Very sad loss news in a very tough loss time—yet another death of a treasured teacher and friend in this foul Year Of The Metal Rat.
Diane di Prima, whom I wrote about two weeks ago here, died yesterday.
With poetry not even on life support anymore, with a culture dying of parched thirst two feet from poetry’s fountainous well, a master practitioner also so versed in the arts of magic and cultural revolution is no longer here to draft sacred tracts to the mountaintop.
As if we’ve even begun to recover from the twin gut punch heartbreaks of fellow friends and teachers Lewis MacAdams and Michael McClure checking out this year.
Alas even beyond the plagues of the body and the body politic, this is far and away the illest environment for earth soul poets.
As most people won’t even know who this famous lady is, you can get a sense of her life here in this short documentary.
Unbroken Chain
Diane taught me the impossibly myriad intricacies of all-time titan Ezra Pound. She unlocked the doors of polis poet mammoth Charles Olson by playing secret tapes of his projective orature, those wild and long, dense and impenetrable lines unlocking clear as new mountain water upon the sonorous baritone of his postman Boston tones.
She shared the mysteries of vision of the incomparable H.D., aka Hilda Doolittle who soared and yet soars over legion more well-known, more-distributed, and far more college-curriculum taught poets and their tenured salesmen.
Finally, she even revealed Shelley’s towering “Prometheus Unbound” as a magical working.
Giants walked among us
The Beat Of Generations
Diane was an archetypal tough lady from old school Brooklyn who didn’t bow an inch to the weakening of generations—and as the Samurai teach us, every generation is weaker than the one before. Once when some weak whiners in our masterclass moaned and groaned over some moderate hundred-page or so assignment, she was aghast at such a pathetic display and went around the room asking how much we each read each week. I was the most at forty hours and the next was one at twenty and then a spate of fives and tens.
“Well you can all begin by doubling your reading,” she said.
“Oh my God,” cried the poetasters like ‘trauma’ victims, “I have a JOB!”
“I don’t care,” di Prima replied. “I’m here to teach you how to be poets, not live your lives.”
“Look, you’ll always have something trying to stop you from being an artist,” she cautioned. “Money, jobs, family, social causes. You’ll always be not getting published, losing lovers, having people die on you. You’re either going to be poets or you’re not.”
“When I was your age,” she said, “I lived in New York City as a single mother and had a secretary job for five hours a week. Before they rigged the system against art and against freedom, that was enough money to get by on and I could read and write the rest of the time. That’s all gone now. I have no idea what you people are going to do—but I do know what you have to do if you want to be poets.”
Let There Be Gold
That was a long time ago, and there’s been no poets since then—just a much tougher environment to make ends meet. Real wages have been in decline for 50 years since Nixon took our currency off the gold standard and made it policy to keep lions like Diane from happening ever again in our culture.
Diane wrought and wrote so much gold.
Diane taught that poets read everything. Not only poetry but for example economics, history, ancient Greek, Latin classics, and arcana.
Diane taught that poets don’t take no for an answer.
Diane taught that poets do ever take care of their brother and sister artists.
Diane taught that The Only War That Matters Is The War Against The Imagination.
Vaya Con Dios Revolutionary Sister!
❏