I turn to Diane Wakoski during troubled times, often looking to her for the antidote to heartbreak. Long bouts of my own existential melancholy are permeated with her self-aware humor and honesty. The frankness with which she can name her emotions makes even her most personal allusions relatable. When I feel my sense of self adrift, that awful shapelessness that many of us know, she brings me back to a familiar and welcome place.
Wakoski is a romantic. She declares her desire to be seen and loved without shame. She’s an old school feminist who loves men (particularly those with mustaches). As a woman, I thought I had to resist my own penchant for tenderness and that included a profound desire to be loved. I came of age in a time when the independent woman was celebrated and to openly want love and, in my case, a male partner was seen as a sign of weakness. Wakoski figured out a way submit to love without diminishing herself.
I’ve written poetry since I was a child, but it took many years to find my voice. Throughout undergrad and my early 20s, I mimicked other writers and focused on what my work sounded like rather than the ideas inside it. The truth was illusive to me and, although I’d always been labeled precocious, I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to say or to whom. When my friend Katherine introduced me to Wakoski’s The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems in 2022, it felt like a homecoming. My point of view was validated; I had unknowingly arrived at a similar ideological place in my work as Wakoski without ever having heard of her. That’s the value in mining for our personal truths: we find ourselves in other people.
-Rachel Willis