"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
The declaration rejects the default assumption that a serious mind must constantly ingest headlines. It is not a proud ignorance but a defense of attention, a statement about what kind of input nourishes the inner life. Newspapers and television represent speed, noise, and the pressure to be up-to-the-minute; poetry, as Diane Wakoski practiced it, thrives on slow encounters with memory, myth, and personal history. By declining current events as a daily diet, she claims the right to circumscribe her imaginative terrain, to protect a private weather from the storms of the news cycle.
The stance also underscores a longstanding tension in American letters between engagement and inwardness. Many of Wakoski’s contemporaries made political witness a core of their work. Wakoski forged a different path, constructing elaborate personal mythologies in long sequences like The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems and other volumes that blur confession, archetype, and fable. Her focus on the interior does not deny the world so much as reframe it; the news that matters becomes the drama of betrayal, desire, loss, and power as they unfold within a singular voice. She implies that art can address reality more lastingly by refusing to be led by its ephemera.
The qualifier about occasionally discussing current events when others wish to talk signals a relational ethic rather than isolation. She preserves sovereignty over what she consumes while remaining available to conversation. There is tact in that concession: community need not demand capitulation, and dialogue can happen without surrendering one’s chosen center of gravity.
Read today, the refusal feels prescient. In a culture saturated with feeds and notifications, abstention reads as a strategy for clarity. The risk, of course, is insularity; the strength is depth. Wakoski’s choice argues that one way to meet the present is to cultivate a mind not constantly buffeted by it, trusting that the poem, and the life it shapes, will reach a truer scale than whatever flashes across the screen.
The stance also underscores a longstanding tension in American letters between engagement and inwardness. Many of Wakoski’s contemporaries made political witness a core of their work. Wakoski forged a different path, constructing elaborate personal mythologies in long sequences like The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems and other volumes that blur confession, archetype, and fable. Her focus on the interior does not deny the world so much as reframe it; the news that matters becomes the drama of betrayal, desire, loss, and power as they unfold within a singular voice. She implies that art can address reality more lastingly by refusing to be led by its ephemera.
The qualifier about occasionally discussing current events when others wish to talk signals a relational ethic rather than isolation. She preserves sovereignty over what she consumes while remaining available to conversation. There is tact in that concession: community need not demand capitulation, and dialogue can happen without surrendering one’s chosen center of gravity.
Read today, the refusal feels prescient. In a culture saturated with feeds and notifications, abstention reads as a strategy for clarity. The risk, of course, is insularity; the strength is depth. Wakoski’s choice argues that one way to meet the present is to cultivate a mind not constantly buffeted by it, trusting that the poem, and the life it shapes, will reach a truer scale than whatever flashes across the screen.
Quote Details
| Topic | Life |
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