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COPYRIGHT 2003 Bridgewater State College
In 2001, as my "Women In America" class drew to a close, my freshman students had a complaint so compelling that they risked offending me just before I calculated final grades. They announced that the women's movement seemed a failure to them because they saw no successful women whom they would choose to emulate. The stars of the entertainment industry, like Madonna or Whitney Houston, tended to have troubled personal lives, while the "safer" role models like Janet Reno and Madeleine Albright seemed desexed. They looked around and saw no woman whose life suggested that they could enjoy distinguished careers without sacrificing all hope of developing a rich personal lives.
I suspect that if the poet Diane Wakoski had heard their comments, she would urge the students to see this deficit as an opportunity to use their hearts and minds to develop and live out new roles that would allow women to enjoy both success and personal happiness. Wakoski's poetry asserts again and again that imagination can help solve the difficulties that repeatedly haunt women.
Wakoski has earned the right to speak with authority on this subject, for during her 65 years on the planet she has lived through times that afforded women considerably fewer options than women attending college today. Moreover, she began her life far from the privileged circumstances often associated with an endeavor like poetry. Born on August 3, 1937, she grew up in Whittier, California where her divorced mother worked as a bookkeeper to support her two daughters. Wakoski's sense of abandonment by her father recurs in her poetry, as in the following poem:
If George Washington had not been the Father of my Country it is doubtful that I would ever have found a father.... other children said, "My father is a doctor," or "My father gave me this camera," or "My father took me to the movies," or "My father and I went swimming," but my father is coming in a letter once a month for a while, and my father sometimes came in a telegram but mostly my father came to me in sleep.
After she became pregnant in high school, she stayed in a home for unwed mothers until she gave birth. She then put the child up for adoption because she did not have the money necessary to provide him with a good life. Educated at the University of California at Berkeley, she considers herself extremely lucky, in part because of the terrific education California offered its residents when she grew up there. And, indeed, her journey through California public school system laid the groundwork for a life rich in both achievement. Wakoski has published over 40 collections of poetry, most with the prestigious Black Sparrow Press, and won numerous awards such as a Guggenheim, a Fulbright and the Poetry Society of America's Walt Whitman Award. After teaching at one university after another for over a decade, she has settled at Michigan State University where she now holds a...
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