Politics & Power Quote by Diane Wakoski

Wakoski’s provocation lands like a gauntlet tossed at two audiences at once: the well-meaning interrogator who wants poetry to file a position paper, and the literary culture that loves to sort writers into ideological bins. Her opening move is blunt self-curation: she refuses the label "political" not because she’s naive about power, but because she suspects the label is a trap that flattens the work into a thesis.

The sly hinge is her claim that the "American tradition" is "always apolitical", even when poets are personally engaged. Taken literally, it’s almost absurd. American poetry is packed with abolitionist fire, antiwar grief, feminist rupture, civil-rights testimony. Wakoski knows that. The line works because it’s less a historical fact than a diagnostic: in the U.S., poems are often granted their highest status when they can be read as private, lyrical, formally self-contained. Politics can be present, but it has to arrive disguised as voice, scene, confession, myth, or music. In that sense "apolitical" names a style of reception as much as a style of writing: the cultural preference for the poem as an arena of individual consciousness rather than a public platform.

Subtext: she’s defending art’s right to be messy, symbolic, and noncompliant with agenda. Context matters too. Coming out of postwar confessional and feminist-era debates about "art vs. activism", Wakoski is staking a claim for the poem’s autonomy - not from history, but from the demand to perform politics in the most legible, slogan-friendly way.