Poetry Deal (San Francisco Poet Laureate Series) by Diane Di Prima

by Diane di Prima

" The Poetry Deal shines with eros and kindness and the reality of inspiration. No American or Anarchist voice or soul-building heart has ever been more clear. The pages are fierce with love and generosity."--Michael McClure, author of Ghost Tantras" The Poetry Deal is fresh flame from a revolutionary fire that continues to burn. Every woman of every age should carry it in a purse with their pepper spray. Diane is the ultimate weapon."--Amber Tamblyn, author of Dark Sparkler"In her latest collection as San Francisco Poet Laureate, di Prima is again at the height of her powers, with 'the act of writing itself more compelling than ever.'"--Micah Ballard, author of Waifs and Strays"I return to this book again and again to remember what it means to own and further a poetic and political lineage."--Ana Bozicevic, author of Rise in the Fall" The Poetry Deal [is] an urgent success of the highest order . . . Diane di Prima should always be high on the American poetry play list."--Barbara Berman, The Rumpus"Recounting a life in poetry, her commitment to progressive thought and action, and a half-century of Bay Area culture, crises, and change, di Prima writes at the top of her game . . . di Prima recalls the time an institutionalized Ezra Pound told her that 'poets have to eat'; rarely has a poet left so much bread on the table for future poets."—*Starred Review, Publishers Weekly"This is a volume that traverses the specific and reaches the universal. She marks her poems with great strength and utmost sensitivity. They are poems that live in real time; not cyberspace. di Prima's poetry is well-lived and poetry worth living in. She is a gifted teacher enjoining the reader to face life's lessons for the attendant dilemmas of old age. Carry this book with you. It will arm you with continuous insight and flaming provocation.”—Robert Sutherland-CohenFramed by two passionate, and critical, prose statements assessing her adopted home city, The Poetry Deal is a collection of poems that provide a personal and political look at forty years of Bay Area culture. Often elegiac in tone, the book captures the poet's sense of loss as she chronicles the deaths of friends from the AIDS epidemic as well as the passing of illustrious countercultural colleagues like Philip Whalen, Pigpen from the Grateful Dead, and Kirby Doyle. She also recalls and mourns out-of-town inspirations like Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Audre Lorde, and Ezra Pound. Yet even as she laments the state of her city today, she finds triumph and solace in her own relationships, the marriages of her friends, the endurance of City Lights, and other symbols of San Francisco's heritage.Born in Brooklyn in 1934, Diane di Prima emerged as a member of the Beat Generation in New York in the late '50s; in the early '60s, she founded the important mimeo magazine The Floating Bear with her lover LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). In the late '60s, she moved to San Francisco, where she would publish her groundbreaking Revolutionary Letters (1971) with City Lights. Her other important books include Memoirs of a Beatnik , Pieces of a Dream , Recollections of My Life as a Woman , and Loba . She was named San Francisco Poet Laureate in 2009.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback Bunko

First published October 14, 2014

About the author

Diane di Prima was an American poet and member of the Beat Generation. She was San Francisco’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2011.

Reviews

[lucien alexander “sasha” · Rating 4 out of 5]

Diane Di Prima moved to the San Francisco I saw in movies and thought was paradise. She shouts out the Panthers and the Diggers and I admit I'm sort of a sucker for a certain kind of poetic radical nostalgia, so "Revolutionary Letter #4", for instance, spoke to me. I wasn't totally in love with her repeated use of "tribe" to describe a group of people, and I think there are a few points where her age and whiteness blind her to certain problems, but overall the poems are lyrical and warm, and seem to come from a thoughtful, feminist place.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have you ever tried to email chicken soup?
Diane di Prima


The Poetry Deal—It’s only 109 pages.

But Diane di Prima—poet, printer, feminist, Buddhist, anarchist, pacifist, cultural revolutionary— packs a lot of life into those pages.

In the late 50s and 60s di Prima lived in New York and California and worked in poetry and theatre circles as the counterculture was on the rise. She was friends with some of the Beat writers and was a literary collaborator of Leroi Jones (later Amiri Baraka). Later on, she taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder. One of her brilliant and useful lectures from Naropa is entitled, “By Any Means Necessary,” on how to get your work out and circulating.

Now in her eighties, di Prima offers new and old readers this book, which is volume #5 in the San Francisco Poet Laureate Series, from City Lights Foundation. Herein, you will find many treasures from this committed poet.

Procrastinators (we are legion) will enjoy “Clearing the Desk,” an open letter to all those solicitors through the U.S. Postal Service whose entreaties have stacked up over time at her work space:

I’d love to send money (if only I had some) to
the UFW
Nalanda Translation Committee
Greenpeace
Project Open Hand
the San Francisco Jazz Fesitval
the Society to Lynch Newt Gingrich
& that new one: People Against Impermanence
(such a sweet idea)

Since the 60s, di Prima has penned several editions of “Revolutionary Letters” that deal with creating a new political sensibility and critiquing the old. In The Poetry Deal, she presents haikus that focus on Israel’s attack on Lebanon in the summer of 2006:

don’t ask why I
have bad dreams
ask why if I don’t

Embracing a suggestion from Dear Abby to “take time to remember those brave souls who gave their lives for freedom,” di Prima writes a litany in “Memorial Day 2003” that includes:

Remember John Brown
Remember the slave revolts
Remember Malcolm
Remember Paracelsus
Remember Huey and Little Bobby Hutton
Remember Tina Modotti
Remember Crazy Horse and Chief Joseph
Remember Amelia Earhart

Recently, I read her memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, which covered her life to the mid-Sixties. I often thought of Catholic Worker friends and their philosophy of personalism, which privileges the face to face, as I discovered how Diane and her friends engaged in spirited mutual aid throughout those tumultuous years. In a striking poem, “Where Are You,” she resists the current wave of new technologies (Skype) and social media (Facebook) and affirms that staying in touch

means when you’re home from the hospital
he brings you a casserole or soup for the freezer
or mops your floor, makes sure you can reach what you need…
it means one of us will stay with your three-year-old
if you have to stay overnight at the hospital
where you just had your second baby

In “Haiti, Chile, Tibet,” she gives eight suggestions for how to confront the tragedies of our times:

8. STOP ASKING WHAT OTHERS “BELIEVE”
just look in their eyes
& see we are the same, they are the same
as your most beloved child, yr dog, yr lover

What energizes me is di Prima’s voice: deep and nonchalant, exuberant and serene, celebratory and damn determined. In “Some Words about the Poem,” she states, “Poets speak truth when no one else can or will. That’s why the hunger for poetry grows when the world grows dark. When repression grows, when people speak in whispers or not at all, they turn to poetry to find what’s going on.”

You can read her book in an hour and a half or so.

And then be revved up to recognize, resist, and rejoice over what’s going on right where you are and even far, far away.

[Larry Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just look at that cover...Diane di Prima, Beat rebel poet, today in an open photo of herself...just sharing as she always had with directness and heart. Her introductory "Inaugural Address" as Poet Laureate of San Francisco is worth the price of the book. Only she can speak with such caring and authenticity of being at the heart of that great Beat and San Francisco movement. She names it and claims its freedom vision well, telling of her move from a noisy and violent NYC to a sunny and friendly San Francisco of the late 1960s. She was part of the communal living then and carries that spirit of openness now. Though she dares to ask what happened to that positive accepting vision. "San Francisco was then and still is for me the place where you can take your dreams into the streets and make them happen. Make change." Though she questions the "UnPhun Party" now running things, she closes by envisioning for us a whole culture of freedom and love and acceptance. I confess it brought tears to my eyes to think my generation allowed this vision to fade or be run by corporate values. Go on to read the wise poems of this book. They speak of age and love and connection. Diane di Prima is alive and well and still ringing changes. Thanks to City Lights for doing this book.

Here's are two small excerpts:

from "Poet Laureate Oath of Office"

my vow is:
to remind us all
to celebrate
there is no time
too desperate
no season
that is not
a Season of Song

from "OLD AGE: The Dilemma"

most of what I'm writing
not that interesting
but the act of writing itself
more compelling than ever.

[Cristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I love about Diane and what I learn from her words is always the most valuable truth that we never need to explain ourselves and who we are. I am so glad that this is the one book I acquired in my first and only trip to City Lights. I hope to get back there.

[Sarah Alcantara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m taking a Beat Literature class (winter quarter 2019, UCSC) and this is the first author I’ve come across since I learned about this movement in high school that wasn’t a white, cis male. Granted, she is a white woman but still, it’s refreshing. I liked reading about her love for poetry as we share similar views. I also enjoyed the different styles/structures of her poems— it made it an enjoyable and captivating read and didn’t make it so that her poems combined into a long one. She had some great lines in here that really touched me.

“I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and the truth of Imagination.” (This is a John Keats quote that she includes in her speech)

“The act of language has left its mark on the stars.
It has filled space w/ myriad tiny mirrors
reflecting some inner movement.

... & language like some great magnetic river
flows thru the valleys & over the peaks of the world” (38).

“love is the immortality
we carry with us” (43).

“We write poetry to remember, and sometimes we write poetry to forget. But hidden in our forgetting, encoded there, is our remembering—our secrets” (107).

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Telling the truth is a radical act and Diane di Prima's poetry reveals the rich rewards that come from devoting one's life -- and one's verses -- to such an act. In poems short and long, she addresses topics as varied and polarizing as the damage of global warming ("350"), the loss of life from AIDS ("Zoron, Your Death"), and the racist violence that undermines the ability for positive change in our government ("& About Obama") without ever sounding the least bit didactic. Because di Prima isn't arguing, she's reporting from the front lines. She's committed to envisioning a better world and revealing just what's wrong with this one. Sure, she has a cause (if you want to say "justice" or "equality" or "love" is a cause) but really, she's simply reconnecting us to our humanity time and again. In this late collection of her work, you'll find humor ("Clearing the Desk") and mysticism ("A Healing Spell for Mouse") as well as a true economy of language as in the poem "Shirley Horn at Yoshi's": "How long can music / override the pain? // She reaches for the playlist." Why be fancy when you can be powerful?

[Gabriel Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

diane diprima for president. except abolish the presidency and reimagine a world of art and care and smoking weed in her anarchist vision instead.

the poetics of the line "lynch newt gingrich" ... i wholeheartedly agree.

[Pasty Hag · Rating 5 out of 5]

AMAZING

[Jes · Rating 3 out of 5]

She's such a boss.

[Tonee Mae Moll · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those books of poetry that you know, before you’re even finished reading it, will be a favorite you return to for years.

[Mela · Rating 4 out of 5]

and I'd also like to be bread, to make bread and write words and make poetry out of every day light and for everyone to do work, the work that makes them happy and brings bread

[Matthew Stolte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspiring - I read my library copy then my purchased copy now I'm going through it a 3rd time to take notes! 🎶

[Lauren Cono · Rating 3 out of 5]

She stands before us: "a piece of wind w/a notebook & pen"

[Brendan]

Rating: 3 1/2

The collection opens with her inaugural address as poet laureate of San Francisco. Way too much leftist politics: promoting the myth that the Rosenbergs were innocent, advocating free food, housing, health care, transportation, and college without a reasonable way to pay for it, abolishing prisons, etc. She touches on her stint as a bookstore clerk when authors like Jean Genet and Henry Miller were banned. We have more common ground on this issue.

As for the poems, topics include the Beats, AIDS, and San Francisco of course.

My favorites:
"City Lights 1961"
"Max Ernst in Suburbia"
"Clearing the Desk"
"Where Are You?"
"Eye Clinic Waiting Room"

[Mills College Library]

811.54 D596p 2014