Life & Wisdom Quote by Diane Wakoski

A small, pointed refusal hides inside Wakoski's politely hedged phrasing: "I don't think" softens the blow, but the line lands as a boundary. Poetry, she implies, is not the newsroom's annex. The little jab at "a contemporary word, venue" matters: she lifts a term from event culture and media-speak, then holds it at arm's length, as if the very vocabulary of "current events" is already steering the art toward public-facing performance and instant relevance.

The intent isn't escapism so much as a defense of tempo. "Current events" demand speed, clarity, and the moral posture of response. Poetry, in Wakoski's frame, works by other pressures: obsession, myth, private weather, the long burn of memory. She isn't denying that poems can be political; she's resisting the idea that a poem's primary job is to keep up. The subtext reads like impatience with the expectation that artists act as cultural first responders, turning every headline into content.

Contextually, Wakoski comes out of a postwar American poetry world that watched confessional intensity, protest verse, and media saturation compete for attention. Her remark sides with the tradition that treats the poem as a machine for transforming experience, not reporting it. The line also gestures at a fear of expiration: poems tethered too tightly to the moment can die with the moment. By rejecting poetry as a "venue", she insists it's not a stage for issues but a form that metabolizes them, slowly, on its own terms.