk and high cheekbones.
No, the daughter of a sailor/ who left her high and dry,"
and in those lines reference the film Chinatown, which impressed me deeply, so full of the lore of Southern Cailfornia's water wars and corruption, framed as film noir, a genre I have tried to emulate in some of my poems.
In that same collection there is a poem called "The Eyes of Laura Mars," another film that deeply impressed me. It starred Fay Dunaway, who played the Water Comissioner's daughter in Chinatown. Another poem in that collection is called “Waiting For The New Tom Cruise Movie” and reiterates a theme from several other poems,
“Oh Craig,
this lyric is for beautiful young men,
for you,
for Tom Cruise,
for Andrew McCarthy,
and some of the boys who sit in my
eccentric classrooms”
The movies provide a continuation of my fantasy life, blending the two so that art and life are interchangeable for me. I continue exploring that subject in the next book in the series, Jason the Sailor, particularly in a poem called “Shoulders” that begins:
“What do actors do
when they go home at night?”
The poem uses an Australian miniseries, A Town Like Alice, starring Bryan Brown, which I think is a remarkable love story about two people who meet as Japanese prisoners in WWII. She British, he Australian, who then search for each other after the war. In that same collection I meditate on another favorite film, Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bete in my poem “Beauty and the Beast,” concluding with these lines,
“I misremembered what actually happened, wanting him
to utter those words, ‘La Belle, la belle,’
this monster who lived Beauty
so much he gave away the glove,
the mirror, the rose, his horse,
the key. The Beast is always there;
it is beauty we must search for so desperately.”
That period, the early 90s, opened up my interest in film (it coincided with getting a VHS player and watching movies on tape, later on disk). I continued to use many film references and metaphors, but my oevre wasn’t so heavily saturated with poems about film until I began to think of it as one of my recurring subject/image tropes, like food, or birds, or flowers. I found that I was entranced by dance movies and wrote a poem focusing on Sally Potter’s mesmerizing film called The Tango Lesson and that quintessential American teenage coming of age film, Dirty Dancing. I began to realize, because much of this film interest began with my fascination for the young actor, Tom Cruise, that I really, really loved teenage movies. Of course, I became a huge John Hughes fan. Some movies of that genre that I loved are John Cusack in The Sure Thing, Andrew McCarthy and Jon Cryer in Pretty in Pink, and Rom Cruise in Risky Business.
A few months ago, Harry Northup (actor and poet) asked me to make a list of my 10 favorite films for his blog. This was my list (not in any order of preference—it would take me a month to figure that out or maybe I couldn’t even figure it out):
1. Pretty In Pink—American, John Hughe
2. The Sure Thing—American, Rob Reiner
3. Top Gun—American, Tony Scott,
4. The Fabulous Baker Boys—American, Steve Kloves
5. La Femme Nikita—French, Luc Besson.
6. Bay of Angels—French, Jacques Demy
7. L’avventura—Italian, Michaelangelo Antonioni
8. Belle de Jour—French, Lui Bunuel
9. Blow-Up—English (?), Michaelangelo Antonioni
10. Four Weddings and A Funeral—English, Mike Newell
11. A mini series on TV: A Town Called Alice (Australian miniseries shown on PBS Masterpiece Theater).
As for Bay of Angels, I started putting a manuscript together with the idea that I had a backlog of poetry from the preceding ten years. My last Black Sparrow book was published in 2000, and it had selected poems, focused on food and drink called The Butcher's Apron. It took me ten years to find a new publisher that I felt was the right one for me. Black Sparrow Press has been my home for 35 years. When I found Anhinga Press, I wanted to publish a slightly unusual book for me, one that was all connected to one image. That was The Diamond Dog, which Anhinga published in 2010. But it was a short and specific collection and I had all those poems from the decade that were unpublished in book form.
Finally, I found the poems that I wanted to use for the manuscript, and then decided that they roughly fell into 3 groups. The first and obvious one were my poems ensuing from film. Then there was a group that seemed more connected to my personal life, and finally a third group. This third group came about because a young poet had made friends with me on the Internet and we exchanged short letters and poems. The poems were often written specifically for each other, or responding to the other’s poems or statements. Since I have always loved the epistolary form and used it in The Archaeology of Movies and Books, I decided to create a section of poems embedded in the letter text from emails Matthew and I exchanged. This section of the book is called “The Lady of Light Meets the Pizza Boy.”
Since the film La Baie des Anges is about romance and chance or gambling, I thought it was a perfect title for my book, since those are important features of my life view.
TCJWW: Did Jazz inspire you?
Wakoski: Jazz definitely has effected and inspired my poetry and life. The pianist Bill Evens is a kind of idol for me. When I was at Berkeley I roomed with a music major and she played a lot of music I had never heard before. Then in my senior year, the avant garde composer La Monte Young was my boyfriend and he had been a jazz saxophonist briefly when he was younger. I was introduced to John Coltrane and then gradually got to know the work of all the big names in 60s jazz. I always loved the pianists more than anything. I loved hearing Bill Evans, on a video I recently watched, say that he had played with horns, but found that for him the perfect sound came from a trio—bass, piano, and drums—so that none of the solos detracted from the central importance of his piano. I realized I felt the same way as a listener, the horns were a distraction, even a possible irritation. Though I have to say that perhaps Chet Baker is an exception to that. I never got into singers, though at that time I fell in love with Edith Piaf and other French chanteuse-like singers. I felt that I wanted to be, in poetry, what Edith Piaf or Juliette Greco were in music. The French really got it—the voice of it at least. Jazz, that is.
I never listen to music when I write. Because music creates moods for me, and the music-inspired mood would interfere with the mood I am trying to create in my head to make a poem. However, I often write trying to make my words into a music. I've been especially inspired by Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Bill Evans, and Edith Piaf. I think their music floats around in my poems.
TCJWW: Could you tell us about future projects?
Wakoski: At the moment I am trying to put together a new book for Anhinga Press. I have a lot of unpublished poems to select from but I can't quite get my head around a shape for the book yet. I am visiting the Other Words writers conference at St. Augustine in November, accompanying my Anhinga editor, and I think we'll spend an afternoon brain storming about our writing and thinking about how my recent poems come together. I also would very much like to have a New & Selected Poems in the next five years. My last selected poems, The Butcher's Apron, was in 2000 with Black Sparrow Press, and it was food/drink themed so that only certain kinds of poems were in it. My previous selected poems was Emerald Ice in 1989. So there are several decades of poems which have never been in a selected collection. The problem is finding a publisher for it. Such a big book (it would have to be) and because I am a rather obscure poet these days, it would need a publisher who might have some sense of how to present it for a serious audience. I dream of Penguin. We can dream, can't we?
TCJWW: Any reflections on life as a poet?
Wakoski: My life as a poet came in two stages. The first when I was young and lived in New York City in just the right decade for young poets (the sixties). My life then was exciting and also difficult because I was poor and without very many social skills. But I was always writing or giving readings. At the end of the sixties I started traveling for poetry readings and into the seventies it became a way of life. In retrospect it was immediate, full of surprises, always focused on art or poetry, alive, energetic, full of emotion. The second half of my life as a poet began when I took a Writer-in-Residence job at Michigan State in 1976. I continued to travel for readings, but eventually I asked that my position at MSU be made full-time, as my husband was tired of traveling and we wanted to buy a house. I retired from MSU in 2012, after 36+ years. I found that "professing" poetry had suited me, and that I got tremendous satisfaction out of creating a radius of poetry that centered around my table or podium and moved out into the world with live energy. The raison d'être for my life as a poet in both stages is that I make poetry a daily part of my life and give it both respect and yet treat it an ordinary act. That's both the way I write poetry and the way I live my life. For me, it has given much joy and satisfaction.
Photo credits:
Author photo courtesy of muses.cal.msu.edu
