The New Anthology of American Poetry: Vol. III: Postmodernisms 1950-Present

DIANE DI PRIMA

285 DIANE DI PRIMA b. 1934 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, diane di prima was the most prominent woman poet of the Beat Generation. She wrote in the Beat style of social nonconformity and conversational free association, though more succinctly than did many of her peers. After 1968, her poetry became more focused on Buddhist self-awareness and social, ecological, ethnological, mythological, and feminist concerns. In this later phase, she has exposed the cross-hatching of political and imaginative concerns (as in “Rant) and has constructed a feminine and feminist aesthetic (as in the Loba poems). Her friend Allen Ginsberg once wrote of her: “Diane di Prima, revolutionary activist of the 1960s Beat literary renaissance, heroic in life and poetics: a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated and twentieth-century radical, her writing informed by Buddhist equanimity, is exemplary in imagist, political and mystical modes.” Di Prima was born in Brooklyn into an Italian-American family. After dropping out of Swarthmore College, she moved to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and joined the Beat movement. She lived a bohemian existence that included editing, theater, music, performance, art, sex, drugs, and, above all, poetry. She and Amiri Baraka became lovers, and she became friends with Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery (all included in this anthology). She also knew such performers as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Fred Herko, and Janice Joplin. Refusing to accept the choice—then almost compulsory —between career and motherhood, she had five children with four different men, even as she continued to produce poems and do other creative work. In 1968 di Prima moved to San Francisco, where she received Buddhist instruction and participated in the hippie counterculture. Her poems grew in spiritual, environmental, and feminist awareness, influenced now by H.D. as well as Walt Whitman. Di Prima continued to involve herself in poetry performance , art, music, and editing, and she became active in a variety of educational endeavors, leading classes for such institutions as the New College of California, the San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts, the Naropa Institute, and the California Poets in the Schools program. From the early 1970s to 1998, she wrote an epic sequence called Loba, in which a wolf goddess encapsulates the varied images, experiences, and myths of womanhood. Still active, di Prima has published forty-three books thus far, and her work has been translated into twenty languages. In his foreword to di Prima’s Pieces of Song, poet Robert Creeley wrote, “Her search for human center is among the most moving I have witnessed.” Ø Diane di Prima 286 further reading Diane di Prima. Loba. New York: Penguin, 1998. — — — —. Memoirs of a Beatnik. New York: Penguin, 1998. — — — —. Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems. San Francisco: City Lights, 2001. — — — —. Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years. New York: Viking, 2001. — — — —. Revolutionary Letters. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2007. Brenda Knight. Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution (Berkeley: Conari Press, 1998). Three Laments 1 Alas I believe I might have become a great writer but the chairs in the library were too hard 2 I have the upper hand but if I keep it I’ll lose the circulation in one arm 3 So here I am the coolest in New York what dont swing I dont push. In some Elysian field1 by a big tree I chew my pride like cud. 1958 1. In Greek and Roman myth, the Elysian Fields were the final resting place of the happy souls of virtuous persons. Poetics Ø 287 Song for Baby-O, Unborn Sweetheart when you break thru you’ll find a poet here not quite what one would choose. I won’t promise you’ll never go hungry or that you won’t be sad on this gutted breaking globe but I can show you baby enough to love to break your heart forever 1958 “Song for Baby-O, Unborn” expresses love for the pregnant poet’s unborn first daughter. As in other early poems, di Prima uses spare, conversational language. Poetics I have deserted my post, I cdnt hold it rearguard/to preserve the language/lucidity: let the language fend for itself. it turned over god knows enough carts in the city streets its barricades are my nightmares preserve the language—there are enough fascists & enough socialists on both...