Love & Passion Quote by Diane Wakoski

Wakoski is pointing at an uncomfortable truth about “beauty”: it often arrives pre-loaded. What looks like a neutral aesthetic standard can be a social script, quietly policing who gets to be seen as desirable, “pure,” tasteful, or worthy of attention. Her move is strategic. By naming women, sex, and race in one breath, she treats conventional beauty not as a private preference but as a cultural technology-one that trains readers to accept certain bodies, voices, and experiences as naturally pleasing, and others as aberrations.

Placed against the backdrop of Language poetry, the intent sharpens. The movement’s suspicion of lyric smoothness, confession, and “transparent” voice wasn’t just a formal game; it was a refusal of the seductive ease by which poems can reproduce ideology. If a poem’s language glides, if its metaphors feel effortlessly “right,” Wakoski suggests we should ask: right for whom? Traditional beauty can smuggle in gendered submissiveness, heterosexual expectation, whiteness as default, the eroticized gaze as common sense. Language poets respond by roughening the surface: fragmentation, disjunction, procedural methods, syntactic jams. These aren’t anti-beauty so much as anti-consensus.

The subtext is a warning to readers and writers alike: aesthetics are never innocent. When Wakoski talks about “getting away,” she’s proposing an ethical reorientation. The poem becomes a site where pleasure is made accountable-where form can stop flattering the dominant gaze and start exposing the machinery behind what we’ve been taught to find beautiful.