Art & Creativity Quote by Diane Wakoski

The brag is carefully booby-trapped with a shrug. Wakoski opens on gratitude, name-checking Black Sparrow Press like a talisman, then pivots to the real point: permanence. Not fame, not awards, but the unglamorous logistics of staying "in print" - a poet's afterlife measured in warehousing, reorders, and whether a small press can keep the lights on. It's a writerly flex, yes, but one delivered in plain clothes, as if she's embarrassed to admit she's beating the odds.

The subtext is anxiety disguised as reportage. "As long as they exist" lands like a quiet memento mori for indie publishing: her career is yoked to an institution that could vanish. That conditional clause gives the sentence its tension. She isn't declaring immortality; she's describing a truce with obscurity that could be revoked by a balance sheet.

Then comes the self-correction - "so I guess, and it's true" - the vocal tic of someone negotiating between skepticism and evidence. Wakoski doesn't fully trust "respectable numbers", because poetry has trained her not to. Instead, she cites the tactile proof: libraries and bookshelves, the places where poetry survives as public infrastructure rather than commercial event.

Context matters: a postwar American poet whose prominence grew alongside small presses, readings, and the slow-build ecosystem of literary culture. Wakoski frames success not as celebrity but as circulation - being present where readers actually live. It's an argument for durability over hype, and it feels almost radical because it's so modest.