This edition is the new volume of di Prima's classic Revolutionary Letters. There are some new pieces added in, and new edits on older pieces, done by the author. A new expanded edition of Loba (twice as long as the 1978 Wingbow Press edition) was published in the Penguin Poets series in August 1998. Her autobiographical memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, was published by Viking in April 2001.
after the second reading: perfect for when you need an intense boost of any kind.
wow, issues di Prima wrote about decades ago, are more than prescient today. every letter is a bold encouragement to think and reconsider and act to change our world for the better. every letter is radical and powerful. it's a challenging reading experience, but an extremely valuable one!
I spent a lot of time with this book of poems. I had been seeing references to it all over. I don't even remember hearing about it before this year.
This text feels uncannily close to us. And by us I mean those of you who know what I mean when I say us. Even the shorthand use of "yr" and "wd" is strikingly similar to how I txt. Let alone the nuances of the pieces revolutionary inclinations. The troublings, the poetics, the practicalities.
The name drops had me welling up in the first pages.
This may be magical thinking, but it's as if this was the best time in my life to read this. At no other point would it have resonated as well. A rekindling of affinity for the magical and the poetic coupled with all sorts of points of affinity.
The sort of 'western radical interpretation' of 'eastern spirituality' and so on would have at previous points had me turn away thinking it ignorant and 2nd hand. But what does come off as misunderstood never becomes so odious as to spoil the experience and I too have come to different understandings of what it means to engage with such things.
There is strategic advise about emergency supplies and terrain. There is wise quips about how it is to be done. There is pushing further to the root, condemnations of all civilization rather than just western. There are condemnations of scientism. There is anti-work sentiment. There is a practical and healthy aversion to leaders and rulers.
Reading it I had quite a few moments where I had to put it down to write down the ideas I had-- sometimes happening for dozens of pages in a row. It is a very generative, troubling, and yet also affirming collection of poems.
As much as it seems like it could have been written yesterday by our comrades, as much as it slips into messianic time, the poems are also very of the times they were written. Both in spirit, in what it addresses, and so on. At first some of the 'healthy living' and 'prepping for collapse' stuff rubbed me the wrong way, but eventually I started to see some perhaps neglected truths in it. Some redeeming characteristics of DIY, communes, free love, and so on.
This text places us in a continuum with rebel desert nomads, the people in the hills, in the swamps, in the ghettos, throughout time.
This text is for those who live or dream of living anarchically and against the law even if you cut out the explicit references to anarchists, which are already few.
There are beautiful lines and important points. Small details that stick out and nestle in my mind. There are sweeping passages that go on and take me in.
"someplace it isn't maybe someplace it ends some hills maybe still free but hungry (eyes blaze over ancient guns"
Understanding that we die a million times as a recipe for living free from the inculcation of fear and inaction.
Some of these poems were a bit outdated, in the sense of being soaked by the most naieve adaptation of hippy idealism/tribalism, but other poems were still resounding insights that could apply today and even comfort & inspire us in our daily struggle (f.e. against the current White House fascist freak show)
I find poetry collections hard to review. I definitely know if I think they're good or not. But parsing what makes them good and finding the specifics and language to explain that to other readers can feel next to impossible.
I've been reading Diane di Prima's poems since the early 80s and always find them compelling. Her language pulls readers along like a torrent during flood season: rapidly and totally. Or maybe I should say I consume her writing the way I consume baklava: insatiably and much too quickly.
The Revolutionary Letters was originally published by City Lights fifty years ago. This new edition makes it clear that, despite the distance in time, di Prima is still speaking to readers in bold language that forces us to reexamine the nature of our daily existence, the distance between our world and a world with justice.
If you are the sort of person who thinks about things, who cares about true and complicated fairness, who wrestles with ideas, who refuses to give up the dream of a better world, read this book. And reread it. Let it sweep you along, then return to it to savor each word.
I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss; the opinions are my own.
Diane di Prima’s late-60s/early-70s revolutionary fervor with her vision of continuance is shown in these Rilke’s-to-a-Young-poet-like Letters. Instead of a blurbed diary of Look What I Did, it is written to those who want to be prepared for the clarion call of the imminent day’s struggle. It reads nearly as well today as it would have upon its initial release.
In this, the second edition, there are 49 brief letters exhorting the reader and would-be revolutionary on the likely-overlooked aspects of revolution that an individual encounters on the ground. Everything from filling a bathtub with water to remembering who the true enemies are of The People.
It’s a quick read that would work well to revisit every once in a while – it’d be a nice addition to a 72-hour kit -- since you never know when the times’ll come a-changin’.
"How do 'we' keep fighting? There is no one way, but sometimes you think about lines in Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters. Di Prima's 'letters' feel like they were written to the all of you that always is somewhere coming together. They remind you that you are a part of something, that as sure as you have enemies who want things like jobs, you have friends who want everything. The new letters in this expanded edition continue di Prima's tradition of telling you things you need to know--like 'you have only / so much / ammunition' & how a poem can matter as 'the memory / of the poem / tak[es] root in / thousands / of minds.' & here you thought this classic couldn't get any better."
Left to themselves people grow their hair. Left to themselves they take off their shoes. Left to themselves they make love sleep easily share blankets, dope & children
they are not lazy or afraid they plant seeds, they smile, they speak to one another. The word coming into its own: touch of love on the brain, the ear.
We return with the sea, the tides We return as often as leaves, as numerous as grass, gentle, insistent, we remember the way, our babes toddle barefoot thru the cities of the universe.
--- Ms. di Prima, your words make my heart fly singing. Thank you thank you thank you from the bottom of my pseudo-revolutionary heart.
Reactionary bizarre & unscrupulous politics (rabbit hunting good, vaccines bad, acid good, gardening bad, "Aborigines" and "Africans" good, universities bad, armed resistance good .. ? opposed to the notion of regret, opposed to "not only Western civilization, but civilization itself" .. ? ?) .. but she had the spirit. I'm thinking of a phrase in French which I've heard to describe dancers - "il y a le soufflé", literally "there is the breath." Blunt, daring, radiant, radical. Holding her own against the endless misogyny of her Beat contemporaries and holding the line against the emergent life-eating machine of the American military-industrial complex (did you know the Kent state massacre actually garnered Nixon public favor? that 58% of the public believed the responsibility for the deaths lay with the demonstrators??!). "It is better to lose and win than win and be defeated." Rest in power.
I really didn't like this collection. The lack of intersectionality and ableism, the juvenile simplicity at thinking one can fight their way through systemic problems and basically live on love and fury combined with the lack of musicality really bothered me. There were a few glimpses of a higher poetic caliber peeking out here and there, but mostly the poems felt unfinished and sophomoric. (which, maybe they were? maybe that's part of reading a poet's older work?) It is what it is. The anniversary edition I bought is bound beautifully, though.
The best case anyone has put forth for anarchism and degrowth. Provocative and impactful poetry and a stunning contribution to the Italian radical tradition. Di Prima dares to imagine a radically different world from our own, and it doesn't really matter what is feasible or what isn't; we are better for having poets that really do ruthlessly criticize all that exists.
From Letter #19: if what you want is housing, industry (G.E. on the Navaho reservation) a car for everyone, garage, refrigerator, TV, more plumbing, scientific freeways, you are still the enemy, you have chosen to sacrifice the planet for a few years of some science fiction Utopia, if what you want
Reminiscent of the novel Vogliamo Tutto (We Want Everything), the last stanza of this poem reads:
THEN YOU ARE STILL THE ENEMY, you are selling yourself short, remember you can have what you ask for, ask for everything
Kudos to the anonymous publishers of the PDF copy I read, which they explicitly noted was published "without permission [...]. Anti-profit, anti-copyright."
Kan absolut inte recensera poesi men det här var så bra?? Vardagliga teman men också världsomspännande och revolutionärt. Fantastiskt rent språkligt. Dikter som publicerats i egengjorda zines och på stora förlag, lästs upp under demonstrationer och sena kvällar. Min dumma lilla kärlek för beat-generationen fortsätter leverera.
Revolutionary letter #27 How much can we afford to lose, before we win, can we cut hair, or give up drugs, take job, join Minute Men, marry, wear their clothes play bingo, what can we stomach, how soon does it leave its mark, can we living straight in a straight part of town still see our people, can we live if we don’t see our people? ‘It is better to lose & win, than win & be defeated’ sd Gertrude Stein, which wd you choose?
I liked these poems much better when revisiting them in the context of a huge amount of reading about the Sixties. Like Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, Denise Levertov, and Audre Lorde--as well as her contemporaries Amiri Baraka and Allen Ginsberg--di Prima sought to draw together the multiple dimensions of life-political, psychological, sexual, creative. The directness of her voice sometimes feels like slogan, but the slogans feel increasingly needed as the patterns of oppression she identified continue to play out.
"The women are lying down in front of the bulldozers sent to destroy the last of the olive groves."
(REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #90)
*
"not killing a few white men will bring back power, not killing all the white men, but killing the white man in each of us, killing the desire for brocade, for gold, for champagne brandy, which sends people out of the sun and out of their lives to create COMMODITY for our pleasure, what claim do we have, can we make, on another’s time, another’s life blood, show me a city which does not consume the air and water for miles around it"
(REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #32)
*
"halfway around the world the bombs are falling Do not think to correct this by refusing to read. It happens as you put down the paper, head for the door. The ozone reaches the point of no-return the butterflies bellyflop, the last firefly, etc. Do not think to correct this by reading. The bombs burst the small skull of an Arab infant the silky black hair is stuck to your hands with brains. W/bits of blood. There is less shrieking than you would expect a soft silence. The silence of the poor, those who could not afford to leave. Drop flowers on them from yr mind, why don’t you? ‘I guess we’ll have to stay and take our chances.’ They die so silently even as we speak Black eyes of children seek eyes of the dying mother bricks fall dirt spurts like fountains in the streets. In the time you fill a cup they die of thirst. In the time it takes to turn off the radio. Not past, not future"
(REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #78)
* "may it continue without police may it continue without prisons may it continue without hospitals, death medicine : flu & flu vaccine may it continue without madhouses, marriage, highschools that are prisons may it continue without empire may it continue in sisterhood may it continue thru the wars to come may it continue in brotherhood may it continue tho the earth seem lost may it continue thru exile & silence may it continue with cunning & love may it continue as woman continues may it continue as breath continues may it continue as stars continue may it continue
may the wind deal kindly w/us may the fire remember our names may springs flow, rain fall again may the land grow green, may it swallow our mistakes"
Diane di Prima died October 25, 2020 in San Francisco. These poems originating in the 60's but some few added as late as in the 2000's, you couldn't just label them one of the great "beat" or "protest" or "feminist"or whatever style of books or "new" since they are based in the origins of poems. From the vantage point of the upside down conspiracy, right-wing world we live in now, her seeming radicalism is like being centrist. also musical, beautiful, coherent. It's sad to imagine a time without such a person alive in it. Among the late incantatory letters #93 is outstanding, written on Memorial Day Remember Sacco & Vanzetti Remember Haymarket Remember John Brown Remember slave revolts Remember Malcolm Remember Paracelsus.... Remember to take yr life back into yr hands It's Memorial Day, remember what you love & do it. Don't wait Remember life hangs by a thread --- anybody's life...
Provocative collection. Really inspired by it. Can't get over this credibly-sourced fact form Wikipedia: "She attended academically elite Hunter College High School where she became part of a small group of friends including classmate Audre Lorde who formed a sort of Dead Poets Society calling themselves 'the Branded.' They cut class to roam the city, hanging out in bookstores, sharing their own poetry and holding séances for dead poets."
Revolutionary Letter #53 San Francisco Note
"I think I'll stay on this / earthquake fault near this / still-active volcano in this / armed fortress facing a / dying ocean & / covered w/ dirt / while the / streets burn up & the / rocks fly & pepper gas / lays us out / cause / that's where's my friends are, / you bastards, not that / you know what that means / Ain't gonna cop to it, ain't gonna / be scared no more, we all / know the same songs, mushrooms, butterflies / we all / have the same babies, dig it / the woods are big."
amazing. still so relevant some of my favourite passages/lines 'does it leave its mark, can we/living straight in a straight part of town still see/our people, can we live/if we don't see our people?' (from RL#27) 'TO BE FREE we've got to be free of/any idea of freedom./Today the State Dept lifted the ban on/travel to China; and closed/Meritt College.' (RL#47) 'With what relief do we fall back on/the tale, so often told in revolutions/that now we must/organize, obey the rules, so that later/we can be free. It is the point/at which the revolution stops. To be carried forward/later & in another country, this is/the pattern, but we can break the pattern' (from RL#48) 'over & over we look for/the picture in the cloth' (from RL#57) 'we sit on shifting ground/at the edge of this ocean/"as far from Europe as you can get"/& watch the hills flicker like dreamskin' (fromRL #57)
I received this as a gift, opened it and landed on page 76: Revolutionary Letter #62: "Take a good look/ at history (the American myth)/ check sell out/ of revolution by the founding fathers" This speaks to me right now!
I like the older stuff, filled with energy and optimism that still speaks to us today.
At some points I was like yesss Diane di Prima!! So true. At other points I was like yikkkkes Diane di Prima!!! Seeming a little white hippie lady who hates vaccines 🫢🫣