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The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems
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The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems
“All of her life’s events are chronicled in the poetry collected in her published works, Diane Wakoski was born in California in 1937.” This quotation will be the center of this article. In light of this, it’s critical to recognize the intimate connection between her personal life and her work. A poem “must naturally grow out of the writer’s life,” she says, and “all poems are letters.” Her poems are so intimate that she has been called a confessional poet. However, she rejects the label. It is common knowledge that the “author” and “speaker” of a poem are two separate entities. However, in this case, Wakoski is both author and speaker simultaneously. While attempting to solve an issue, she alludes to actual people and real events in her life in such a manner that some critics find it too personal. In the words of Wakoski, composing a poem is a kind of therapy; it’s a way of expressing oneself, not to a counsellor or even to the audience. Poems serve as a way to “finish a dream” because, as she put it: “It’s the only way I know how to achieve something that I can’t do in real life.” She’s learnt to exist in both worlds as a pragmatist.
Poets, says Wakoski, must first have something to say before conveying it in the right way. Using the cosmos (moon, rings of Saturn, Magellanic clouds), history (George Washington, the King of Spain), personal experience (the motorcycle betrayal poems), and literary rivalries to create personal mythology in the style of William Butler Yeats, she carves out a territory that is strictly confined to herself CITATION Wak71 l 1033 (Wakoski). As a result, her themes of loss and acceptance, ugliness and beauty, identity loss, and growth are developed via mythology. Her ideas are dualistic and, more importantly, vulnerable to the poem’s resolve. In her mind, poetry helps her heal rather than splinter. It’s worth noting that the novel Coins and Coffins was written as a tribute to La Monte Young, her second husband and the father of her second child. A lost lover is introduced in this book, building her mythology in the process. “Justice Is Reason Enough” borrows from Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” with its “vast shape and its pounding wings.” It’s the “shape” of her mythical twin brother, David, with whom she had incest, that is the focus of this poem. For the justice that “balances the beauty of the universe,” she mourns her brother, “dead by his hand.” Since the poem’s final line mentions beauty, the overall tone is acceptance and encouragement.
Discrepancies and Apparitions also include “Follow That Stagecoach,” a poem that Wakoski considers one of her greatest and most characteristic writing pieces. With its classic sheriff and black rubber skin-diving suit-wearing speaker, Dry Gulch Hollow may seem to be situated in the Wild West. Still, it rapidly transforms into a river, and the macho Western sheriff transforms into a homosexual authority figure. “The sense of disguise is a/ rattlesnake,” the poem’s opening line, implies that the lover- sheriff, like a snake in the grass, puts on and takes off various disguises, including gender: “oh yes, you are putting on your skin-diving suit very fast running to the ocean and slipping away from this girl who carries a loaded gun.” It’s a reversal of roles as she assumes the power he does not have, carrying about a phallic pistol in place of his. “So I’ll write you a love poem if I want to,” the poem concludes, with its trademark self-assurance. Being from the West, I have no fear of my own shadow. Cleverly, the “shadow” refers to her second male personality; the lover is suggested to have rejected his completeness by rejecting the “shadow.”
This time, Wakoski takes on “the father of my nation,” a term given to one of Washington’s poems, the patriarchal political and military system, by focusing on The George Washington Poems, which she dedicated to her father and husband. Anachronistically, “George Washington” emerges as the speaker’s confidant, absentee father, and occasionally absentee lover throughout the book’s twenty-three poems. He plays historical positions such as surveyor and tree cutter and general politician and enslaver. Poet Robert Wakoski pokes fun at the traditional image of a man in leadership in the United States by beginning his first poem with an allusion to “George Washington and the Loss of His Teeth,” in which he refers to “George” throughout the poem in a disrespectful manner.
We better understand her feelings and experiences due to this poetry. Diane Wakoski specialized in writing poetry that dealt with the subject of grief. When a woman feels she isn’t attractive, she suffers the loss of her childhood, the loss of her loves, and the loss of her family. Because of these setbacks, she found herself surrounded by a scorched soil of loneliness, which she expressed with great sincerity. However, in my opinion, these poems do not represent a statement of female autonomy. In many Women’s Liberation tracts, their wrath is not intellectual, as in this book. Miss Wakoski employs a novel strategy, though. She gnaws on the enslavement of women with her teeth and yells them out with such ferocious passion that the Chains begin to dissolve. Enthusiasm is that of a solitary prisoner who is both bitter and free at the same time. However, this is not a generalization throughout the book. I’ve never come across modern poetry like these poems. Vengeance and self-knowledge are sometimes disguised as whimsical asides that delight the reader while frightening him with understanding.
When it comes to the book’s most glaring shortcoming, its rage becomes shallow and repetitive. Stridency doesn’t always transform into poetry; the words are crushed nearly into impotence by their wrath. Her dedication: “This book is dedicated to those guys who have deceived me at one time or another, in hopes they would fall from their motorbikes and shatter their necks” sets the tone. The intended sarcasm doesn’t fully work. Many of the poems display excessive rage, leading to a lack of kindness and blindness that detracts from the poetry’s power. Overall, Wakoski is a poet’s poet, and he has a wealth of knowledge to share.
Works Cited
Wakoski, Diane. The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems. Second Printing, Touchstone, 1971.
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