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Diane di Prima Recollections Of My Life As A Woman: The New York Years I am not in the flame, I am the flame —Diane di Prima, “Canticle of St. Joan” The following quotation is one of the central perceptions of Diane di Prima’s long-awaited, riveting memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (Viking, 2001). The perception is linked to various incidents in di Prima’s life—particularly to her taking peyote and to her clandestine love affair with the married LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka): These new poems of mine [“The Jungle,” “The Ballroom,” “The Party,” “The Beach,” “Lord Jim,” “The Yeoman of the Guard,” “Blackout”], with their longer lines and almost deadly certainty, had already begun before Roi knocked on my door. They had begun with my first peyote trip, and with the vast permission I had found in Jimmy Waring’s “composition classes.” But now, as my emotional life came to a strong, though temporary, focus—this new work, too, came to a fruition: a powerful voice found its way through me and into the world.The first of many voices that would speak through me, now that I no longer sought to control the poem. For isn’t it not that we “find our voice” as poetry teachers are so fond of saying, but rather that voices find us, and perhaps we welcome them? Is not poetry a dance from possession to possession—“obsession” in the full sense the word had in nineteenth-century magick? We are “ridden” as by the gods. The perception is all the stronger because it seems to move in a direction opposite to the primary direction of di Prima’s life: the assertion of her will—a word which is often capitalized in this book. Indeed, the word “control”— present in the above quotation—echoes throughout Recollections of my Life as aWoman, as in the author’s assertion that her “struggle for control over my own life had been an epic one” or “what I heard from lovers, was that I was a controlling or castrating bitch.” One feels at times that perhaps the worst 171 172 The Dancer and the Dance thing that can happen to di Prima is something occurring “against her will.” Yet the poem “comes to fruition” as something outside the poet’s “control”— outside her “will.” One thinks of a remark Stanley Fish makes in his recent book, How Milton Works: Milton, writes Fish, “longs to be absorbed by a power greater than he.” At the same time, Milton “experiences absorption as a threat . . . to his very being.” Di Prima’s statement is an assertion of a truth which is at some distance from what “poetry teachers are so fond of saying.” If it contradicts those teachers—and even contradicts some aspects of di Prima’s own experience—so be it: that is the nature of “truth.” There is no doubt that Recollections of my Life as a Woman stirs up strong feelings. A woman friend of mine attended a reading di Prima was giving to publicize the book. Di Prima read the following passage: When Billie [Holiday] was coming to Carnegie Hall there was no way I could have gone. No way to afford it. But I had a friend, a kind of acquaintance on the fringe of the scene, a woman named Joan McCarthy who liked us all very much and would invite us over to eat steak and talk. She was a woman who was not like any of us at all, she held a straight job, had no imagination, nothing in her mind or conversation flew, and we were always fondly exasperated or outright angry when we left her house. I think she was glamorized, fascinated by us all. Miraculously, Joan McCarthy invited me to go with her to hear Billie Holiday; she had two tickets. Never before or after do I remember being invited, or going, anywhere with Joan. Just this one miracle. Naturally I said yes. And naturally di Prima loves the concert. “Tonight,” she writes, “[Billie Holiday] went still deeper, into a whole other dimension, and took us with her.” The passage, which is an eloquent tribute to Billie Holiday, implicitly asks us to identify ourselves with di Prima and her friends—and to see Joan McCarthy as an outcast: “a woman who was not like any of us.” Yet, as she listened, my friend found herself identifying with Joan McCarthy. She began...

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