Woman Keeping Beat

Inspirations from poet Diane di Prima (1934-2020)

“You can have what you ask for.

Ask for everything.”

~ Diane di Prima

Diane di Prima and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), NYC (1960)

We have several shelves in our home library dedicated to the Beats. These writers are our friends. The posse includes of course Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Snyder, Ferlinghetti, Cassady, alongside Joyce Johnson, Diane di Prima, Anne Waldman, Patti Smith, and several others.

My husband and I make a Beat pilgrimage to City Lights Books in North Beach whenever we’re in San Francisco. A year ago, I nabbed Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry As Insurgent Art (2007) and Neal Cassady’s The First Third (1971).

But last month, my womanly writer’s heart quaked, split open. I picked up Diane di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (2001) from City Lights. Sucked in whilst catsitting for friends in Russian Hill. The writing is jaw-dropping and the storytelling exquisite. Highly recommend.

I knew about di Prima primarily through her Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969). I appreciated the book which, rumor has it, was commissioned as a tell-all exposé – and that it was. Extremely juicy deets of her coming of age as an East Village poetess. No one can fault her for writing for cash – that woman needed to eat – and it was indeed tough times, especially as a bohemian female artist in the 50s and 60s.

Surely, it was one thing for Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and the like to do what they did and live and how they lived; no question they were trailblazers and paid many a ferry boatman to produce the art they produced. But to do all that as a woman, raising kids as a single mother, fully committed to her life as an artist, a poet – well, that’s next level.

I prefer prose to poetry, and my favorite mode is memoir. But after reading Diane’s Recollections, I discovered her collection The Poetry Deal (2014) – commemorating her 2009 inauguration as San Francisco’s Poet Laureate.

Song for Baby-o, Unborn

This one blows my gourd - written for Jeanne, her first child, in 1959. She was 22.

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

di Prima reads at the Gas Light Cafe, NYC (1959)

And from her Revolutionary Letters:

“You can have what you ask for.

Ask for everything.”

It’s so powerful, the simplest lines.

In addition to being a committed poet, Diane was something of a sorceress, a poet-priestess. Read the Tarot. Lived her life as a woman. Not attempting to be a man. This is no small feat – to be strong and smart and wild – and also, soft, sensitive, and vulnerable – more susceptible in so many ways.

“I think the poet is the last person who is still speaking the 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

The Poetry Deal

Here is a clip of The Poetry Deal (2011) documentary about Diane. You can watch the entire 27 min. film on PBS for free here. I myself played it on repeat at least five times – had it in the background while making butternut squash soup in my pressure cooker. Absorbed.

I pen this short piece to pay respects to this Woman Beat, and to share her with you. Knowing Diane in this way, I feel less alone as a woman – as a writer, a societal outrider. Someone who has made choices to leave security, marriage, relationship, countries, lovers, cities behind – all in service to the art.

In service to soul, I go, and I write. I go and I write where She asks or commands me to go and to write. I’ve taken incredible risks, made death-defying moves. I’m a solo act, not working in community, rather a loner when it comes to writing. This has me mostly isolated and more in communion with the Divine as my inspiration. As with this recent meeting with Diane, contact with dead poets can be a lifesaver.

I’ll leave you with the “No Problem Party Poem” below. And, to the writers, the artists, the free spirits and free thinkers:

Keep the Beat.

No Problem Party Poem

Here’s a favorite from Selected Poems: 1956-1975 by Diane di Prima: