Politics & Power Quote by Diane Wakoski

Wakoski’s blunt “I don’t care” is doing more work than it first admits. It’s not indifference; it’s a refusal to police readership. In a culture that routinely asks artists to certify the “correct” interpretation of their work, she shrugs off the role of traffic cop and treats meaning as something co-authored in public. The line lands as a small act of artistic sovereignty: the poem leaves her desk and becomes fair game.

The key tension is in the pairing of “women, feminists” with “political interpretation.” She acknowledges a specific, historically charged readership - women reading against the grain of a literary tradition that often rendered them muse, symbol, or absence. Feminist reading practices don’t just decode; they contest. Wakoski doesn’t pretend those lenses aren’t there, and she doesn’t flatter them, either. She frames political interpretation as power, not contamination.

Subtext: she’s dodging the trap of being drafted into a single ideological camp. Late-20th-century American poetry culture (especially around confessional modes and the canon wars of the 70s-90s) frequently turned women poets into proxies in arguments about authenticity, gender, and authority. Her stance keeps the poem from being reduced to a position paper while still granting that politics will happen anyway - because readers bring lived stakes to language.

“That’s what poetry is supposed to do” is the real provocation. Poetry, for Wakoski, isn’t an altar for pure aesthetics; it’s a device that converts private experience into public argument. The poem’s job is not to stay neutral, but to survive contact with interpretation.