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The Magellanic Clouds.
poetry
- GenresPoetry
150 pages, Paperback
First published October 10, 1975
1 person is currently reading
40 people want to read
About the author
Diane Wakoski
160 books56 followersWakoski is an American poet who is primarily associated with the deep image poets such as Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Kelly, and Clayton Eshleman. Throughout her work she uses legends, myth and fairy tales to create a deeply personal mythology.
She is best known for a series of poems collectively known as "The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems."
Wakoski was given the William Carlos Williams Award for her "Emerald Ice: Selected Poetry 1962-1987."
She is best known for a series of poems collectively known as "The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems."
Wakoski was given the William Carlos Williams Award for her "Emerald Ice: Selected Poetry 1962-1987."
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 27, 2024
The photographic plate is blurred.
That blurry area
is where you laughed and
breathed on the plate; lizard skinned
prickly pears roll out of your mouth; a purple bird
twists your tongue with his beak
and crazy cactus leaves of love pin you luckily to
one man;
you have a mouthful of stars when you laugh
and you fall over the milky way at your feet.
Next door the Megellanic Clouds swirl
and try to force themselves into your paintings
but you are too happy painting
little hearts and big hearts and sticking them
all over you husband
who is a river washing silver fish over you in the dark.
March 8, 2025
This is an early work by Wakoski. Her writing is largely surreal. I like surrealism but it's a tricky thing to do successfully. When it is done successfully, I find it extremely fascinating and some of the most rewarding poetry to read because the whole is greater than the some of the parts, which initially you, the reader, didn't believe could possibly come together in any sort of meaningful way. There's a great stretching and contracting that happens.
Wakoski has some wonderful poems in this volume but also many snoozers. I would say she is hugely guilty of self-indulgent fascination with her own ability to generate disassociated imagery. I have no objection to this sort of mental tripping as a form of personal recreation and even consider it healthy mental exercise. But a poet needs to give me a reason to read his/her poetry and jumbled imagery isn't a reason. Been there, seen that, done that.
Some poems never cohere. Some poems have a jumble and then develop into something good but isolated later on. Why not cut the jumble? It nearly put me to sleep before I got to the good part. Surrealism built its head of steam on what is called automatic writing, which is writing without inhibitions/editing anything that comes into the mind on the assumption that this results in plumbing normally inaccessible depths of the subconscious where profound insights await discovery. Sometimes this is true. But it's certainly not always true. Some of the surrealists and many of their later followers seem to treat as sacred everything that comes up from automatic writing or other forms of free association. That's a mistake. Give us the good stuff at the end and pare out the meaningless subterfuge you had to wade through to get there. Poet means maker not simply receiver.
Okay, so much for my rant. I do like surrealism, as I said. I'd heard of Wakoski and this book before finding it in one of my cheap book outlets and snatching it up, glad to have a chance to read her. Since she occupies a poetic hinterland, her work isn't anthologized all that often. And this is early Wakoski, circa 1970. I have no idea how her poetry has developed since.
On to the poems themselves! The book starts with "Greed: Part 1. Of Polygamy" and "Greed: Part 2. Of Accord & Principle." The first is interesting and the second is absolutely marvelous. The titles sound dry but Wakoski is a complicated, holistic thinker. In fact, I would say that whenever she tries to be simple her poems fall flat, unlike some poets who can make a simple moment beautiful or incisive. So greed in these poems is any form of wanting your cake and eating it too or wanting two mutually exclusive things. In "Of Accord & Principle," she is examining the desire to be popular and yet to maintain one's integrity. In the poem, she introduces the image of two fish mouthing/kissing early on. It's a neutral image at first, is beginning to seem rather suspect in the middle of the 10-page poem and is outright sinister at the end.
The poem is flawed by a diatribe in the middle about poets who want fame and yet to keep their integrity. This accusation of contests being won as a matter of "kissing up" to judges or whatever is considered the poetry establishment at the time is now nothing new. I don't know if it was shocking for her to bring it out in a poem in the 1970s. To her credit, she does not try to dodge guilt. This proved the case with most of her poems. If there was something unsavory, she searched her own insides for evidence of being tainted.
On the strength of "Of Accord and Principle," it's complexity and the sense of being led on a journey by a competent and intelligent guide who had something large to show me, I read 29 poems, 60 pages, of snoozers that I found very difficult to read, before I hit pay dirt again. Overall the last third of the book was much more rewarding. Because of that, I'm interested in reading more of Wakoski. It appears on amazon that her latest collection was in 2010. In 1984, she collected the "Greed," poems, which grew to 13, into one volume.
Past time to quote some of her work. "The Old Impossibilities" is an example of a poem where the vast majority of the poem seemed disconnected from what I considered a powerful ending. Here's the beginning (in all quoting here, spacing on the page is lost):
Dreaming borders on
apricot tastes,
the distance of swallows
to the eave,
the uncurtained window,
his bare foot on the hot cement
Take one
small segment
of the grapefruit
The odor of their bodies after a shower
Past winter into
the language
You had to bleed for each love poem:
why not
for the others?
That is all contiguous. Now for the end that I liked:
I cannot scream
so I whisper
I cannot dance
so I whisper
I cannot have my children
so I whisper
I cannot have my husband
so I whisper
I cannot sleep
so I whisper
This sac that holds my life
finely woven of
whispers
rustles as I slip it over my
head. Rustles as I walk down the street
rustles in a world made of
mouths
rustles and rustles
These whispers that clothe me
and take the place of my life
What I love about that is how the whispering, the shrinking and inhibition, the attempt to hide, is in the end loud and obvious to everyone. I saw nothing in the earlier part of the poem that led up to or augmented this ending passage. I would say cut it all.
By contrast, the poem "The Birds of Paradise Being Very Plain Birds" is a poem where all the parts seem to fit. I wouldn't even take out the gruesome part that I don't like because in the end I think it is part of the fabric of the poem, part of what the poem is about, which again is either being less than one's potential or seeming to be less. Here is the beginning:
"What do they look like," he said.
I said, "They are very very plain,
until they ruffle their neck feathers."
This is a city where
beauty is
unexpected.
They threw the jaguar a dead rabbit,
whole, white, long ears still warm,
pink eye holes in his soft rabbit head.
[A bit from the middle:]
"Look at the truck with all those sacks of potatoes," she said,
but her friends in the limousine did not know what she was saying,
she was out of her senses, perhaps with grief,
the hearse with the yellow flowers on it travelling too slowly in
the sunlight, the day too slow, too still, the day
when everyone's vision cracked a bit in the sun,
the strain of the bird flying through the window,
the Bird of Paradise suddenly ruffling his feathers,
a change to beauty.
[and from the end]
Each has a different look, I say,
but all plain,
very plain, until the ruffling starts.
Once again he is the Buddha sheep,
staring past me into the mirror, his wisdom, mazes of himself,
I the rabbit, never having run in the fields or stolen carrots from
Farmer brown, raised in a cage,
bred for food,
crouching especially timid but not moving,
the day the keepers came in to wring necks, the hunt never starting,
having been already over at the start
--the brains go first
a hungry animal licking his way down,
through the red mass,
no longer a brain.
The Birds of Paradise have only an occasional
and unpredictable
beauty.
It's hard to give the entire impression of the poem by quoting it in parts, which I think is a testament to the poem. For instance, the last part where the speaker identifies with the rabbit is a counterpart to having identified with the jaguar. And the rabbit is not just a rabbit any more. Also, the middle part I quoted above comes after a section in which the reverse perception was "true." The person had seen a limousine which she was told was actually a truck of potatoes. A lot is going on here about perception and different ways of being deprived and the way we find nourishment.
So I'm curious about later Wakoski. I'd like to read the collected greeds, maybe something from the 90s and something from the past ten years to see what she has done with her talent for both images and big ideas.
Wakoski has some wonderful poems in this volume but also many snoozers. I would say she is hugely guilty of self-indulgent fascination with her own ability to generate disassociated imagery. I have no objection to this sort of mental tripping as a form of personal recreation and even consider it healthy mental exercise. But a poet needs to give me a reason to read his/her poetry and jumbled imagery isn't a reason. Been there, seen that, done that.
Some poems never cohere. Some poems have a jumble and then develop into something good but isolated later on. Why not cut the jumble? It nearly put me to sleep before I got to the good part. Surrealism built its head of steam on what is called automatic writing, which is writing without inhibitions/editing anything that comes into the mind on the assumption that this results in plumbing normally inaccessible depths of the subconscious where profound insights await discovery. Sometimes this is true. But it's certainly not always true. Some of the surrealists and many of their later followers seem to treat as sacred everything that comes up from automatic writing or other forms of free association. That's a mistake. Give us the good stuff at the end and pare out the meaningless subterfuge you had to wade through to get there. Poet means maker not simply receiver.
Okay, so much for my rant. I do like surrealism, as I said. I'd heard of Wakoski and this book before finding it in one of my cheap book outlets and snatching it up, glad to have a chance to read her. Since she occupies a poetic hinterland, her work isn't anthologized all that often. And this is early Wakoski, circa 1970. I have no idea how her poetry has developed since.
On to the poems themselves! The book starts with "Greed: Part 1. Of Polygamy" and "Greed: Part 2. Of Accord & Principle." The first is interesting and the second is absolutely marvelous. The titles sound dry but Wakoski is a complicated, holistic thinker. In fact, I would say that whenever she tries to be simple her poems fall flat, unlike some poets who can make a simple moment beautiful or incisive. So greed in these poems is any form of wanting your cake and eating it too or wanting two mutually exclusive things. In "Of Accord & Principle," she is examining the desire to be popular and yet to maintain one's integrity. In the poem, she introduces the image of two fish mouthing/kissing early on. It's a neutral image at first, is beginning to seem rather suspect in the middle of the 10-page poem and is outright sinister at the end.
The poem is flawed by a diatribe in the middle about poets who want fame and yet to keep their integrity. This accusation of contests being won as a matter of "kissing up" to judges or whatever is considered the poetry establishment at the time is now nothing new. I don't know if it was shocking for her to bring it out in a poem in the 1970s. To her credit, she does not try to dodge guilt. This proved the case with most of her poems. If there was something unsavory, she searched her own insides for evidence of being tainted.
On the strength of "Of Accord and Principle," it's complexity and the sense of being led on a journey by a competent and intelligent guide who had something large to show me, I read 29 poems, 60 pages, of snoozers that I found very difficult to read, before I hit pay dirt again. Overall the last third of the book was much more rewarding. Because of that, I'm interested in reading more of Wakoski. It appears on amazon that her latest collection was in 2010. In 1984, she collected the "Greed," poems, which grew to 13, into one volume.
Past time to quote some of her work. "The Old Impossibilities" is an example of a poem where the vast majority of the poem seemed disconnected from what I considered a powerful ending. Here's the beginning (in all quoting here, spacing on the page is lost):
Dreaming borders on
apricot tastes,
the distance of swallows
to the eave,
the uncurtained window,
his bare foot on the hot cement
Take one
small segment
of the grapefruit
The odor of their bodies after a shower
Past winter into
the language
You had to bleed for each love poem:
why not
for the others?
That is all contiguous. Now for the end that I liked:
I cannot scream
so I whisper
I cannot dance
so I whisper
I cannot have my children
so I whisper
I cannot have my husband
so I whisper
I cannot sleep
so I whisper
This sac that holds my life
finely woven of
whispers
rustles as I slip it over my
head. Rustles as I walk down the street
rustles in a world made of
mouths
rustles and rustles
These whispers that clothe me
and take the place of my life
What I love about that is how the whispering, the shrinking and inhibition, the attempt to hide, is in the end loud and obvious to everyone. I saw nothing in the earlier part of the poem that led up to or augmented this ending passage. I would say cut it all.
By contrast, the poem "The Birds of Paradise Being Very Plain Birds" is a poem where all the parts seem to fit. I wouldn't even take out the gruesome part that I don't like because in the end I think it is part of the fabric of the poem, part of what the poem is about, which again is either being less than one's potential or seeming to be less. Here is the beginning:
"What do they look like," he said.
I said, "They are very very plain,
until they ruffle their neck feathers."
This is a city where
beauty is
unexpected.
They threw the jaguar a dead rabbit,
whole, white, long ears still warm,
pink eye holes in his soft rabbit head.
[A bit from the middle:]
"Look at the truck with all those sacks of potatoes," she said,
but her friends in the limousine did not know what she was saying,
she was out of her senses, perhaps with grief,
the hearse with the yellow flowers on it travelling too slowly in
the sunlight, the day too slow, too still, the day
when everyone's vision cracked a bit in the sun,
the strain of the bird flying through the window,
the Bird of Paradise suddenly ruffling his feathers,
a change to beauty.
[and from the end]
Each has a different look, I say,
but all plain,
very plain, until the ruffling starts.
Once again he is the Buddha sheep,
staring past me into the mirror, his wisdom, mazes of himself,
I the rabbit, never having run in the fields or stolen carrots from
Farmer brown, raised in a cage,
bred for food,
crouching especially timid but not moving,
the day the keepers came in to wring necks, the hunt never starting,
having been already over at the start
--the brains go first
a hungry animal licking his way down,
through the red mass,
no longer a brain.
The Birds of Paradise have only an occasional
and unpredictable
beauty.
It's hard to give the entire impression of the poem by quoting it in parts, which I think is a testament to the poem. For instance, the last part where the speaker identifies with the rabbit is a counterpart to having identified with the jaguar. And the rabbit is not just a rabbit any more. Also, the middle part I quoted above comes after a section in which the reverse perception was "true." The person had seen a limousine which she was told was actually a truck of potatoes. A lot is going on here about perception and different ways of being deprived and the way we find nourishment.
So I'm curious about later Wakoski. I'd like to read the collected greeds, maybe something from the 90s and something from the past ten years to see what she has done with her talent for both images and big ideas.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews