Diane Wakoski Rides Again

Diane Wakoski drives a blue Honda Accord whose vanity plates spell out GREED. That’s a nod to the poet’s 14-part sequence of the same name, published between 1968 and 2000, but it’s also evidence of just how deeply poetry infuses her life. On the December afternoon that I visit her, wind has knocked out the power in her corner of East Lansing, Michigan. We sit at her dining room table while her husband of 40 years, the photographer Robert Turney, sets up oil lamps. Wakoski’s house is compact and typical of an 84-year-old writer: prescription bottles mingle with literary journals; a wall shelf displays tea canisters. In the adjoining living room, wall-to-wall shelves are choc-a-block with poetry, sorted alphabetically.

“Guess what arrived in the mail today?” Wakoski asks. She points to an advance copy of Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch: The Complete Motorcycle Betrayal Poems (Black Sparrow Press, 2022), a new edition that gathers Wakoski’s “motorcycle betrayal” poems and marks the 50th anniversary of her gleeful and fiery collection, The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems (1971). The new book, with an introduction by the poet Elizabeth A.I. Powell and an afterword by the author, will introduce Wakoski to a new generation that approaches relationships and gender in profoundly different ways than readers did a half-century ago.

Written in the aftermath of an epic breakup, The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems captured the early ’70s zeitgeist and earned the already established poet a wider audience. “[M]arked by their time,” she writes in the new afterword, the poems “contributed to the thoughts of women who wanted the absoluteness of male domination—of everything—changed, wanted to be the woman riding the motorcycle” and “not just a spectator.” Even cast against the ’70s literary scene in which American poets were exploring ways to write about the self’s relation to the world, Wakoski’s poems stood out for their intimacy and personal revelation. “Dear Clayton,” she writes in “Ten, The Number of My Fingers,”

You understand me better than any man.
You are
my twin. You are hard on me
to honor me, and kind
when there is a need for kindness.

Out of 45 poems in the original collection, more than 30 are directly addressed to someone. Imagine a mash-up of Sylvia Plath’s dramatic turns, Frank O’Hara’s personal coterie, and Allen Ginsberg’s “candor disarms paranoia” credo.

“There’s this famous line about the first Velvet Underground album that’s often attributed to Brian Eno,” Joshua Bodwell, editorial director of Godine/Black Sparrow Press, publisher of the new volume, writes to me over email. “It goes something like, ‘They didn’t sell many records, but everyone who bought one went out and started a band.’ I think The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems was that kind of poetry collection in the 1970s.”

In 2019, Bodwell was working with Terrance Hayes on Wicked Enchantment, a selected collection of Wanda Coleman’s poetry, and looking through Black Sparrow’s extensive backlist for similar projects with other authors. That summer, Bodwell met up with Daniel Halpern, the founder of Ecco Press, for drinks at a bar near the High Line in New York City. Halpern, well-versed in Black Sparrow titles, was excited to hear about infusing new energy into the press. Bodwell mentioned assembling a collection of Wakoski’s work, “but I wasn’t sure what yet,” he said. “Then Dan said, ‘I always loved those motorcycle poems.’”

Something clicked. Over “real letters, not emails,” Bodwell and Wakoski came up with the idea of combining The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems with 10 additional poems featuring the character of the Motorcycle Betrayer from other collections.

The re-release is another victory lap in Waksoki’s impressive and in many ways unlikely six-decade career, well-mythologized over more than 30 collections. Wakoski’s work is a sui generis mix of Deep Image, Confessional, Beat, and New York School poetics, one that Lynn Melnick classifies, in a Los Angeles Review of Books essay, as “enduring badassery.” Wakoski herself has long resisted labels: most notably, feminist and Confessional. She has also resisted the strain of criticism and condescension reserved for independently minded female writers who draw on their own lives for material.

“I’ve had, you know, 80 percent negative reviews and 20 percent good ones,” Wakoski tells me. “But the negative ones never really gave me anything to work with. One of the things that always made me mad about poetry criticism, for the most part, was that it wasn’t very useful.”

Joyce Carol Oates, a Black Sparrow Press-mate in the 1970s, writes to me over email, “I feel for Diane as one might feel for a sister-comrade who has—almost literally—been through the wars. [She] is a radically political poet—by implication. She has been fearless in speaking from her own, unique perspective and for avoiding fashions in poetry.”

***

The author bio that appears in several of Wakoski’s books, including the first edition of Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch, consists of two straightforward sentences: “Diane Wakoski was born in California in 1937. The poems in her published books give all the important information about her life.” As author biographies go, it makes for an excellent misdirection for work that reads, in Wakoski’s words, as “a manifesto for keeping secrets.”

Wakoski was born in Whittier, California, in 1937. Her mother, “more Medusa than Medea,” worked as a bookkeeper and scraped money together for her daughter’s piano lessons. Her father, a Navy man, mythologized as “Jason” in Wakoski’s later work, was rarely around—“mostly / my father came to me / in sleep,” she writes in “The Father of My Country.” Wakoski started writing poems at seven years old. As a young adult, she had difficult romantic relationships, many of which reenacted her father’s absence. She experienced “haunting pregnancies, births, and adoptions,” in the words of The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing. But she was determined to live the life of a poet. “When you are denied the life that you want, you invent one for yourself,” she writes in her 1978 essay “The Blue Swan.”

As a scholarship student at University of California, Berkeley, Wakoski was exposed to the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat poetry scenes of the Bay area. She studied under Thom Gunn and Josephine Miles, edited the school’s literary magazine, and began publishing poems in small journals. The fall after getting her degree in 1960, Wakoski flew to New York City with her significant other, the minimalist composer La Monte Young, on a travel fellowship.

“I think I learned some of my so-called ‘fearlessness’ from La Monte,” she says. “He was just always ahead.” In New York, “we already had this little community. So we landed on our feet.”

Wakoski’s avant-garde milieu included artist Walter De Maria, dancer Simone Forti, poet Jackson Mac Low, and composers Terry Jennings, John Cage, and Terry Riley. Young co-produced a concert series with a young Yoko Ono at her studio loft on Chambers Street. Wakoski collected tickets, once getting into a squabble with Max Ernst over his change. After Ono and Young had an affair, Wakoski moved in with painter-turned-sculptor Robert Morris. “So I lived with two fathers of American minimalism, Robert Morris and La Monte Young,” Wakoski says now, as if marveling at her own life.

Wakoski also entered New York’s poetry scene from the start. In 1961, she was selected to read at the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, as part of their New Poets’ series (later re-christened the Discovery series) with David Ignatow. She also took part in the coffee shop readings at Les Deux Mégots and The Tenth Street Coffeehouse. In 1962, her poetry appeared in two books: her debut collection, Coins & Coffins, from Jerome Rothenberg’s Hawk’s Well Press; and the anthology Four Young Lady Poets, from Amiri Baraka’s (then LeRoi Jones) Totem Press.

“I came to New York as a very timid person,” Wakoski recalls. “And it made me bold. I just felt confident being there.”

As the ’60s progressed, Wakoski worked as a junior high school teacher (“I had to pretend that I lived alone so that I could keep the job,” she recalls) and continued to publish in magazines and take part in readings. By the middle of the decade, however, she found herself in a troubled marriage with photographer S. Shepard Sherbell, who left her stranded in New York after a stint living in London. Newly divorced, Wakoski was introduced to Tony Weinberger, an erstwhile poet who worked as a motorcycle mechanic and handyman on downtown lofts. Starting in 1968, Wakoski and Weinberger lived together in his house at 578 East Fifth Street. “He told me I didn’t have to work while I was living with him, because I never asked [for] very much,” Wakoski says. This freed her to, as she puts it, “work at poetry.”

That same year, Wakoski published the first parts of Greed, her long poem project, spread over 14 books, that addresses obsessions with fame and acceptance in the poetry world. Black Sparrow released the book, although Wakoski also published with Doubleday and other presses, often issuing several collections a year. An appearance in Newsweek and prizes such as a Guggenheim Fellowship followed. Wakoski knew from experience that English departments had “soft money” to do things like poetry readings. “So I did a huge letter writing campaign on my old Olivetti typewriter,” she says, offering herself up for readings and workshops, citing her publications and burgeoning reputation. For every 100 letters Wakoski wrote, she got “one or two replies.”

And so, for almost a decade, Wakoski worked as a traveling poet, giving 60 to 70 readings a year, with New York City as her home base. Camille Paglia, the cultural critic and professor at University of the Arts, remembers a reading by Wakoski when she was a graduate student at Yale in 1969. “Her use of common speech, without sentimentality or pretension, was refreshingly free of the showy acrobatics and fey locutions that blight too much academically acclaimed poetry,” Paglia writes in a statement sent to me via email. “Her tough, direct American idiom made a vivid impression on me.”

In early 1971, Wakoski was again living with Weinberger, the couple’s second go-around. (They had broken up in 1969.) Wakoski thought the reunion would stick, but it didn’t. Weinberger, then employed by the famed nightclub Max’s Kansas City, was building a cabin on top of a hill in Vermont, in classic ’70s back-to-the-land fashion, and did not envision Wakoski as part of this phase. He asked her to leave. Later, when she requested that her possessions be returned, Weinberger refused, on the grounds that her belongings should be applied to her unpaid rent. Wakoski was enraged.

And so the figure of the Motorcycle Betrayer was born from the ruins of this affair. Later that year, Wakoski published The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems.

***

As a college student in the late 1980s, I picked up a copy of The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems in a used bookstore in Philadelphia. It was the paperback edition, the one with the legendary dedication emblazoned across its cover:

This book is dedicated to
all those men who betrayed
me at one time or another;
in hopes they will fall off
their motorcycles and
break their necks.

(“I hated that paperback edition,” Wakoski says, examining my dog-eared copy on her dining room table. “The original hardback was elegant and beautiful, with a paper jacket that was black and silver. I don’t like the trippy stuff.”)

It is difficult to overstate how refreshing Wakoski’s poems were to me in the decade of New Formalism and desiccated print journals filled with academic poetry. On one level, reading Wakoski felt transgressive, even wrong. Poems like “I Lay Next to You All Night, Trying Awake to Understand the Watering Places of the Moon” and “You, Letting the Trees Stand as My Betrayer” read as clear-hearted and deceptively straightforward. Aside from Ginsberg’s work, I had not yet read poems with such a radical use of the first-person.

On another level, I felt liberated: at last, here was the poetry equivalent of the autobiographical art I was lapping up elsewhere, such as Spalding Gray’s monologues, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, Ross McElwee’s film Sherman’s March (1986), and Joni Mitchell’s album Hejira (1976). The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems proved an excellent introduction to Wakoski’s work, as well as a gateway to the world of alternative poetries. It is also quintessential Wakoski, starting with the often-anthologized “I Have Had to Learn to Live With My Face”:

I lost my children because I had no money, no husband,
I lost my husband because I was not beautiful,
I lost everything a woman needs, wants,
almost
before I became a woman,
my face shimmering and flat as the moon
with no features.

There is also the controlled melancholy of “Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons” (“I haven’t touched the piano in 10 years, / perhaps in fear that what little love I’ve been able to / pick, like lint, out of the corners of pockets, / will get lost”) and “Conversations with Jan” (”You would rather / take a girl / with a pretty face / on a tour of your kitchen / than listen to me”), along with bittersweet torch songs “Uneasy Rider” and “What I Want in a Husband Besides a Mustache”:

I want a man who is mechanical,
physical,
likes to build,
work with his hands,
perhaps even a sportsman,
but one who does all these things with intelligence
and preferably learned them from
books.
I like a man who has faith in books.
That means he’ll also have faith in me.
I’m a very long and imaginative book.

The collection was a hit and went through several printings. As with so many figures in Wakoski’s personal mythology—the King of Spain, Jason the Sailor, Medea, George Washington, the Shadow Boy—the Motorcycle Betrayer reappeared in later work, including the title poem from Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch, published by Black Sparrow in 1973. A short foreword to that poem tells the story of a man and a woman “who have been living together for some time [and] separate.” The woman decides to “kill him mentally” by writing a “dance poem” that, in the poet’s words, will “prove to herself that she’s glad he’s gone from her life.” “With joy she will dance on all the bad memories of their life together.” Wakoski invokes Robert Duncan, Pindar, Federico García Lorca, Wallace Stevens, Robert Creeley, and William Carlos Williams, and begins:

God damn it,
at last I am going to dance on your grave,
old man;
           you’ve stepped on my shadow once too often,
you’ve been unfaithful to me with other women,
women so cheap and insipid it psychs me out to think I might
ever
be put
in the same category with them;

“I think I was living two lives,” Wakoski writes in the new afterword. “There was the Diane of the poems—traveling and giving readings, acting-out the Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch persona,” and then there was another Diane, the “intimate self, still strangled by her adolescent fear of losing her daddy; she was hurt, hurt by men not feeling loyalty to exchanged emotions.”

The primary riddle I have tried to solve when approaching Wakoski’s work is how to reconcile the seeming contradiction of a poet who argues that poetry “is only interesting in proportion to how interesting the person who writes it is,” while also suggesting that “the answer is to leave / autobiography.” In her foundational essay “Creating a Personal Mythology,” from 1975, she writes, “You see, poets really are stuck with themselves. For the poem is always the personal narrative and most of us have very limited selves.” Once I realized that those two sentiments coexist in Wakoski’s work, I could see how contradicting and containing multitudes is sort of the point.

Over the next five decades and 30-plus collections, Wakoski continued her “poetic search to find an acceptable way to say unacceptable things”: the multi-part Greed; Emerald Ice: Selected Poems, 1962–1987, which won the William Carlos Williams Award; and four volumes of an “Archeology of Movies and Books,” a project from the 1990s, inspired in part by Williams’s Paterson, that integrates letters, poems, and book excerpts. In 1976, Wakoski joined the English faculty at Michigan State University as the writer-in-residence, retiring in 2012 as Distinguished Professor Emeritus. At the same dining room table where we sit in December for our interview, Wakoski regularly convened poetry groups of her former students over the years, with names such as The Sapphos, The Alchemists, and The Troubadours. After retiring, Wakoski put out three collections with Anhinga Press, the most recent of which is Lady of Light (2018).

***

If there was one George Plimpton-style New Journalism stunt I wanted to do while visiting Wakoski, it was to drink tea with her. Wakoski dots her poems with references to tea drinking. In “Breakfast,” for example, she calls a “scented Earl Gray” a “courtier” and “a dandy,” while in “A Californian Fights Against the Old New England Traditions” she talks of bringing her “own teapot and can of / Fortnum & Mason Ceylon Tea” as she people-watches in a Safeway. To drink tea seemed like the ideal way to commune with her in East Lansing.

“Yes, I do still drink tea,” she wrote to me before my arrival. “And I will gladly serve you some when you visit.” What followed was a series of tea-related questions. Do I prefer black teas, such as Earl Grey or Assam? Or green teas like Oolong or Gun Powder? Teas that “tend towards the herbal”? “Smoky teas like Lapsang Souchong?”

I opt for Wakoski’s regular choice, what she calls her “steady date, the one I love”: caramel-flavored black tea with cashew milk. “I think it goes with another senior fall into ninny-brained activities: my love for Regency novels—romance novels about the late 19th century,” she says. Over caramel tea, we talk about one of the things Wakoski first told me when I reached out to her: she has stopped writing poems.

“Not because I wished to, but because I no longer seem to be able,” she says. “I always thought that old age would be a good time to write.” After knee replacement surgeries in 2016 and 2017 and the onset of arthritis in her hands, she says, “I simply don’t know why I can’t do it anymore.”

There’s another reason. “I always thought I saw reality or what was happening around me accurately. And I no longer think that what I see is actually what’s there. I always did before.”

At our last interview at Waksoki’s table, I ask her about anger, and how this expanded version of The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems might resonate more now.

“Have you heard of Taylor Swift?” I ask.

“Oh yes,” she says. “I love country music.”

I tell her about “All Too Well,” Taylor Swift’s bitter retelling of a failed relationship with an unnamed man, although he’s likely the actor Jake Gyllenhaal. Re-recorded and released last year in an expanded 10-minute version, it beat out Don McLean’s 1971 epic “American Pie” as the longest song to ever hit number one. I draw parallels between Taylor Swift’s lover and the Motorcycle Betrayer. I suggest that Swift, like Wakoski, draws on life experience to make her art, mixing anger and personal mythology, in much the same way Wakoski does in Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch.

“Oh, I think it’s a great idea,” she says. “And now I have to hear that song. But you must remember,” she adds, “anger is the top emotion. But there are lots of others, too. There’s still yearning. There’s always the yearning.”