Politics & Power Quote by Diane Wakoski

Wakoski’s sentence smuggles a provocation inside an almost offhand clarification: “American cultural myth” isn’t a decorative theme poets may choose to dabble in, it’s the water they’re already swimming in. The key move is her collapsing of intention. “Whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not” undercuts the romantic image of the poet as sovereign maker. In her view, the poem isn’t simply a private lyric act; it’s also a cultural artifact that unknowingly reheats national narratives, symbols, and fantasies.

The phrasing “From reading a previous answer” signals a conversational, interview-like context, the poet in critic mode, building an argument rather than delivering an oracle. That matters: Wakoski is not preaching timeless wisdom; she’s positioning herself in a debate about what makes “good American poetry.” Her claim is less about flag-waving than about infrastructure. “Myth” here implies a set of stories that feel natural because they’re ubiquitous: frontier individualism, reinvention, innocence and violence, the self-made self, the romance of mobility. You don’t cite them; you breathe them.

Subtextually, she’s also calling out a certain kind of literary self-conception: the poet who believes craft and personal sincerity alone can float a poem above ideology. Wakoski suggests the opposite. Even refusal becomes a form of participation, because myth is not just content but grammar - what counts as freedom, desire, heroism, failure. The line works because it’s blunt about the unconscious. It turns “good” into a diagnostic category: strong American poems don’t merely describe America; they leak America, especially when the poet thinks they aren’t.