SOURCE: "The Emerald Essay," in Toward a New Poetry, The University of Michigan Press, 1980, pp. 37-44.

In this excerpt, originally published in 1973, Wakoski discusses her concept that "poetry is mythology. And mythology is image. " In the process, she outlines the some of the ways that she comes upon images and how they are used in her work.

I have spent the three days I have been here [The Boatwright Literary Festival in Richmond, Virginia] looking with fascination at the gigantic emeralds ringed with tiny diamond studs that Katherine Anne Porter wears on her pale birdlike hands. One, the smaller one, is shaped like a large teardrop and I think of those Southern catalpa trees that now, in winter, are bare with sexual pods hanging from the limbs like walking canes, and how in a few months they will be covered again with heart-shaped green leaves, like the green...