DIANE DI PRIMA
the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism
the ultimate claustrophobia is "it all adds up"
nothing adds up & nothing stands in for
anything else
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT
-- Diane di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter #75”
LTEL 155B SYLLABUS (CONT.):
Week 8:
Mon. Nov. 14: Midterm taken in class.
Wed. Nov. 16: Read the poems (letters # 1-70) in Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters (pp. 1-94).
Week 9:
Mon. Nov. 21: Finish reading di Prima, Revolutionary Letters (pp. 95-160).
Wed. Nov. 23: Start reading Karen Tei Yamashita, I-Hotel (any one-three “floors”/ or chapters of the overall 10). ( KTY to visit our lecture...this class or the next one.)
Week 10:
Mon, Nov., 28: finish I-Hotel. (KTY to visit?)
Wed. Nov 30: Last class session: show some Waldman/Dylan: Students read their post-beat works/sites/projects etc....
Week 11:
NOTE: Final Projects will be due by 4-7PM on Tuesday, December 6, which is the final-exam time slot (bring to Baskin Lecture Hall our classroom).
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Diane di Prima (1934- ):
“You Say You Want a Revolution”: Spreading Utopian Anarchism across San Francisco, “Turtle Island” America, and the Post-Beat World.
1934: Born in Brooklyn, New York and has strong ties to Greenwich Village Bohemian culture; started writing at seven, influenced by grandfather from whom she took abiding ties to Italian utopic anarchism;
1951, studied physics at Swarthmore College for two years and dropped out;
1958 first book of poems published, This Bird Flies Backwards, full of wry love poems.
1961, started the literary mimeograph The Floating Bear with Leroi Jones, with whom she also started New York Poets Theater of one-act plays;
1964, with her husband Alan Marlowe she founded the Poets Press and published first books by Audre Lorde, David Henderson et al;
1968 ff.: moved to SF and became part of the Diggers & SF writing scene; she starts to study zen with Roshi Suzuki; world tribalisms and socialist quests from Cuba and China to the Diggers in the Haight Ashbury of SF. Always quests to align revolutionary visions of altered world practices and arts with First peoples of Turtle island and polytheistic magic practices; “raising rebellion into an art.”
1969, Memoirs of a Beatnik published by Olympia Press and later by Penguin.
1971, City Lights publishes the serial poem, Revolutionary Letters [“something you could understand at one hearing, something like Guerilla Theater” she first read out by a bullhorn from a flatbed truck in NYC] distributed widely by underground press before it is published by City Lights;
1974, teaches poetry in opening sessions of Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO.
1978, starts to publish feminist muse poems called Loba, which she keeps adding poems to over the years.
1980, helps to establish Masters Program in Poetics at New College of California in SF.
1981, begins work at psychic and healer, which leads to her writing and teaching in the San Francisco Institute of Magic and the Healing Arts.
1990, Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems published by City Lights.
2001, Recollections of My Life as a Woman published.
2010, she is appointed by Mayor Newsome as Poet Laureate of San Francisco. ...
“I think the poet is the last person who is still speaking truth when no one else dares to. I think the poet is the first person to begin the shaping and visioning of the new forms and the new consciousness when no one else has begun to sense it; I think these are two of the most essential human functions.”
-- Diane di Prima, in Brenda Knight, ed., Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution (1996).
“Don’t forget, however great your visioning and your inspiration, you need the techniques of your craft and there’s nowhere, really to go get them because these are not passed out in schools. They are passed on person to person, and back then [in earlier days of the Beat Generation] the male naturally passed them on to the male. I think maybe I was one of the first women to break through that in having deep conversations with Charles Olson and Frank O’Hara [as well as mentorship relations with Ezra Pound, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi at SF & Tassajara zendo, and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche at Naropa].
-- Diane di Prima to Anne Waldman.
“It is some essential clarity I value [in di Prima’s poetry]—which in these initial occasions of her writing is already moving to declare itself: food, places, friends, nights, streets, dreams, the way. She is an adept and flexible provider of the real, which we eat daily or else we starve…She is true.”
-- Robert Creeley, “Foreword: for Diane” to Pieces of a Song.
“… a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated, and twentieth- century radical, her writing, informed by Buddhist equanimity, is exemplary in imagist, political and mystical modes.”
-- Allen Ginsberg on di Prima’s body of work.
“Diane di Prima is the original outlaw poet; she wrote herself a wild, authentic life without regard for the rules during an era when being such a female creature was truly transgressive. Her writing is crucial as history; as literature it is enduring and bewitching.”
-- Michelle Tea, blurb for extended edition of Revolutionary Letters (2007).
SOME GOOD LINKS (there are many others online if you look around):
Diane di Prima reads “April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa” at Naropa Institute:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVN9lamJyoQ&playnext=1&list=PL1667173FD5DDB050
Diane di Prima reading in the “Lunch Poems series” at UC Berkeley in 2008 (introduction by Robert Hass):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk629z7REWY
Diane di Prima reads from Revolutionary Letters (#7 ,#13, #16, #49)
in 1969 in NYC on the radio:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PvEaSLY5L0
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Some possible “blog”-- or even “final project” topics!-- for writings on Revolutionary Letters (but follow your TA’s section mandates and suggestions):
1) Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters is an historically evolving “serial” work, as she adds new letters in response to new events and configurations of herself, the city, the country, the world. Write your own version of a “revolutionary letter” in a poem or in a brief essay, working in some aspects of the contemporary situation you face.
-- see “Twelve For/From Diane di Prima” based on twelve cut-up, collaged, and repurposed phrases from Revolutionary Letters putting some links between Psyche and Geography as phrased into the urban space of the contemporary City [here, San Francisco]. Others?
2) Discuss one of the Revolutionary Letters in which a woman’s point of view and values adds something different or new to the beat perspective on the world, and its beatitude quest.
-- poems of revolutionary love (p.5; p. 11 on love emerging from “people left to themselves”; Memorial Day 2003 (Letter #93, p. 143)
-- healing tips for action and health (p. 12).
--defensive weaponry cum Buddhist compassion and yogic tactics (pp. 15, 21, 26, 44);
-- forges a new diet for the revolutionary body (pp. 56, 70, 73);
-- “women’s alchemy” of blood, labor, birth (#44, p, 57).
-- “my body a weapon as yours is” (#66, p. 83); “Dee’s Song” (p. 155).
-- learn “magic” as an alternative knowledge (#46, p. 59, #59, p. 76; p. 87, Tibetan healing chant); alchemy by Inward Fire (#74, p.101).
-- women protest against bulldozer to protect olive groves (#90, p. 139).
-- woman warrior figure portrayed in “Canticle of St. Joan” (p. 157).
3) What other worlds, other cultures, other ways of connecting to an alternative to American dominant culture are enacted in The Revolutionary Letters?
-- appeals to Turtle Island, Native American way of life as a more balanced ecology of planetary belonging (pp. 34, 37, 46, 49, 53, 59 72, 78; “New Mexico Poem,” p. 150).
-- embracing the “we” solidarity of world revolution across different urban and national sites(pp. 42, 38, 40, 43, 51 [“PEOPLE’S PLANET”).
-- invokes “Arab song” to project another world view against US going to war (Letters # 77 #78, #79, #80, #81, #82; 9/11 poem of global feedback, Letter # 88).
-- uses imagination of poetics to create an alternative cosmology (Letter #75, p. 103, “Rant”)
4) Discuss one of more of the “revolutionary letter” poems that can be connected to Occupy Wall Street-like tactics of revolutionary urbanism or urban-space repurposing that is now taking place in the Bay Area as around the world.
-- poems that seem “anti-urban” in their stance but actually de-create and negate urban forms under capital in order to forge and create new forms (pp. 28, 45, 47, 77, 53).
-- picking “be-in” sites and demo sites (Letter # 8, p. 17).
-- campus & city seizure tactics of the commons (Letter #15, p. 27).
-- construct “hiding places” inside your home & neighborhood p. 38)
-- altered geography maps (pp. 34, 50, 20).
-- tips for urban occupation in revolutionary times of urban action (p. 9)
-- “the vortex of creation is the vortex of destruction” (Letter # 12, p. 23).
-- embraces San Francisco and its “woods” (#53, p. 68; #70, p. 93).
-- towards an anti-productivist driven planet, refusing over-consumption (p. 28); refusing the global assembly line of exploited women (p. 44; Letter # 67, 84).
Rob Wilson
TWELVE FOR/FROM DIANE di PRIMA: A POST-BEAT LETTER
It’s a good idea, Psyche, you turn away from the conditioning
hauling in the galaxy like some used geography from the Interzone
eyes & hands, knives & guns, psychological remnants of tools
this dark a song full of bargaining is getting old on the mass media
notebooks by the dozen carved up into winter scarves for the homeless
the undead are homeless too and walk back-streets of San Francisco
this war against the imagination needs some televising online
to become a new prosody of pithy characters, do you see?
Psyche split from Geography, in cities around the world, our bombs are dropping, bags of rice burst open so we can give them to Mars for free
tired of it so am I bald eagle on this f lying flag where a
porcelain city glitters & splits into a million shards revolving into slums
(RW poem in homage to Diane Di Prima as Political/Poetic “Muse” of the Future)
KAREN YAMASHITA
Interview with Karen Tei Yamashita: “Thank you. I’m very honored [to be nominated for National Book Award in 2010].
I think the work of the previous books made the I Hotel possible; that is to say that I learned while writing how to research, to create form, structure, and narrative voice, and to follow a writing practice intuitive to my own process. The research for Brazil-Maru, based on the history of Japanese immigration to Brazil, was similarly extensive, and I employed practices of interviewing learned from those years. In writing Tropic of Orange, I continued to experiment with voice and narrative perspectives. While researching Circle K Cycles in Japan, I became more confident about moving within a community as recorder and participant while building a contemporary archive. The archival research for I Hotel, however, was far more extensive than in the previous projects. I spent endless hours reviewing old underground newspapers, flyers, graphic art, literature, audio speeches, documentary radio and video, books, and music of the time.
PBAJ: I Hotel is dedicated to Asako and her grandchildren. Do you have a reader in mind as you write?
KTY: My mother, Asako Yamashita, is 93 years old. I suppose she won’t mind her age broadcast at this late date as she, though hard of hearing, has been an avid reader, her mind still very much engaged in current events, the state of the economy, and politics. She reads the New York Times every morning, and she’s the reader who cut out the notice about the National Book Awards. I think it became a reality for her when she read it there. My mother and father and their generation of Nisei Americans lived through the war having to be removed from the San Francisco bay area and sites all along the Pacific Coast to concentration camps. It’s probably not Asako as a particular reader that I have in mind but perhaps that legacy of struggle that extends to a continuing movement for civil and human rights that may be a guiding spirit.
….KTY: The International Hotel or I-Hotel was/is a real place. It was a hotel built around the turn of the century, 1900, on Kearny and Jackson streets between Chinatown and North Beach in San Francisco. In the pre-war era, Kearny Street was known as Filipino- or Manilatown, lined by restaurants, bars, and storefronts that serviced the Filipino community and was mostly populated by Filipino migrant laborers. By the 1960s, the I-Hotel was rundown but cheap housing for a bachelor community of elderly Filipino and Chinese, men who had lived out their lives as agricultural field labor, cannery workers, merchant mariners, longshoremen, union activists, busboys, and cooks. As tenants, these men made their last stand to prevent the destruction of the hotel to be replaced, under the guise of redevelopment, by a parking lot. From 1968 to 1977, community and student activists and eventually thousands of supporters in the San Francisco and East Bay areas congregated at the I-Hotel to prevent the eviction and destruction of the hotel.
This narrative technique has been, for me, an ongoing question from the first novel on. I suppose it began in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest in experimenting with a narrator who is a ball, and it continues in all of my work. It’s become an obsession, but maybe this last book has flushed it out of me. As a creative writing teacher, for many years I used Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler as a teaching tool, to encourage students to find and experiment with narrative voice. I think once a writer discovers the construction, limitations, and pleasures of a voice, the writing often takes care of itself. As for the I Hotel, embedded in the assumptions of the ten novellas and their narrative voices is also a literary project that has to do with Asian American literature.”
Some Book Review comments on I-Hotel:
Weighing in at slightly over 600 pages, author Karen Tei Yamashita’s National Book Award-nominated I Hotel is an encyclopedic compilation of facts, personages, and allusions both common and obscure that could very well represent a turning point in Asian-American literature. A novel that took its author 10 years to write, I Hotel actually consists of ten “hotels”: loosely-associated novellas that detail the variegated strands of activism within San Francisco’s Asian-American community, circa 1968-1977…
Concurrent with the protests of both San Francisco State and UC Berkeley, students and social activists rallied to protest what was clearly a case of the city’s marginalizing a long-established community of color solely for reasons of gentrification. The I-Hotel quickly became the locus of Asian-American political activity for nearly a decade. Yamashita takes great care to make this point explicit, such as when she has a collective “we” succinctly state: “By now we understood the joke about the Red Block on Kearny and swimming around in radical alphabet soup—... On the face of it, we were all radical activist revolutionaries, and we were all united to defeat a capitalist-imperialist system of greed.”
As in her previous works, Yamashita incorporates satire and the surreal in prose that is playful yet knowing, fierce yet mournful, in a wildly multicultural landscape. The novel reveals how the civil rights movement intertwines the Black Panthers, Yellow Power, the Indian takeover of Alcatraz, the formation of the United Farm Workers, protests against nuclear proliferation, and the rights of the disabled – and the fascinating contributions of Asian Americans in each.
You may find yourself putting down the book and going online to find out more about this compelling history, and guessing whom the fictional characters are based on. Mo Akagi appears to be Richard Aoki, field marshal for the Black Panthers. Edmund Yat Min Lee bears a resemblance to Ling-chi Wang, activist and retired UC Berkeley professor of ethnic studies. Arthur Hama might be Takeo “Edward” Terada, a Japanese immigrant who painted Coit Tower murals.
….In the final pages, Yamashita assumes the voice of the community – the “we” who ask, “But why save an old hotel?” In lyrical, elegant prose, she explains how the hotel became a symbol, a rallying cry for people putting aside their differences to unite for a cause.
“Each room was a tiny home, a place of final refuge for a lifetime of work … when we saw the elderly tenants thrown out on the streets, maybe we saw ourselves, our own stories of struggle and sacrifice connected to their stories, and we knew that whatever our kids had been trying to do, we could agree on this one thing – the honor due to those who’ve gone before.”
