On Poetry, Peership, and Imagination: A Love Letter to Diane di Prima

I.

When Diane di Prima left the world of the living this past October, the poetry community seemed to shudder in sadness. When a great poet dies, you feel the weight of all the other poets you will never know. We poets are always eternally connected.

di Prima’s passing was also a monumental loss for poetry itself. Author of some 50 books and with a career spanning 50 plus years, she is well-known as a member of the Beat poets, having worked with Amiri Baraka and Allen Ginsberg. But her work expanded well beyond her Beat years, and she was a well-respected poet and writer across many styles, a fervent activist, a dedicated teacher, and a generous and kind member of the poetry community, often welcoming and bringing together unlikely members. She made a home for so many poets to be.

Most of the copies of Diane di Prima books I have are used books that have markings by another poetry reader. It can be annoying to have to read through another’s notes, but in my di Prima books, it feels right. The books are all slightly worn, having been carried through life a bit by another hand, transformed into a communal reading space where we can all share her magic. There are the places in the books marked by other readers, and I am drawn to them in ways I might not have been through my own eyes, and I love this.

My copy of Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (2001) is one that I still have on loan from my friend, the poet Amber Rose Tamblyn. I still remember Amber handing it to me in a dark bar, like she was telling me a secret. “You’ll like this one,” she said, and I did. I love feeling the slightly yellowy pages of the book and knowing that Amber read them. The communal spaces in my di Prima books, which I share with the mostly unknown readers who marked them with their beautiful imaginations, in concert with di Prima’s, and now mine, are holy spaces. I feel instinctively di Prima would have liked this idea.

In her inaugural address as San Francisco Poet Laureate, di Prima spoke about how she had come to poetry early:

I had begun writing poetry when I was seven. I never stopped, but I was twice that age—fourteen—when I gave myself wholeheartedly to the poem. I had been reading Keats’ letters, reading Shelley and Thomas Wolfe with my friends … when I had a kind of epiphany. My mind moved in an instant from hero-worship, gazing upward, to peership, looking straight on. I realized there was no reason I couldn’t do what these folks had done. No reason I couldn’t at least try. At that moment I made what I knew would be a lifelong commitment. (The Poetry Deal, 2014)

It is in this idea of peership that di Prima seems to welcome us all. So often, poetry is framed as something that we have to be formally initiated into to fully understand, so that the best that we can hope for is a kind of “hero worship,” that is, to uphold a calcified hierarchy of good poetry and maybe not-so-good poetry. But in truth, poetry is for all of us—there’s no such thing as good or bad poetry––and we are all peers in the space of poetry. And when we, as poets, read each other as peers, in a sort of peer worship, anything in poetry might still be possible.

This wasn’t just theory for di Prima—it’s a practice that comes through in her life and in her work. In her lines, I feel her saying, come on, take my hand, you have a good story to tell, just I like do.

II.

It’s in di Prima’s idea of the shared imagination that I feel peership with her most of all. As she writes in “Rant” (Revolutionary Letters, 1971):

THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION

ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT

There is no way out of the spiritual battle
There is no way you can avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher

you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world

I love these words so much, and the way she brings into focus how an onslaught on the imagination is an onslaught on life itself. In too many schools and educational settings, and work settings as well, we devalue the imagination and the implicit worthiness of each person’s distinct “consciousness of making” their “world,” and their ability to imagine a better future for themselves and all of us. This war on the imagination, brought on by greed and hate, is, as the poem argues, insidious because it takes away dignity and hope and denies everyone the “readymade clothes” of their own beautiful “poetics.”

Loba (1973–1998), an epic in multiple parts, is a treatise on the worthiness of the imagination and the peership of poetry, too. Written as a sort of never-ending worshipful letter to Loba, a wolf goddess, over the span of more than 25 years, Loba is in so many ways an occult text that welcomes poets to come together. From the work’s opening lines:

O lost moon sisters
crescent in hair, sea underfoot do you wander
in blue veil, in green leaf, in tattered shawl do you wander
[…]
with gloves, with hat, in rags, in fur, in beads
under the waning moon, hair streaming in black rain
wailing with stray dogs, hissing in doorways
shadows you are, that fall on crossroads, highways

By invoking the image of poets wandering alongside this great wolf spirit, Loba, di Prima shows that a collective peership might be possible. Just as wolves or dogs run in packs, these lines call to other poets, these shadows of the wolf, to come together as “lost moon sisters.” Later, di Prima writes:

let us be what we are,    mid leap
let us fall or rise
on the breath the Will
                         yields to.

This vision of poetry is what di Prima offers all poets and what she brings to me. I’ve always felt a little bit out of place in poetry, like I don’t exactly belong and never will. But di Prima, with all her boundless love, makes me feel as if I am still invited to the party, and that’s her gift too—to make you feel invited. She makes the idea of community possible, even when it might seem too utopian to be a reality.

These are the possibilities that I carry with me from di Prima’s work. Where poets and people care for one another, and writing is an extension of life. And where the imagination is not controlled in any way, but free for us all, as in this excerpt from Loba, Book Two:

          The body itself is the vector
          carried thru time
          curve of the Will imprinted
          on linear air.

III.

Some of my favorite books by di Prima mimic the everyday luxury of poetry, which offers sustenance and delight, as in di Prima’s description of the scent of her grandmother’s hands: “lemons and olive oil, garlic and waxes and mysterious herbs” (Recollections). These “thousand herbs” populate every poem of di Prima’s, as do the great twins of pleasure: food and sex.

In Dinners and Nightmares (1961), food, friendship, and love are always intertwined. Di Prima’s rich descriptions of eating could rival those of the best food critics: “I remember iced coffee made from powdered skim milk and coffee ice cubes and a sprinkle of cinnamon, and this was very good indeed.” First of all, coffee ice cubes! Second, the cinnamon. A tiny touch of spicy finery that makes all the difference. The line reminds me of when I stayed in someone’s house one summer, and how they kept a little clay bowl—varnished in a blue shiny glaze—of turmeric and cinnamon, on the kitchen countertop. “For your coffee,” they told me. These tiny, vivid details that make life worth living are throughout di Prima’s book. They are seemingly inconsequential details. After all, no one really needs cinnamon in their coffee (or do they?). But it is within these small details that poetry comes alive.

I also love di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969), known at least in part of for its highly erotic descriptions, which she added after her editor famously turned back draft after draft with “More Sex” scrawled at the top. In this book, the narrator recalls, in exquisite detail, moments of erotic connection, such as when she “slid my hands under his buttocks, and drew him closer to me, moving my head up and down, and pressing my own wet opening tight against his knee.” There are also cosmic sex scenes, like this one: “We two, one seed form, nestled closed and together in our own germinating warmth till the long fingers of light and wind should find us and coax us back into being.” In these passages, di Prima opens up space for poets and writers who come after her to do the same, to enter into this wild and wonderful space and celebrate sex as part of the life force. These are ideals of erotic writing that I have always aspired to achieve, both in the embrace of these human events and in the description of them through language.

As poets, we make a lifelong commitment to poetry, though we might not realize it when we’re young. I know that when I was seven, I didn’t fully understand the pact I was making with poetry, as I started scribbling broken phrases in the dark of my bedroom into a flowery notebook. I didn’t understand the lifelong contract I was signing. I only partially understand it now.

di Prima understood that as a poet you create another being, a persona, as is clear in this poem from The Poetry Deal:

the Phoenix is
                    timeless
as gold is

She heads for
            the sky

like a grown child
leaving Mother

I am only now beginning to understand that in the space of a poem I create a Phoenix who must live on past me, and live with my fellow poets, in an immortal landscape, for the good of all of the glorious poets who live after me. It is a persona that is always wild, leaving home already equipped with tools, “a hair / ahead / of the beat,” hands clutching the warmest rose (The Poetry Deal). The poem is a space where, as Audre Lorde writes in her poem “Second Spring,” when “We have no passions left to love the spring,” still a “new sun will warm our proud and cautious feet.” Even when life is cruel, we still have poetry to bind us together and give us hope. It is through an understanding of the eternal community of poets that extends past any particular poet into the past and into the future, in peership, that a poem is made, a persona molded. In each new step I take as a poet, I feel di Prima’s hands reaching out to me, urging me to take hold as I walk along unsteadily, urging me to stay in the space of the poem.

IV.

This year has brought so many raw feelings to the surface for me and likely for so many of us. It’s easy to overlook the importance of poetry and the imagination in the midst of all of the heaviness. At times, none of it seems as real as the stark realities of each day now, so many of them intensely horrific. But di Prima asks us all not to forget the imagination. As she writes in “Rant,” “w/out imagination there is no memory.” Together as poets, in this moment, we must not forget the importance of our work in shaping our collective memory, for us and for the future poets who will come after us. For it is in “a continuum // of imagination” that we exist, in “an infinite sea of possibility” and in an eternal community of peership. It is a space of the imagination where we can share our books, write on their pages, and construct our own endless poetics.

Often, when a poet dies, there is a rush to say: I knew them. And what that knowing means is variable. This love letter to Diane di Prima is not that. I didn’t know her in this life, but also I deeply knew her. The sacred part of all poets is the golden cord that we share from birth to grave, and beyond. di Prima is, as my friend, the poet Samantha Zighelboim, said of her recently, “everyone’s.” Her legacy belongs to all of us, with her work always going toward a truth, no matter what that means or how difficult it might be to swallow.

Despite feeling slightly estranged from it, I’ve always had an insatiable need for poetry, never to be quite quenched. Diane di Prima brings frank honesty to the poem. There is no bullshit, no hiding. The whole truth is in her clarity. Her poetry is life. I must say, for even just a moment, it quenches that need in me.

Life as a mother during the pandemic has been a bit of a wake-up call. I have felt the endless luck of my life and endless dirty dishes. The dirt everywhere and scum on the walls, all crusted over. All of it never to be clean again. And the massive privilege, too, to be in a home, dirty walls and all, with food, and the layers and contours of each dish of vegetables, the weekly routine of spaghetti night and fish once a week. There’s only blessings for me to be thankful for. I think often of my Lithuanian grandmother, Becky, a mother of four whom I never met, and who my father said would insist that each child use “only one glass a day,” so as to cut down on dirty dishes. I finally, after all of these years, understand why. I think of di Prima, a mother of five and a poet, and I feel her giving me strength, giving us all strength, to keep going.

“Poetry ends like a rope,” writes Jack Spicer in “A Book of Music.” That is, a poem never ends. I’ve always thought of that rope as a lifeline. Or more so, it’s like the yarn the Fates cut to make your specific life, or the yarn Cecilia Vicuña uses in her artwork. Poets use the Fates’ yarn, too. We hold out the length of our life’s work and when it’s time to make a book, we cut. Spicer’s rope is the lifeline in the ocean. It’s the endless legacy of poetry, the legacy of a poem, glowing and awful, passed down as a flower to the next poet in an act of enormous generosity. It’s the point of peership that di Prima mentioned, where the poet passes the rope on to you, on equal level.

So, too, Diane di Prima passes this glowing flower on to you. It’s up to you, it’s up to all of us, now to take it.

Let’s take it!