The Poetry Deal: a film with Diane di Prima

A poem from about 1957 called What Morning Is, What Morning Is "First you wake up and it is daylight, but wrong with some hood honking the horn in the street and again, till you think you'll go out of your mind and you're not quite awake so you think, rock? Yes. A rock at his head, smash his face the bastard and then awake with eyes open and Freddy at the window standing all flopping in silly pajamas, saying 'Some people are rude.' And you think 'rude is not the word, smash his face!' Then you say, 'Good morning,baby.' And then you sit up and then it's breakfast. Feel foolish.

Old wool shirt, moth holes too and all the pots dirty. Cook eggs over yesterday's eggs, so what? And the cat climbing up and down your pants leg, four weeks old and a plague. How I hate instant coffee.

And Freddy-o says 'You're sad today, Di.' Don't know never know how I feel only yes, when I write and then there is how much weighs the laundry? And Freddy late as usual, cutting out. So you bathe then. Hot water, thank God.

And upstairs, yes, sun, and the record Eroica and then find a book. Stein! Yes, Stein and Picasso. Wish Freddy had books but she's cool.

Still life swings. Then standing in sun, robe off, stretch and again, still life swings. '42 Paris. Yeah, German shit, and what else?

He's not screaming, live through it. Beethoven too, Gone cat, live through anything. Lovely guitar. Nature morte.

Yes. Calmer than life, wow brighter than cool. We're so stupid! Just stand, nothing on but the sun, lots of it.

And you think yes, OK, I'll swing it." A poem can be anything, you have a blank piece of paper. You can go anywhere, you can do anything, you can make anything happen. The ground of imagination is fearlessness. Discourse is videotape of a movie, of a shadow play.

But the puppets are in your hand. Your counters in a multidimensional chess, which is divination and strategy. The war that matters is the war against the imagination. All other wars are subsumed in it.

I had read a lot of philosophy before I found the poets. I had read my way through Plato and everybody else in the Brooklyn Public Library on Clinton Street. Up, and up through, you know, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. I was in love with Schopenhauer.

I thought, if he had known me, (I was 13), if he had known me, he wouldn't have been so despairing. I was like that. Once I found the poetry, I couldn't understand why anybody bothered with philosophy. Because in poetry you didn't have to stick to one point of view.

You could hold paradox in a poem. You didn't have to be consistent. You didn't have to be logical. And logic seemed like such a limiting box.

I was about 13 or so when I found the poets, so it seemed. There was never any thought in my mind of being a prose writer, really. 1961, 62. Beat poetry...

didn't have a very good reputation in the general public or in the academic community, either. They were considered drug addicts, good for nothings, and what they offered as poetry was considered terrible. I hope you go through hell tonight, beloved. I hope you choke to death on lumps of stars.

And by your bed, a window with frost. And moon on frost and you want to scream and can't because. your woman is, I hope, right there, asleep. Baby, I hope you never close your eyes so two of us can pick up on this dawn.

Well, when I gave my first poetry reading with Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia at the Six Gallery, Allen Ginsberg read Howl at the time. Our, our objective was to lift poetry off the page and to take it to people, to sell it, to tell them what our politics were, what our feeling about the environment was, what our feeling about Asian art and mysticism was and to be speaking for a lot of people who wanted to see or hear those things because it was a time of terrible convention and overweening silence. From a gray, crew cutted, gray suited masses who were just getting their first taste of the new chemicals in the form of antipsychotics or drugging themselves with them. And at the same time pushing for war.

So you get into an elevator and you feel like these gray army men standing there looking at you like your misplaced cannon fodder. Because your hair's a little too long and your clothes are a little too tight. It was it was ugly. A lot of young people were coming in and asking 'do you have the latest book by Allen Ginsberg?' and I thought 'Allen Who'?

These are some poems from Revolutionary Letters book written in the 60s and still being written from time to time. And I fell in love with the poetry myself. Beware of those who say we are the beautiful losers. Who stand in their long hair and wait to be punished.

Who weep on beaches for our isolation. We are not alone. We have brothers in all the hills. We have sisters in the jungles and in the Ozarks.

We even have brothers on the frozen tundra. They sit by their fires, they sing, they gather arms, they multiply, they will reclaim the earth. No where we can go, but they are waiting for us. No exile.

Where we will not hear. 'Welcome home. Good morning, sister. Let me work with you.

Good morning, brother. Let me fight by your side.' When I was a young "Bohemian," I was running around, having drugs, having all these lovers. Still, the morning I went to the park and wrote, we were near Central Park, because there was so many of us living so close on top of each other, we needed to separate to get work done. And then, the afternoon I studied at the house, and it was infallible.

As badass as the boys are always portrayed as being in the beat scene, Really, Diane was badass, and the females involved in that scene were badass. They were doing everything that the guys were doing and they were raising children. And they were, you know, being -- they were transgressing cultural norms about femininity. So, you know, it's just important to know that there were women involved.

When I was in North Beach as a young woman poet, and I was feeling like the only woman in North Beach, I think I wrote a poem once with that title. And Diane di Prima in New York often seems like one of the first powerful woman writers to come out of the beat scene. She forced what she wanted to be into being, with a very big and good soul, I mean, it wasn't like I'm going to trample in your face to get this. It was like, I'm going to, this hadn't, she was interested in what hadn't existed before, as we all were.

I used excerpts from a segment called 'What I Ate Where,' and it's just great. It's like the first part of it is like a diary of the food she ate. And I love that. Like, I love just capturing what kind of seems like the mundanist aspects of your days, and it actually ends up being the best juiciest details.

Fall, 1953. Kraft Cheese spreads on Pepperidge Farm bread for lunch, This at work while doing Latin. I was reading Virgil, I think. I worked in the credit department of a large sugar company.

February, 1954. Lunch tongues, liver spread, caviar, Vienna sausages, anything that came in small enough jars. We lived off what we could steal from the A & P. Garbage soup, which was everything thrown into the pot, cooked in a four gallon kettle, enough for everybody.

Payment was you always brought up some wood for the fireplace. Food was warm all night. You just took a bowl and sat down. Nobody ever talked much.

We just looked at the fire. There's nothing as important in the world as doing your work, whatever that might be. You know, making a garden, to making The Divine Comedy, to... or Howl, or whatever, it's whatever it is, you know, making a quilt.

It's like what you make is like the center of one's life. She lived her life in New York and in here in California as a woman really dedicated to her art. But also dedicated to being a full woman. And having children and everything that entailed And, somehow bringing her children into her full life of Poets Theater, and and living, Living on her own, completely on her own, heartbreakingly on her own at many points in her life and it's something that I've always really admired and identified with.

This is stuff I wrote in the 50s. And I was carrying my first baby by choice. I didn't want a man, I didn't want a husband, I wanted a kid. So this is to her.

Jeanne, Song for Baby-O, Unborn Sweetheart, when you break thru, you'll find a poet here. Not quite what one would choose. I can'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.

Thanks for the ice cream. He says thanks for the ice cream, Diane. Oh, You're welcome! It's nice if you come into the bookstore in the morning, you know, and you can, it's easy to park and it's laid back and everybody's gone off to some stupid job.

I basically kind of just try to do my thing regardless of whatever the culture is dictating. She's clearly done that her whole life. But damn, it must have been hard sometimes. I mean, I can't imagine what it was like in the 50s and 60s and just living outside the mainstream when it just seemed, to me -- not that I was there -- it seemed just so much more difficult for women to break out of the cultural molds that were set for them.

I met Diane in the 50s, but long after that, in '68, my husband and I started a commune, which Diane came to and stayed with us for a year and lived in this barn loft here. The women really loved her because she bought everybody a case, a case, a big case of Pampers. We had eight two year olds running around at the same time, so there was a lot of dirty diapers to wash. It was the middle of winter.

The winter before, we'd been snowed in for six weeks. It was like the Donner Party. That was the Christmas present. She bought the, the diapers from getting some kind of royalty for her books from Holland, I think, or someplace, you know.

So that was what she did with the royalty. The men hated it! Because in some ways she was upstaging them, but in other ways, 'this is unecological and we can't, you know, how are we going to dispose of Pampers and blah, blah, blah' and the Pampers were kind of a signal to be down on her, without saying pushy woman. And so, so she kind of the guys were, I think, really kind of threatened by Diane, really.

Although, all of the Beats, all of, you know, all of the big named writers of the Beat Generation gave her incredible props and were incredibly impressed by her work. It was, I think, a lot more difficult for her to get published and get the kind of distribution for her books Get the kind of recognition that all the boys did. Ok, here's one. Just a random selection from from Loba, part one, which came out as a chapbook.

And I think it was published in 1973. About the time that this photograph was taken. And it says, this is part of the poem but I'll pick up this part. 'I am you and I must become you.

I have been you and I must become you. I am always you, I must become you. Ay-a ay-a ah ay-a ay-a ah ah. Maya ma maya ma.

Om star mother ma om maya ma ah." Oh oh oh. So I have that in the book. Thank God I have something in a book I was 14, I knew. And when the day that I knew, I write about this in Recollections, the day that I knew I had to be a poet, and I'm not saying I aspired to be a poet.

I felt on the same eye to eye level with Keats who I had been reading for years. I knew it wasn't any question of like, 'oh, he's this great hero and I'm this little person.' I never felt that with anyone anyway. But, from that point on but, the day that I knew that, I also knew what I wasn't going to have, I knew that I was excluded from something that I was thinking of then as regular human society. And he picked up his bag and started to go out the door.

Then he came back, kissed me on the mouth. His lips were shut. 'I love you, he said, but I'm queer.' I touch the hollow in his face just under the cheekbone. 'I know.' I said, 'don't worry.

It's not important.' It's a typical morning, 1955. A wonder I survived it all! But in fact, we never expected to be published. Never, once.

There were no publishers to publish us. There were no, there were no galleries to show us, except those that were owned and run by artists. And we were artists. We were all artists, and we were all in -- in being artists together.

And we fought with each other, and we supported each other, and we cared about each other, and we hated each other, but we were all artists together. And we didn't expect a university job, and we didn't expect a government grant, and we didn't ever expect to find a publisher. And Diane grew up in that world, whether it's East Coast or West Coast. It was the same in both places.

She was producing little mimeographed pamphlets as a way of supporting herself, and I would buy a few of them. And one time she came in, she'd sold me 10 copies of a little play, a six page mimeographed play that she'd written. And a couple of months later, she came back in with some that she'd put cardboard covers on that had drawing on them. She said this was the deluxe edition.

I was taking home maybe 20 dollars a week, just enough to eat off of, and I knew that I couldn't send the same thing at five dollars a copy instead of two dollars a copy to the university. So I said, 'no, I'm not buying any of them.' She was both unhappy and angry. When she got to the door she turned around and said, 'I don't know how you run your business!' And I said, 'well, unfortunately, I do know how you run yours!' Well, few, a couple of weeks later, she came back and we both got past this burst of temper on both our parts. And I think maybe that was the real beginning of our friendship.

But this is me. I already had my first child. Somebody there had gotten a hold of a copy of that first book, "This Kind of Bird Flies Backward," and somebody there had actually typed it with 12 carbon copies. Because there was no copying machinery technology.

And he told me that with 12 carbons of "This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards" was going around Leavenworth prison. That to me is the definition of success. That it meant something to people, that spoke to their heart. Here's the shelf.

Diane begins here and goes all across here and across there. Now, those are the things that fit on the standard bookshelf. There's a lot more down below that oversize stuff. But my favorite poem is one of the Revolutionary Letters.

Which is called, 'April Fool Birthday Poem For Grandpa.' 'We do it for you and your ilk, for Carlo Tresca, for Sacco and Vanzetti. Without knowing it, or thinking about it, as we do it for Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde (all street lights shall be purple), Do it for Trotzky and Shelley and big dumb Kropotkin, Eisenstein's Strike people, Jean Cocteau's ennui, We do it for the stars over the Bronx, that they may look on earth and not be ashamed. There's no words in color anyway, and yet, it wakes up all your feelings. When I was doing "Recollections of My Life as a Woman," I would get up from the computer and just come over, there would be something I was working on, I'd paint what I thought and I'd come back.

There was a period of time I was thinking about the fact that we all have a secret deal that we made with the art of our choice. Like what we secretly hope that we'll get out of it. And meanwhile, I had written a poem when I was thinking about it a lot called "The Poetry Deal." And I'm going to read that. So in this poem, the 'You' is poetry, I'm talking to poetry itself.

"The Poetry Deal" 'I want to say that I don't want anything but the whisper of your scarf as you do the dance of the seven veils, The soft sound of your satin slippers on the carpet, and the raw, still bloody meat you toss my way that I chew on all night long. I don't want anything you don't already bring. Trips to other worlds, dimension of dimensions of light or sound. The rides on the back of a leopard on those black rocks, high over some sea or gorge.

But it isn't true. I want all that. The sheet lightning of quasars. You dance between those colors, yes, but I want you as mother, sister, the stone walls of the cave I lie in, in trance for seven days.

The mist around the cabin that makes it invisible. I want the flare and counterpoint of words. And I want the non-verbal. What can never be spoken as a foundation.

I'd like my daily bread however you arrange it. And I'd also like to be bread or sustenance for some others even after I've left, a song they can walk a trail with. I don't think we've talked about money, or success, or fame, whatever that is, for a long time. I hoped you'd forget that part.

Now, I'll do as you say about all that, what seems most useful. I'd like to keep learning how to brew bitter herbs, and how to make them translucent, edible, almost crystalline. What I offered you wasn't much. You can always wake me, like my closest friend or most loved lover.

You can burn my favorite snapshot of myself, lead me on paths or not paths anywhere. You can not make sense for years and I'll still believe you Drop husbands, tribes, and jobs as you wish. You mostly aren't jealous. Have taken your place alongside gardens, breadmaking, children, printing presses.

But when your eyes shoot sparks and you say, 'Choose: between Me and It' It has always gone, except when It was my kids I took that risk and we worked it out somehow. Now, I've come to a place where there are no kids, no tribe, no bread, no garden. Only you in your two faces, formed and formless. Nothing to hold back now and nothing to offer.

I stand before you a piece of wind with a notebook and pen. Which one of us is it who dances and which is the quasar?' Remember, you can have what you ask for, ask for everything.