Diane Di Prima’s birthday today. Diane di Prima (1934-2020)
See some of our previous postings on the Allen Ginsberg Project – here
and here – and here
We feature today vintage footage from a reading from the earlier days of the Poetry Center at PCCC (Passaic County Community College) which was recorded for public access television in Paterson for a series entitled “Poetry Works USA” (1994)
The introduction to the reading is by executive director, Maria Mazziotti Gillan,
MMG: “I’m very pleased to welcome today Diane Di Prima as our guest poet. Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn and lived and wrote in Manhattan for many years..where she became known, as I’m sure you all know, as an important writer of the Beat movement. During that time she founded the New York Poets Theatre and founded Poets Press, which published the work of many new writers of the period.Together with LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) she added the literary newsletter, The Floating Bear from 1961 to (19)69. For the past 25 years she’s lived and worked in Northern California, where she took part in many activities and where she raised her five children and taught hermetic and esoteric traditions in poetry and I think was very instrumental in starting a poetics program at the New College of California. She’s the author of 32 books of poetry and prose including Pieces of A Song (from City Lights Books) and Seminary Poems (from Floating Island Press). Her work has been translated into 12 languages. She currently lives in San Francisco where she teaches privately. Her works-in-progress include Not Quite Buffalo Stew, a satire of Californian life, [Editorial note – unpublished] The Mysteries of Vision, a book of essays on HD, and one or two like the study of Shelley’s poetic use of traditional Western magic Her Collected Plays, Zip Code, will be published by Coffee House Press, an autobiographical memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman will be published by Viking-Penguin Books in 1994. And those are all the little facts about Diane di Prima. I think, however, I can’t allow her to come up here and read her poetry without saying that the same kind of courage and energy and honesty that’s present in the poems is also present in Diane di Prima as a person,. And I think that it’s so wonderful to see that kind of correlation between the person on the page and the person in real life. Let’s welcome Diane di Prima
D d P: My first book that I published (hooray!) came out in 1958, The poems were written in the mid ‘Fifties till the middle ‘Fifties, ’53 to ’56, something like that, and the thrust of that time and that culture and that way of writing was really to be very very understated, to say as little as possible. And so these were poems that said as little as possible and..or said as much as possible without saying in words, which is an interesting thing to play with for a while. I”ll read you a few little things from that time that are from a series called More or Less Love Poems – (“You bet your life…”..”you’ll think it happened accidental”), (“You are not quite the air I breathe/thank god/so go) That was.. those were considered love poems in 1953, they were very affectionate. Here’s a very affectionate one – “for you/I would no longer pick/my so-pickable nose or bite my delicious nails/for you I would fix my teeth and buy a mattress/for you I would kill my favorite roach that lives in the woodwork by the drawing table”). So those were the.. it took a lot of.. when I did a lot of cutting things back at that point, making them as.. seeing how much you could say without saying it .
And then things changed again and one was sort of interested in putting stuff back in – but maybe not – I’ll read a poem called “Numbers Racket”.It’s from a few years later. It’s also a love poem (“When you take no for an answer”..”are you taking it now, taking no for an answer”)
And then there were.. you know, one got involved in other kinds of things, got interested in long lines and images and filling things out and not being cool all the time. But on other poem I want to read from this early thing is a poem I wrote to my first child before she was born – called “Song for Baby-O, Unborn”. It’s from 1957. (“Sweetheart, when you break through, you’ll find a poet here… enough to love to break your heart forever”)
So skipping a whole lot of time, I’d like to read a poem that Maria asked me to read that 1I wrote in 1968 (so ten years have gone by and many kinds of things have been written, newsletters have been printed and theaters and presses have been bought and sold and now it’s 1968 and I’m writing to my anarchist grandfather – April Fool..(April fools was his birthday). “April Fools Birthday Poem for Grandpa“ – (“Today is your/birthday and I have tried..”…”that they may look on earth/and not be ashamed”)
Maria also asked me to read this (I guess we’re into a family thing here). This poem to my father which I wrote a couple of years after his death is called “To My Father” – (*In my dreams you stand among roses..”…”In my dreams you stand at the door of your house/and weep for your wife, my mother”)
So that’s all that stuff from pre-1970, that leaves out really the main kind of thing I wrote from in the ’60’s, but I’ll read you one of those. There’s a kind of way I was writing and I still write somewhat, somewhat, somewhat, which is like..very much using the images to say it, not explaining what there about, which I began around 1960. I wrote a book of love poems to Amiri Baraka called The New Handbook of Heaven, and they were all written like that, and this is from that book. It’s a poem called “The Beach”, and although it doesn’t say so anywhere any more than the earlier cool poems did, it’s a love poem – “The Beach” – (“where I ship out from the tides give no indication”…”my choice, my monster lobster walked back home”)
So, moving into later times, I did a lot of traveling in the ’70’s and wrote a lot about the middle of the country which I hadn’t spent very much time in before then (that’s kind of simplistic, but true), and did a lot of teaching in places like Wyoming, Montana, Minnesota, Arizona and so on, a lot of reform schools, a lot of reservation schools, a lot of different kinds of middle of the country work, and this is a poem inspired by a show at the Walker Art Center at Minneapolis. It was..the entire Walker Art Center, which is huge, was filled with..Indian art from all over and it was divided by areas and you could really see that there wasn’t an Indian nation here, there are innumerable different cultures and names and ways of being and seeing here and that was part of what pulled the poem out of me (ironically, the museum on the West Coast later asked for permission to use the poem when they had brought out an Indian potter and had her sit in their museum making pots for our edification) and I was way at the time and someone in my house gave them permission so there was my poem on the wall and there was her making pots. It’s very strange – “Indian Art – Form and Tradition” as a title was the title of the show – (“were we not fine/were we not all fine in our buckskin..”where is our song now, our sorrow”)
..easier to go from poem to poem.. This..this is.. / My youngest daughter was about five when she came with me on a big trip to a big national poetry festival in Grand Rapids, Michigan – It’s called “Tara at Grand Rapids” – (“1 – On the airplane she said, “I feel stretched”. “Where?”, I asked, and she laid her hand on her crown chakra” – 2 – This morning we went to breakfast, birds were singing …”…”Well anyway, whole wheat is holy too”)
Okay I’m going to share with you a true experience what it’s like to be on the road as a poet – it’s a very glamorous profession, very exciting, full of… well, this is called “Ramada Inn in Denver” – okay -(“It’s taken a whole day to get from Great Falls to Casper and I ain’t there yet”…”and walk what I hope is. straight line to the door”) – the fun, the fun, the fun, of the literary life! – ah yes!
I don’t want to take too long because I want to read some little bits of other stuff.
So, anyway, then when I traveled for years, and then, in 1971, I began writing a long poem, which I’m still writing called “Loba”, which I don’t think I’ll stop to read from right now but maybe maybe later.
I would like to read a little bit of the prose book that I’m writing for Viking called Recollections of My Life As A Woman. It’s hard to sort of figure out. I’ve got three hundred and thirty seven pages of this stuff by now, and I really couldn’t figure out where to park your brain. It all weighs too much, so I brought the beginning and I’m going to read a little of the beginning which is somewhat about my maternal grandparents. So, Recollections of My Life As A Woman, I originally conceived of as a book for my daughters about the dopey things I did because I bought various myths about what a woman is or should be and (but in a silly, I know you know, humorous kind of way because I didn’t think it was the end of the world – and it has proven not to be the end of the world and… but then somehow it expanded, it grew to far more than that, it’s a full-blown memoir now. The memoir I promised Viking is 200,000 words and we’ll..we’ll cut down from that and I think it might cover.. it’ll either cover me through the “Sixties, or through about (19)78, depends.. They think they’re getting my whole life but that your life is how you define it, so..
So here’s the beginning – (“My earliest sense of what it means to be a woman was learnt from my grandmother…”…..” …My grandfather… it was clear to me that he was as good as it got”
video stops here – then, part 2 – continues
D d P: I want to read because I want to read one other little part from a little further in. about the war, the coming of the war. My..I..I explained earlier that my father’s father’s brother returned to Sicily just before World War II broke out and my father’s father stayed in America so Giuseppe went back to Sicily and Pietro stayed in American and this came from my own memory. As I was writing I would begin to actually remember things I could not remember so clearly before and there’s this quality in it that some is really remembered and some is more like a dream where you’re partly reconstructing, So I told them that the subtitle of this book is “An Imagination of an Autobiography” – but this part is definitely from my..from a picture that I had clear in my mind.We’ve gone down to the boat to see them off – (“They are another part of the family I understand this much though I don’t know any of them well…”.. We broke bread together one last time. A man I barely remember held me on his knee”)
So that’s a little bit of this endless prose that I’m doing and I would like to maybe take ten more minutes and read you a little bit from Loba, and a little bit of relatively new stuff, and there’s one poem I definitely want to read to you to end with It takes about five minutes so we’ll stop with that
Loba came out in ’78 in a book that’s..185 pages and it’s been writing itself onwardly since then. There’s about another 140 pages to add to it when it comes out again, which I’m sort of vaguely getting ready right now. Part of the new part of Loba is kind loosely based… I use myths but mostly I use them very loosely like they weave in and out and there has been the sense of a hunt going on through a lot of sections. At first was the imagine my mind of the wolf, the she-wolf, soba, being hunted around the zodiac which was around the twelve processes of the alchemical transformation and then that moved into a lot of different hunt poems of different sorts, Tristan and Isolde in the forest, and so on. And then it sort of focused in like a zoom lens on the hunt of Psyche for Eros after he leaves, after she looks at him. So there’s a lot of poems, like poems of Psyche wandering through strange worlds and underworlds and.. but I don’t…(one I’m going read, one of those) but it’s also just the strange world in San Francisco in 1993 – and it’s the same kind world that I wrote nd thrithe neighborhood about, just seen from and through a different lens. And so this poem is called “Ishtar – 1” – Ishtar you remember was the goddess in charge of all the prostitutes in Babylon. That was a big job! – Ishtar – (1) -(This was for a woman who used to hang out on my block, a prostitute) – Ishtar – 1 (Deliberate as a shell of a body…”…”..watered silk to wrap them round”) – That’s one of the more immediately written pieces of the Lobo poem.
And I can maybe read you something earlier, a little lighter, if I find one.. This is a poem that people have told me variously is a poem to the Muse as a Woman (I don’t really know that’s so, but I write to one – or oneself – but, here it is – it has no title – {Editorial note – later titled “Apparuit”] – (“There is some sweet woman/ whose words I have never seen/ who springs/ full-blown into mind..”…”..in a desert/ whose fountains/ no caravans stream…” [tape ends here]