Politics & Power Quote by Diane Wakoski

Wakoski is staking out a stubborn kind of artistic citizenship: she refuses to let the culture file her work under “useful.” The key move is temporal. “Even before that term was available to us” frames “politically correct” as a label that arrived after the policing it names, a retroactive stamp that makes dissent sound like a trend. She’s not denying politics; she’s rejecting the way politics gets used to pre-assign a poem’s job description.

The quote also exposes how categorization works as a soft muzzle. “Just a black poet… just a woman poet” isn’t a dismissal of Blackness or womanhood; it’s a critique of “just,” that small word that shrinks a writer to a single axis of legibility. The subtext is about gatekeepers - editors, critics, classrooms - who reward “representation” when it behaves, when it’s readable as a tidy emblem. Wakoski identifies with those who don’t want to be “read as” anything first, because being read that way dictates form, tone, even permissible anger. It turns the poet into a spokesperson before she’s allowed to be a maker.

Her final example, “an anti-Vietnam war poet,” situates the statement in the post-1960s hangover, when activist art could become both celebrated and stranded: praised for moral clarity, then reduced to its banner. Wakoski’s insistence isn’t apolitical purity; it’s a demand for aesthetic sovereignty. The poem, she implies, should be allowed to be messy, contradictory, private, excessive - and still matter.