Politics & Power Quote by Diane Wakoski

Postmodernism’s real flex isn’t shock value; it’s its comfort with mixing playlists. Wakoski’s line lands with the matter-of-fact confidence of someone who watched “serious” art lose its monopoly on seriousness. By insisting that high and low culture “come together” in all Post Modern art, she’s not describing a cute collage technique. She’s staking a claim about authority: the old gatekeepers who separated opera from pop, Milton from movies, were never just making aesthetic distinctions. They were enforcing a social hierarchy.

The phrasing is telling. “Come together” is blunt, almost domestic, as if the merger is inevitable and already underway. No handwringing, no apology. Then she adds, “American poetry is not excluded from this,” a small sentence that reads like a correction to a lingering fantasy that poetry can stay pure. In the U.S., that fantasy has always been shaky. American poetry has been in constant conversation with mass culture, from Whitman’s democratic sprawl to the Beats’ jazz-soaked rebellion to the New York School’s chatter with advertising and galleries.

Wakoski, writing out of the postwar and late-20th-century moment, is also defending the poet’s right to raid the whole culture, not just the canon. The subtext: if your poem can’t metabolize TV, rock lyrics, brand names, and tabloid emotion, it’s not more elevated - it’s less honest about where Americans actually live.