Politics & Power Quote by Diane Wakoski

Wakoski’s line is a preemptive boundary, but it’s also a dare. She refuses the common bargain offered to poets in loud times: become a commentator, translate headlines into moral posture, let the work be “useful” in the most immediate way. The phrasing “current events sense” matters. She’s not claiming poetry floats above power; she’s rejecting the narrow expectation that a poem should behave like an op-ed with line breaks.

The subtext is about control: who gets to decide what a poem is for. Wakoski came up in postwar American poetry’s long argument over confession, politics, and the public role of art. By the late 20th century, “political” often meant legible positions and timely references, the kind of readability that makes a poem easy to circulate and easy to flatten. Her “never wanted anyone” is blunt, almost stubbornly domestic: the poet as someone guarding the terms of intimacy. Read me for my obsessions, my psychic weather, my mythmaking - not as a proxy vote.

At the same time, the denial contains a quiet admission: readers will try anyway. Saying you’re “not political” can be less an escape than a diagnosis of how politics colonizes attention. Wakoski’s stance insists that the deeper politics of poetry live in what it trains you to notice: desire, hierarchy, shame, the body, the story you tell yourself to survive. She’s asking for a slower kind of reading, one that doesn’t confuse relevance with proximity to the news cycle.