The Philosophy of the Beats

Laugh of the Revolutionary

19 laugh of the revolutIonary Diane di Prima, French Feminist Philosophy, and the Contemporary Cult of the Beat Heroine Roseanne Giannini Quinn Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history— by her own movement. —Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” The Beat literary movement can safely be described as masculinist. To wit, Jack Kerouac infamously describes female writers of his day as “girls” who “say nothing and wear black.”1 It is no wonder then that, similar to the ways in which they were often dismissed by the men in the movement, the female Beats have gone decades without getting their scholarly due. In particular , Diane di Prima, writer of more than thirty books, whose work has been translated into at least thirteen languages, has not yet had a book of literary criticism devoted to her substantial contribution to American letters and to radical social and political theory. Some of her most recognized titles include This Kind of Bird Flies Backward (1958); Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969); Revolutionary Letters (1971, rereleased with additional new poems in 2007); the serial poem Loba (1973; 1976; 1977; 1978; 1998); Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems (2001); and the first volume of her autobiography, entitled Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (2001). Over the last two decades, the critical attention that has been paid to her the most consistently has come from Italian American literary critics who write of her as a foremother to today’s Italian American women writers within and outside of a Beat context.2 In this essay, I wish to situate di Prima within a larger feminist and Beat context in two ways: first by looking briefly at the current state of di Prima 20 Roseanne Giannini Quinn herself as being a still-living San Francisco Beat-poet feminist icon; and second, by examining her radical poetics, primarily via an analysis of her long poem Loba (2008) and Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969). To this end, I will employ a theoretical framework derived from the French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous, whose call for women to “write the body” is exemplified in di Prima’s writing and in her life. Even as di Prima herself eschews her literary investment in the Beat movement today, she publicly interacts with young writers who clearly come to see her out of Beat nostalgia, and to some extent, I argue, revere her as a figure of popular culture rather than as a deeply serious social philosopher and innovative feminist poet. Throughout my analysis, I foreground the importance of di Prima’s decades-long social critiques of war, capitalism, and patriarchal violence that, when set alongside Cixous’s conceptualizations of the “true texts of women—female-sexed texts”—may contribute to our much-needed expansion of the importance of women to the Beat movement and to a broader understanding of their literary and cultural legacies.3 In a recent interview with Diane di Prima by Jackson Ellis in the online magazine verbicide, as di Prima is reminiscing about her friendships with quintessential Beat William Burroughs and Black Mountain poet Charles Olson, she pauses and says: “If you’re a woman, you have the disadvantage [that] you’re a woman and nobody pays attention to you.”4 Certainly, the gendered ignoring of female Beat poets has a continuous history. Just take a trip to the Beat Museum in the North Beach section of San Francisco. The location of the women’s room is up a flight of stairs and tucked in tiny area; stepping into it can be described and experienced as walking into a small closet. If you judge appreciation by square footage, this display is decidedly underwhelming. One of its most noticeable features, not surprisingly perhaps , is the moody black-and-white photograph of di Prima in her straighthaired youth—no updated picture—as if she and her work no longer exist. Recently, however, this real and symbolic legacy shrinking seems to be more at odds with the current attention being paid to her. Most crucially, di Prima was named the fifth poet laureate of San Francisco in May 2009, with the official inauguration on February 24, 2010 (following Lawrence Ferlinghetti , Janice Mirikatani, devorah major, and Beat veteran Jack Hirschum). An important phenomenon emerged leading up to the poet laureate proclamation by Mayor Gavin Newsom and that was the vocal and organized support of di Prima by young working...