Favorite Poets

[RedRosa]

Diane Di Prima (1934-2020) has always been one of my favorite poets. I head her read around a dozen times over the years.

Bio:

"Feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Swarthmore College for two years before moving to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and becoming a writer in the emerging Beat movement. There, she developed friendships with poets Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, and Audre Lorde. After joining Timothy Leary’s intentional community in upstate New York, she moved to San Francisco in 1968.

"Di Prima’s poetry mixes stream-of-consciousness with attention to form and joins politics to spiritual practice. In an interview with Jacket magazine, di Prima spoke about her life as a writer, a mother, and an activist. “I wanted everything—very earnestly and totally—I wanted to have every experience I could have, I wanted everything that was possible to a person in a female body, and that meant that I wanted to be mother.… So my feeling was, ‘Well’—as I had many times had the feeling—‘Well, nobody’s done it quite this way before but fuck it, that’s what I’m doing, I’m going to risk it.’”

"Di Prima published more than 40 books. Her poetry collections included This Kind of Bird Flies Backward (1958), the long poem Loba (1978, expanded 1998), and Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems (2001). She is also the author of the short story collection Dinners and Nightmares (1960), the semi-autobiographical Memoirs of a Beatnik (1968), and the memoir Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years
(2001)."

April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa

Today is your

birthday and I have tried

writing these things before,

but now

in the gathering madness, I want to

thank you

for telling me what to expect

for pulling

no punches, back there in that scrubbed Bronx parlor

thank you

for honestly weeping in time to

innumerable heartbreaking

italian operas for

pulling my hair when I

pulled the leaves off the trees so I'd

know how it feels, we are

involved in it now, revolution, up to our

knees and the tide is rising, I embrace

strangers on the street, filled with their love and

mine, the love you told us had to come or we

die, told them all in that Bronx park, me listening in

spring Bronx dusk, breathing stars, so glorious

to me your white hair, your height your fierce

blue eyes, rare among italians, I stood

a ways off, looking up at you, my grandpa

people listened to, I stand

a ways off listening as I pour out soup

young men with light in their faces

at my table, talking love, talking revolution

which is love, spelled backwards, how

you would love us all, would thunder your anarchist wisdom

at us, would thunder Dante, and Giordano Bruno, orderly men

bent to your ends, well I want you to know

we do it for you, and your ilk, for Carlo Tresca,

for Sacco and Vanzetti, without knowing

it, or thinking about it, as we do it for Aubrey Beardsley

Oscar Wilde (all street lights shall be purple), do it

for Trotsky and Shelley and big/dumb

Kropotkin

Eisenstein's Strike people, Jean Cocteau's ennui, we do it for

the stars over the Bronx

that they may look on earth

and not be ashamed.

from Pieces of a Song (City Lights, 1990)

[RedRosa]

I read Anne Waldman's Fast Speaking Woman (City Lights, still in print) circa 1976 and loved it. I've read all her collections including the current one Trickster Feminism. http://www.annewaldman.org/

[RedRosa]

A poem by Sharon Olds . It’s fun, from The Gold Cell, 1987:

After 37 Years, My Mother Apologizes for My Childhood

When you tilted toward me, arms out
like someone trying to walk through a fire,
when you swayed toward me, crying out you were
sorry for what you had done to me, your
eyes filling with terrible liquid like
balls of mercury from a broken thermometer
skidding on the floor, when you quietly screamed
𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘐 𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘯? 𝘞𝘩𝘰 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘐 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦? the
chopped crockery of your hands swinging toward me, the
water cracking from your eyes like moisture from
stones under heavy pressure, I could not
see what I would do with the rest of my life.
The sky seemed to be splintering, like a window
someone is bursting into or out of, your
tiny face glittered as if with
shattered crystal, with true regret, the
regret of the body. I could not see what my
days would be, with you sorry, with
you wishing you had not done it, the
sky falling around me, its shards
glistening in my eyes, your old, soft
body fallen against me in horror I
took you in my arms, I said 𝘐𝘵’𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵,
𝘥𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘤𝘳𝘺, 𝘪𝘵’𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵, the air filled with
flying glass, I hardly knew what I
said or who I would be now that I had forgiven you.