Much-missed, much loved, Diane di Prima, had she lived would be celebrating her 90th Birthday today
Some previous Diane Di Prima posts on The Allen Ginsberg Project – here, here, and here
A focus today on her occult sensibility – and a “shout out” on the extraordinarily valuable “Catalog of the Diane di Prima Occult Library“, (published by TKS Books/Granary back in 2022).
Conceived as a “working collection for poetry, teaching and research”, M.C. Kinniburgh,
its compiler and co-ordinator, writes:
“I began reseaching this library as part of my doctoral dissertation in 2017, when I went to visit Diane di Prima and Sheppard Powell for the first time. I continued to spend time with these books on subsequent trips, and wrote about their relationship to di Prima’s poetry for my 2019 dissertation, and a 2022 book on poets’ libraries. In February 2022, I cataloged the collection at item level, with the intention of finding the books a permanent home. I revised this catalog in October 2022 during the packing and shipping of the books their institutional home at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There, the books are available for researchers alongside di Prima’s literary papers. In the spirit of the archival nature of this collection all items are listed in the order they appeared on five consecutive bookcases in di Prima’s garage…”
From her brief, and lucid, introduction:
“During the 1970’s, the poet Diane Di Prima found herself with burgeoning research needs for occult materials. For her poetry she had recently “received” by poetic dictation the first few poems of what would become her mythological epic, Loba, and found herself delving deeply into pre-modern religious and spiritual practice, including goddess traditions and ancient civilizations. At the same time spurred by a request to write the introduction to a new edition of A.E.Waite‘s edition of works by Paracelsus, di Prima also became heavily invested in alchemy, devouring the hermetic texts associated with this early modern practice. By the 1980’s, di Prima had begun the San Francisco School of Magical and Healing Arts (SIMHA) with her partner Sheppard Powell, deepening her interest in the works of Aleister Crowley, the Golden Dawn, dreams and visualization practices, and New Age topics, like crystal healing and plant alchemy. Around the same time di Prima also taught the Hidden Religions course at New College, upon Robert Duncan‘s insistence.
To chart a way forward for her poetry, teaching, and writing, di Prima began to consciously collect what she soon called her “occult library”. This collection, comprising over 1,000 volumes is the physical evidence of poetry-related practices that were essential to di Prima for the last five decades…”
(The book, now out-of-print, was published in a limited edition, but there is, thankfully, a low-res PDF version of the catalog available for perusal on-line – here)
Her pivotal encounter with Paracelsus (his Hermetic and Alchemical Writings, a commission from Felix Morrow’s University Books) is recounted in the closing pages of her remarkable and captivating 2001 autobiography – Recollections of My Life As A Woman.
In it, di Prima writes:
“I didn’t guess that Paracelsus would change forever my way of seeing the world. When I actually began got read him there was that part of me that recognized even what was most obscure in those pages as inevitable and true. It is the same organ of recognition that is at work when one’s whole being says”yes” to a painting, a piece music, even though it is like nothing we’ve known before, even tho’ it takes an incredible stretch to stay with it to actually hear it, or see it. There is some infallible mechanism in us, something like a dowsing rod of the heart, and it moves in us sometimes – moves seldom, but with total authority.”
Her poem, “Paracelsus” may be read – here
The alchemical, the occult, the spiritual, however, it need hardly be said, suffuses all her writing.
David Stephen Calonne‘s The Spiritual Imagination of The Beats (2017) is, as his publishers note, “the first comprehensive study to explore the role of esoteric, occult, alchemical, shamanistic, mystical and magical traditions in the work of eleven major Beat authors”
(di Prima is among them). As he subsequently notes, following its publication, “I continued studying di Prima’s complete oeuvre as well as conducting a compulsive Internet search through used and rare book dealers to locate several difficult-to-find works. My teaching, lecturing and research led ultimately to Diane di Prima – Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions (2020)”, his encyclopedic full-length study
Patrick James Dunagan reviews it – here
Paul E Nelson conducts an in-depth conversation with the author – here
from that conversation:
PN: A hermetic person running a food bank, that’s curious, its part of the core of who she was. There’s something early in the book, (I think it’s in the introduction), and it might give us a clue as to why she had to go back several centuries, maybe, to get some answers, and there’s a quote from (Allen) Ginsberg, (yeah it’s in the introduction), and the quote is that the East did not go through the Dark Ages, through the destruction of the wisdom transmission principles and the West did have a breakdown, and that this quote shows up in a book like this explains a lot about the foundation of her poetics, her cosmology, her life’s work, and her life’s work is what you call a new scripture for the Beat or Hippie generation, and beyond, (because, you know, when I look back at the ‘Sixties and the promises and the possibilities of the Age of Aquarius and then think about the last four years…)…
So that breakdown in the wisdom transmission in the West, not in the East, and how she was true to her roots by going into.. you know, picking up where it was dropped… ?
DC: Yes, I’m glad you brought that up. Also, again, the title -“Hidden Religions” (Visionary Poetics and Hidden Religions) – I’m taking that from her. She gave a course at New College in California, which she called “The Hidden Religions and the Literature of Europe”, and that’s exactly what she was trying to do – How can I retrace this hidden spiritual tradition that got repressed? – by the church, basically, and then, as you said, by contrasting it to, say, Tibetan traditions which continued without interruption. So in a way, when you think about it, pagan Europe, what happened? – I mean, the Church of Rome replaced the pagan Romans, right? – and then, basically, what you get is a continuous burying of those older traditions. So, I think.. (and she goes back, she goes all the way, she actually even went further back, in that course that she taught, to the Stone Age, you know). She wanted to go all the way back to the beginnings of.. you know.. the classic.. after the Stone Age – the matriarchy, right?, the Goddess figure, which was overthrown by the male patriarchy. So she’s trying to do that also in those courses she gave, all the way back, back to the beginnings of culture.. How.. (how) can we trace back, as far back as we can, the seeds of a kind of revolutionary egalitarian communal spiritual tradition, I think in a way, that’s what she’s trying to do (and by spiritual, I don’t like that word either, I have no other word to use but let’s call it.. you know…it’s not that it’s irrational, its..)
Here’s the extended note from Allen that Calonne quotes:
Di Prima’s friend Allen Ginsberg defined the shift in awareness following the Second World War, arguing in an interview that the threat of atomic apocalypse fostered a need in intelligent young people to search for answers to their psychological quandaries in ancient spiritual traditions:
“Then from the 50s on, there was there introduction of literal Himalayan wisdom with Zen Buddhist roshi‘s, teachers, Zen Masters coming to America, adding an element of wisdom that had been amateur before the Theosophists, The 60s – the introduction of the Tibetan lamas, the Tibetan Book of the Dead and techniques of mind training that are really radical and interesting that were just guessed at in the West once the continuity of the old Gnostics had been broken back during the Dark Ages. The East didn’t go through the Dark Ages, through the destruction of the wisdom transmission principles and the West did have a breakdown… There was no breakdown of the transmission of the wisdom practices in the East. There is still some direct lineage back to Buddha and Chinese Buddhism in China and Zen Buddhism back in Japan. There is a direct lineage of teacher to teacher, from generation to generation, from Buddha’s time to the present Zen Masters. Same with the Tibetan lamas. There is a direct lineage of unbroken transmission of wind training with the Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhists.
Whereas in the West, the old Gnostic schools that came from the same source during the Dark Ages there was an inquisition. There was a breakdown of the transmission of Gnostic contemplative practices. In India there is the direct transmission of the ancient pronunciation and chanting in Sanskrit from generation to generation, unbroken. There is nobody who knows how Ancient Greek was sung and chanted. There was a breakdown in that transmission both in the field of contemplative practice and in the field of poetic practice. So nobody knows how Homer was sung. Or how Sappho was sung. Whereas in the East there was no breakdown in the chanting of Sanskrit. That’s a really important thing. The accumulated wisdom, the tie-binding wisdom so characteristic of high civilization broke down in the West. So we got cut off from our roots, so to speak.”
Iris Cushing‘s Diane di Prima – Prometheus Unbound – As A. Magickal Working is still available from the exemplary CUNY Poetics Document Initiative
“Originally composed to prepare a lecture delivered at the New College of California in 1984, di Prima’s notes, “Prometheus Unbound as a Magickal Working,” begins with the claim that Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1819 lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound is “… a magical ritual to be performed in the mind’s eye, or more accurately, in the realm of the Imagination.”
Here‘s Diane di Prima reading in 1974, reading on the Summer Solstice (sic). She reads her poem “Dream: The Loba Reveals Herself”, then turns to her notebook to read more from her continuing long poem, Loba.”)
Here’s Dale Smith on Loba – (back in 2010, in Big Bridge) – “Tracking The Spirit – Diane di Prima’s Loba”. Smith, astutely refers to it as ” a swift and penetrating book.. in the spirit of Robert Duncan, it presents a complex register of hermetic intersections. (It) is a book of knowledge based in the imaginaries and practices of magic, because di Prima’s art is made through invocations, spells and visionary quests.”