Politics & Power Quote by Diane Wakoski

There’s a dry, quietly radical confidence in Wakoski’s “definitely.” It’s not the bluster of flag-waving; it’s a poet staking out aesthetic territory in a language that arrives pre-owned. English, after all, comes with a built-in prestige economy: the British canon, the inherited meters, the idea that “serious” poetry has an accent. Wakoski’s line cuts through that by insisting that American poetry isn’t merely an offshoot, an export market, or a provincial variation. It’s its own project.

The intent feels twofold. On the surface, she’s drawing a border for clarity: different histories, different pressures, different music. Underneath, she’s pushing back against a cultural reflex that treats British literature as the default setting and American work as the remix. “Distinguish” is doing the heavy lifting: she’s not claiming superiority, she’s demanding legibility. Let the poems be read with the right ears.

Context matters: Wakoski emerges from postwar American poetry where confession, performance, and vernacular speech are becoming central tools, and where women poets are fighting not only for space but for terms of evaluation not modeled on old gatekeepers. The subtext is a warning about standards: if you judge American poems by British measures of restraint, decorum, or class-inflected lyricism, you’ll misread their engine. American poetry’s electricity often comes from appetite, sprawl, contradiction, the frontier myth turned inward. Wakoski wants criticism to stop treating that as a flaw and start recognizing it as form.