"I do not read newspapers. I do not watch television. I am not interested in current events, although I will occasionally discuss them if other people want to discuss them"
About this Quote
Refusing the news here isn’t ignorance; it’s a border control policy. Wakoski’s blunt triad - no newspapers, no television, no interest in “current events” - reads like a poet defending the interior life against an industrial-scale attention economy. The repetition has the rhythm of a vow: not a casual preference, but an identity she’s staking out. In a culture that treats “staying informed” as basic civic hygiene, she commits the heresy of opting out.
The subtext is less “I don’t care” than “I care about different clocks.” “Current events” are framed as something other people bring to the room, and she’ll “occasionally discuss them” out of social courtesy, not conviction. That last clause is key: she isn’t anti-social; she’s anti-compulsory. The line draws a bright distinction between conversation as human contact and news as a constant drip of manufactured urgency. She’ll meet you where you are, but she won’t live there.
Context matters: Wakoski comes of age in the mid-century U.S., when television becomes the national hearth and newspapers still set the daily agenda. For a poet, the claim functions as a defense of time - time to hear language, to sit with sensation, to think beyond the headline’s shelf life. There’s also a quiet rebuke embedded in the phrase “current events,” which makes history sound like a channel, not a lived continuum. The intent isn’t to be above it all; it’s to protect a mode of attention that the news, by design, can’t monetize.
The subtext is less “I don’t care” than “I care about different clocks.” “Current events” are framed as something other people bring to the room, and she’ll “occasionally discuss them” out of social courtesy, not conviction. That last clause is key: she isn’t anti-social; she’s anti-compulsory. The line draws a bright distinction between conversation as human contact and news as a constant drip of manufactured urgency. She’ll meet you where you are, but she won’t live there.
Context matters: Wakoski comes of age in the mid-century U.S., when television becomes the national hearth and newspapers still set the daily agenda. For a poet, the claim functions as a defense of time - time to hear language, to sit with sensation, to think beyond the headline’s shelf life. There’s also a quiet rebuke embedded in the phrase “current events,” which makes history sound like a channel, not a lived continuum. The intent isn’t to be above it all; it’s to protect a mode of attention that the news, by design, can’t monetize.
Quote Details
| Topic | Life |
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