"Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground"
About this Quote
There is a defiant calm in Wakoski's phrasing: the pressure is real, but so is the survival instinct. She refuses the melodrama of "poetry is dying" and instead frames art as an adaptive organism. "Resilient" belongs to the language itself, not to any institution that claims to steward it. That’s the first quiet jab: academies, markets, and gatekeepers can tighten the screws, but they don’t own the medium.
The key move is the metaphor of going underground. It borrows from political resistance and subculture, implying censorship, fashion cycles, and economic marginalization without naming any single villain. When poetry is "pressured" - squeezed by commercial demands, reduced attention spans, standardized education, the expectation to be palatable or profitable - it doesn’t politely disappear. It changes distribution channels. It becomes mimeographed zines, basement readings, small presses, coded language, private notebooks, lyrics that smuggle in the line breaks. The underground is both refuge and strategy: hidden, yes, but also networked.
Wakoski wrote in the long wake of postwar American poetics, when the confessional, Beat, and feminist currents proved how quickly "serious" literature could be dismissed, then revived elsewhere. Her sentence carries that history of cycles: repression, rerouting, return. The subtext is a warning to cultural authorities and a comfort to writers: pressure doesn’t sterilize poetry; it forces it to evolve, to find new veins in the culture where it can keep circulating until the surface makes room again.
The key move is the metaphor of going underground. It borrows from political resistance and subculture, implying censorship, fashion cycles, and economic marginalization without naming any single villain. When poetry is "pressured" - squeezed by commercial demands, reduced attention spans, standardized education, the expectation to be palatable or profitable - it doesn’t politely disappear. It changes distribution channels. It becomes mimeographed zines, basement readings, small presses, coded language, private notebooks, lyrics that smuggle in the line breaks. The underground is both refuge and strategy: hidden, yes, but also networked.
Wakoski wrote in the long wake of postwar American poetics, when the confessional, Beat, and feminist currents proved how quickly "serious" literature could be dismissed, then revived elsewhere. Her sentence carries that history of cycles: repression, rerouting, return. The subtext is a warning to cultural authorities and a comfort to writers: pressure doesn’t sterilize poetry; it forces it to evolve, to find new veins in the culture where it can keep circulating until the surface makes room again.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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