A Review of Diane Wakoski’s Lady of Light
Lady of Light, Diane Wakoski. Anhinga Press, 2018. 234 pages. $22.00
by Craig Cotter
For over fifty years, Diane Wakoski’s poetry has brought transcendent beauty to American readers.
If you’ve attended her readings, rooms filled, you always see fans carrying-in armloads of books to be signed—books written over many decades—books worn from reading. With her generosity of spirit, you will always see her sitting at a table signing, talking, taking photos—always staying until the last person has had their books signed.
The lines are beginning again as Wakoski’s new book, Lady of Light, has hit bookstore and internet shelves.
Wakoski’s work has been multiply described—as a member of the Deep Imagist School (something that never really caught-on in the early ‘60s because who really wants to be considered deep in poetry?), as a confessional poet, as a feminist and as a narrative poet.
Wakoski has laughed-off most labels. She gives a wry smile about the Deep Imagists. She acknowledges that one aspect of the confessional is that you plead guilty to what you are confessing, and she accepts no such presumptions. A huge supporter of women’s rights, Wakoski has often run afoul of some feminists as she has stated she does not feel whole without a man in her life; and has, irreverently, truthfully, humorously said that she also needs a penis. And it is very hard to classify Wakoski as a strict narrative poet when her poems often leave narrative structures and move into—yes—series of deep images.
Regardless of classifications, Wakoski has always been at the forefront of the avant-garde. Lady of Light wastes no time in owning these bona fides as the book begins with a poem written for her in 1962 by Jackson MacLow, and Wakoski goes about structuring her new book into light sections suggested by MacLow’s poem.
Wakoski has been a teacher of poetry for many decades, around the world, around America, and focused on Michigan State University for the past forty years. There is little separation between Wakoski’s poetry workshops and her poetry—both function to share the good things that have come from the Whitman Tradition; to share ideas of art centered around beauty and truth; and to not waste anyone’s fucking time with false praise or reassurance.
Wakoski has earned enemies in the poetry world for her frank talk and writing that has seemed brutal to some. But this laser demand for Truth is always focused more on herself than on others.
Throughout Wakoski’s poetry she shares her experiences growing-up in poverty in Orange County, California. Of being abandoned by her father; of being an odd child who was almost constantly lonely and frightened.
But no self-pity in Wakoski. These episodes are only shared in the context of how to escape from pain and suffering through Art.
Her masterworks are well anthologized and well loved: “I Have Had to Learn to Live With My Face,” “The Story of Richard Maxfield,” “Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons,” “The Pumpkin Pie..,” “Red Runner.” In each of these poems suffering—whether from an ugly face, the death of an important artist and friend, the poverty of childhood, false reassurance, or the cares of aging and death—is never portrayed as a pity-party. Relief, salvation, ecstasy, always comes in the form of art.
Lady of Light again delves into life’s challenges—as Wakoski turns 82 this year—more than ever into the decay and ultimate death of the body. But if there was ever a book from an elder stateswoman to young poets about how to approach art, this is it.
Wakoski writes in “And Now She Has Disappeared in Water,” the long, reflective poem she wrote about her younger sister Marilyn’s death:
ART
is made when you subject yourself
to the unacceptable, then dredge
yourself out,
find a mineral replacement
The poem begins with the image of an 8 of spades found in the speaker’s driveway. This triggers a Proustian involuntary memory of playing Crazy Eights with her sister as a child. The black card simultaneously calls forth an image of a flock—a “murmuration—” of starlings—and this whirling black cloud glides through the poem as the speaker shares a barren childhood crushed by poverty. The speaker—who sees beauty that others do not—is an outcast.
A beautiful narrative sequence follows of a mother who, irrationally, hates tea. The observer in the poem—mature Diane thinking back on her childhood feelings—knows, even as a small girl, such blind hatred and disgust can only move her away from something essential.
The “April 5” entry—Easter Sunday—shares one of the few times the speaker and her sister have a bonding moment—dying and coloring hard-boiled eggs. This activity, though pleasant, was
“…[n]ot enough to make us friends.”
As a core principle of her teaching, Wakoski would remind her university students that you must observe. Listen. Look. When others turn-away, as a social custom, she encourages her students to watch, listen, take notes, make recordings—whatever is necessary. That one of a poet’s key tools is to keenly analyze and attempt to understand the world.
After sharing how “…[m]y unwillingness to be like our classmates/embarrassed you,” the speaker moves forward with an articulation of how to escape suffering through—as always—poetry/art:
That unwillingness to be like others
was what made me a poet.
“Look away,” our mother said to us,
when there were ugly things confronting us.
I could not do that.
As the poem winds through fourteen pages, sections identified as written during the first nine days of the April after her sister’s death, the poem shares, with brutal honesty, the pain associated with a broken family/hopelessness. Shares the distance between the speaker Diane and her younger sister Marilyn. But whereas Lady of Light is dedicated to Robinson Jeffers, one of Wakoski’s great teachers and exemplars of Western art, unlike Jeffers, who generally felt humanity was a huge cosmic mistake worthy of being wiped-out, Wakoski always finds a way, through art, to overcome suffering. And mourns those who do not escape.
In “El Segundo Blues,” Wakoski uses the image of highly endangered Los Angeles butterflies—with just a few football fields of turf remaining in and around LAX as their last colonies—as a migrating cloud that both takes her to her childhood home of deprivation, but also transforms her as the magic cloud rescues with the blues of Bill Evans/the hope of “male authority” the girl searches for in a fatherless existence.
The El Segundo Blues are an image of hidden beauty. Unrecognized beauty. Tenuous beauty.
From “Raven T’ai Chi:”
…the despair I often feel when I am sure I have created beauty
but that no one perceives it.
When you leave your eyes always open,
perhaps you see what others see, but what is this life about
except hidden beauty?
The hidden beauty of love between sisters; of endangered butterflies; of not turning away.
In “Harlequin Rose,” the poet/Diane disappears:
I aminvisible
because I am old.
No man
is looking at me, thinking of my mysteries or secrets,
wondering if he dare approach.
I am my aunts now, chubby roses…
As Wakoski looks more deeply at her own aging/disappearance/approaching death, she shares the inevitable, the loss of power, the loss of self, the loss of light—but moves forward with acceptance and a sense of humor that has been a staple of her work:
My name, Diane, declares
Moon Goddess… an oxymoron
as I control nothing
Call me Diane, I say, wanting you to think of moonlight…
…If I were a jellybean, I’d be the
purple one that nobody likes.
[“Sea Thrift & Gorse”]
Leaving a Michigan butterfly garden full of non-native species, the speaker in “Frisked for Butterflies” moves quickly between the reality of genocides, the absurdity of not accepting natural migrations and the beauty they can create, a deep acceptance of inevitable change, and the understanding that such lack of acceptance can deprive us of beauty:
…in a world that…
had never before in history
been careful. Not careful of systems or species—
destroying or transplanting
Passenger Pigeons,
Buffalo,
Native Americans.
That, in fact, some historic attempts to keep
systems pure
become…holocausts or genocides.
*
…We had all smiled, being patted down, but I left
feeling a little sad, empty,
knowing I was carrying nothing with wings…
…no menace of escaped beauty to invade my
pale life.
Wakoski has developed a huge readership partly because her poems are accessible. Her language lacks pretension. She was famously disdained by a critic in the ‘70s for writing “corn pone lyrics.”
Wakoski casts aside such silliness with every poem. Whether writing about a sister who collected seashells, endangered butterflies, aging or jellybeans, Wakoski has taken a central tenant of Williams and made it a reality for over five decades. At a Harvard reading on December 4, 1951, Williams reminded the audience that any subject was open to the American poem. We were free from having to write about Gods and Kings; we could consider our own lives/experiences as fertile material for poetry.
This sentiment might not seem so revolutionary two decades into the 21st Century. But to lose sight of it is to dishonor those who broke ground for this American adventure. Wakoski never does. She has always honored Jeffers. Stevens, ever a touchstone for Wakoski, receives an epigraph in “Ode To My Hands,” in which Wakoski shares a tenant she has learned from this master: “Beauty…/…in the flesh is immortal.”
Lady of Light is not only a sensual exploration of how suffering can be overcome through art, it contains her own versions of Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.”
Wakoski asked an important rhetorical question in 1976’s Waiting For the King of Spain:
I often wonder why a poem to me
is so much more like a piece of bread and butter
then like a sapphire?
In Light, further direction to artists continues:
…poetry is subtle, always a bit
perverse, and never without a little piece of broken glass
you are asked to swallow.
From “To Render the Beauty You Crave” in Light, Wakoski again reminds of the need to always acknowledge great artists who have shown a Way. These lines from a sequence of poems written while listening to Daniel Barenboim perform Beethoven’s piano sonatas:
Listening to this music, morning after morning,
I am convinced that the idea of progress in Art
is blasphemy. Why would anyone ever want
to replace Beethoven? Why always the search for the new?
As so many masters of contemporary American poetry have passed: Ginsberg, Creeley, Ignatow, Merwin, O’Hara, Wright—so many others—it is our good fortune that Diane Wakoski’s work straddles two centuries. Lady of Light is poetry at its most mature and powerful.
As Williams taught us in 1955’s “Of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,”
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Over 60 years later, in “Black Friday,” Wakoski unifies the generations of American poetry:
…what
really is absurd
is trying to live without
poetry.
Craig Cotter was born in 1960 in New York and has lived in California since 1986. His poems have appeared in Caliban Online, California Quarterly, Chiron Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, Free State Review, Great Lakes Review, Hawai’i Review, Ottawa Arts Review, Poetry New Zealand & Tampa Review. His fourth book of poems, After Lunch with Frank O’Hara, is currently available from Chelsea Station Editions. In 2011 his manuscript After Lunch was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. In 2019 his new manuscript, Alex, was a finalist for the Tampa Review Prize. www.craigcotter.com