SOURCE: An interview in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter, 1977, pp. 1-19.

In this interview, originally conducted in 1974 and updated in 1976, Wakoski discusses many aspects of poetry, including the role gender plays in writing, her concern with "beauty" and aesthetics, and the state of contemporary poetry.

[Healey]: When did you first begin to write poetry?

[Wakoski]: When I was about seven years old. I wrote many sonnets and began taking writing courses in the fifties at Berkeley. I was encouraged by Tom Parkinson and Josephine Miles, and admired Robinson Jeffers and T. S. Eliot. I think I was fortunate to be in college in the late fifties, at the time of the San Francisco poetry renaissance. Everyone around the college was as involved with contemporary poetry as people in the poetry scene in San Francisco, and that's unusual for universities. There were always the college professors who thought that...