As far as we knew, there was only a small handful of us – perhaps 40 or 50 in the city – who knew what we knew: who raced about in Levis and work shirts, made art, smoked dope, dug the new jazz, and spoke a bastardization of the black argot.
– Diane di Prima, Memoirs of a Beatnik
Asked how it feels to be among the last of the original Beat poets, Diane di Prima just scoffs. Beat isn’t a generation or a literary movement, as far as she’s concerned, it’s simply a type of poetry.
"I don’t feel like I’m the last of anything, or the first of anything," says the 69-year-old di Prima, who has been called the first and most important woman writer of the Beat movement.
"François Villon (the medieval French poet) was a Beat writer. Rimbaud was a Beat writer," she says. "I think there’s a Beat style – and it’s still going strong. There are young kids today writing in the Beat modality and you could make the case for some kinds of rap growing out of that, too. I don’t think you can say, ‘This was the Beat period and now, nobody else can write like that if they want to.’"
In fact, the Beat tradition, which is concerned, in di Prima’s words, with "the importance of living speech and the vernacular," is thriving these days. And one sign of its health is the launching of the Calgary International Spoken Word Festival, where di Prima will be giving workshops from July 5 to 9. Her visit also includes a public reading on Wednesday, July 7 at Knox United Church.
It will be a chance to hear one of the legends of the Beat era, the rebellious Italian American poet from Brooklyn who hung with LSD guru Timothy Leary, was busted for obscenity with fellow poet Le Roi Jones, staged colourful antiwar demonstrations with the radical Diggers troupe and published her sexually candid Memoirs of a Beatnik in 1969. Yet those were only the early chapters in the career of a poet, scholar, activist and longtime Buddhist who has been writing steadily for half a century. In fact, a new edition of her ongoing Revolutionary Letters, begun during her time with the Diggers in the late ’60s, is about to be published with 23 new poems.
"I write (poems) all the time," says di Prima during a frank and friendly telephone interview from her home in San Francisco. "It’s a habit." She jots them down on any scrap of paper at hand – in the margins of books or on the backs of flyers. "Sometimes I find them on the floor or under the bed."
And she’s still protesting, too. "The two months before we started bombing Iraq, I was doing peace readings every other day," she says. Although her days of doing Diggers-style street theatre are over. "I’m partially disabled, I can’t stand very long. I have a bad spine and one of my knees has had surgery for torn cartilage," she says. "So I don’t go out on the streets and do the marching stuff. I can’t."
But if the body is wearing down, the mind remains razor keen. The erudite di Prima just finished teaching one of her private poetry courses, an intense, three-month study of Yeats and his use of the western hermetic tradition, and in her Calgary workshops she’ll offer a broad survey of women mystic writers that will range from the ancient Gnostics to 20th-century American poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Talking with her, it’s clear that di Prima’s life has been one great, vigorous quest for knowledge, a journey that has taken her from Zen to Tibetan Buddhism while at the same time leading her to explore western magic and shamanism, all of it feeding her writing.
Di Prima says she first embraced Buddhism, not as an alternative to orthodox western religions, but as a way to create poetry. "My parents were atheists," she says. "My first influence was my mother’s father from southern Italy, who was not only an atheist but an anarchist. The early attraction of Buddhism was that it was a very direct and applicable way of making your art. It was going to that ‘no mind’ place to make art and learning to drop all those stupid rules that you were taught about poetry."
She began practising Zen in 1962. Twelve years later, along with poets Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, she helped create the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, the famed writing program at Naropa University, a Buddhist institution in Colorado founded by Tibetan lama Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Eventually, she left Zen and became a Tibetan Buddhist, once again for pragmatic reasons.
"I was working with western magic and trance and visualization, and I needed something that gave me more of a sense of backup," she says. "The Tibetan Buddhist tradition comes directly out of the shamanistic tradition and makes no bones about it."
But getting back to that "Beat generation," di Prima admits the ranks of her contemporaries are beginning to thin – although, given their youthful excesses, most have lasted much longer than expected. Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs both died in 1997, but Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder, among others, are still alive and kicking. Di Prima says she and McClure still get together, but not that often.
"I think we all have a little bit of a sense that we’d like to get as much of our work in order as possible before we go," she says. "So there’s more staying at home and shuffling the papers."
Yet, even as she works on the second volume of her autobiography (the first, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, was published in 2001), di Prima, a mother and grandmother, remains very much concerned for the future, especially in light of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the teeth of worldwide protests.
"We haven’t really faced up to how much power those folks think they have, that they can afford to ignore the whole world," she says of the Bush administration. "And I also wonder what it’s going to lead to in the next three to five years. It’s a sad situation, but there’s also more hope than you sometimes think. A lot of these anti-globalization and antiwar movements transcend differences in political thinking and economics and so on – they are global movements, and something may come of that."
As a veteran radical, what does she think of the activism among today’s youth? "It’s great," she says. "I think the young people are working consciously with a lot of tools that we didn’t – like ways of resolving differences between different activist groups.
"They do a lot more talking and meeting than I could have stood," she adds with a laugh, "but they’re interested in resolving issues amongst themselves ahead of time, so that they can act in a more uniform and sane manner." |
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