Ward was determined to become an artist, and enrolled in the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, which was then an unaccredited institution.
Career
Gallery of Diane Ward
1981
From left to right, standing: Tan Wanveer, Diane Ward, Terence Winch, Susan Campbell; from left to right, sitting: Phyllis Rosenzweig, Bernie Welt, Doug Lang, Becky Levenson - in about 1981 in Terence Winch's apartment.
From left to right, standing: Tan Wanveer, Diane Ward, Terence Winch, Susan Campbell; from left to right, sitting: Phyllis Rosenzweig, Bernie Welt, Doug Lang, Becky Levenson - in about 1981 in Terence Winch's apartment.
Diane Ward is an American educator and poet. She was initially associated with the first wave of Language poetry in the 1970s and has actively published in the 21st century, maintaining a presence in various artistic communities for many decades.
Background
Diane Ward was born on November 9, 1956 in Washington, District of Columbia, United States.
She was one of six children, one of whom died in infancy, and in order to support his family, her father worked as an accountant for the General Accounting Office of the U.S. government during the day, and in numerous other jobs in the evenings. He died when Ward was 12.
Finances became difficult for the family, and Ward’s two brothers dropped out of school. Her mother worked as a seamstress and for a savings and loan institution.
Education
Ward was determined to become an artist, and enrolled in the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, which was then an unaccredited institution. There she began taking art courses and also met Doug Lang and Terence Winch, both of whom taught creative writing.
At that time Ward began writing poetry, and with Doug Lang moved into a large house whose other tenants included local poet Bernard Welt.
But Ward truly realized that she wanted to become a poet only when, one day, she heard a local Radio Pacifica broadcast in which Peter Inman described what he felt a poet was.
Diane Ward moved with a young artist friend to New York City in 1979. There she worked as a freelance typesetter, and helped with distribution and production for Roof Books, one of the major sources of “Language” poetry, edited by James Sherry. While working on the night shift at a typesetting house near Union Square, she met Chris Hauty.
Meanwhile, Ward took a job as a production associate at Pantheon Books in 1982. In 1987 she moved with Hauty to Los Angeles, California. Ward worked for a while at the University of California, Los Angeles, before turning her attention full time to motherhood. She has also worked as a schoolteacher’s assistant.
Through all these years she still found time to devote herself to poetry, writing nine books of poetry and editing, with Phyllis Rosenzweig, a journal published in various forms - fliers, postcards, etc. She has also extensively participated in readings throughout the country.
Additionally, Ward has published more than a dozen works of poetry and has been included in numerous anthologies, among them: Moving Borders and Out of Everywhere along with selections published in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry and From the Other Side of the Century. She has also read widely in the United States, including the District of Columbia Arts Center, Small Press Traffic at New College (San Francisco), The Bowery Poetry Club and The Poetry Project of St. Mark’s Church.
Besides, Ward's work has appeared in dozens of small press publications, including Crayon, Conjunctions, The Paris Review, Sulfur, and Raddle Moon.
Ward currently lives in Santa Monica, California where she taught poetry in public schools to 1st through 5th graders for many years.
Diane Ward has received considerable recognition for her work including the 1980 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and the San Francisco State University Poetry Center’s Book of the Year Award in 1984, and the 1988-1989 California Arts Council Artists Fellowship in Literature.
Several of her poems (including “Fade on Family”) have been set to music by the Los Angeles composer Michael Webster, and she has collaborated with the avant-garde sound performer and musician, Emily Hay.
Although influenced, in part, by writers associated at the time with New York School poetry such as Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge, Ward notes that she was most influenced by Gertrude Stein.
Quotations:
"I realized that poetry could be like drawing, it could be thinking itself, a conceptual activity, and not just an end product."
Interests
Writers
Gertrude Stein
Connections
Diane Ward married Chris Hauty in 1988. Hauty also wanted to be a poet, but writing plays and reviewing scripts, he began to focus more on film, and turned to writing film scripts.
In 1987 Diane moved with Hauty to Los Angeles, where they had two children, George and Jackson. Hauty began working for various film studios there.
