The Alsop Review

These new poems of mine [“The Jungle,” “The Ballroom,” “The Party,” “The Beach,” “Lord Jim,” “The Yeoman of the Guard,” “Blackout”], with their longer lines and almost deadly certainty, had already begun before Roi knocked on my door. They had begun with my first peyote trip, and with the vast permission I had found in Jimmy Waring’s “composition classes.” But now, as my emotional life came to a strong, though temporary, focus--this new work, too, came to a fruition: a powerful voice found its way through me and into the world. The first of many voices that would speak through me, now that I no longer sought to control the poem.

For isn’t it not that we “find our voice” as poetry teachers are so fond of saying, but rather that voices find us, and perhaps we welcome them? Is not poetry a dance from possession to possession—“obsession” in the full sense the word had in nineteenth-century magick? We are “ridden” as by the gods.

The perception is all the stronger because it seems to move in a direction opposite to the primary direction of di Prima’s life: the assertion of her will--a word which is often capitalized in this book. Indeed, the word “control”--present in the above quotation--echoes throughout Recollections of my Life as a Woman, as in the author’s assertion that her “struggle for control over my own life had been an epic one” or “what I heard from lovers, was that I was a controlling or castrating bitch.” One feels at times that perhaps the worst thing that can happen to di Prima is something occurring “against her will.” Yet the poem “comes to fruition” as something outside the poet’s “control”--outside her “will.” One thinks of a remark Stanley Fish makes in his recent book, How Milton Works: Milton, writes Fish, “longs to be absorbed by a power greater than he.” At the same time, Milton “experiences absorption as a threat...to his very being.” Di Prima’s statement is an assertion of a truth which is at some distance from what “poetry teachers are so fond of saying.” If it contradicts those teachers--and even contradicts some aspects of di Prima’s own experience--so be it: that is the nature of “truth.”

There is no doubt that Recollections of my Life as a Woman stirs up strong feelings. A woman friend of mine attended a reading di Prima was giving to publicize the book. Di Prima read the following passage:

When Billie [Holiday] was coming to Carnegie Hall there was no way I could have gone. No way to afford it. But I had a friend, a kind of acquaintance on the fringe of the scene, a woman named Joan McCarthy who liked us all very much and would invite us over to eat steak and talk. She was a woman who was not like any of us at all, she held a straight job, had no imagination, nothing in her mind or conversation flew, and we were always fondly exasperated or outright angry when we left her house. I think she was glamorized, fascinated by us all.

Miraculously, Joan McCarthy invited me to go with her to hear Billie Holiday; she had two tickets. Never before or after do I remember being invited, or going, anywhere with Joan. Just this one miracle.

Naturally I said yes.

And naturally di Prima loves the concert. “Tonight,” she writes, “[Billie Holiday] went still deeper, into a whole other dimension, and took us with her.”

The passage, which is an eloquent tribute to Billie Holiday, implicitly asks us to identify ourselves with di Prima and her friends--and to see Joan McCarthy as an outcast: “a woman who was not like any of us.” Yet, as she listened, my friend found herself identifying with Joan McCarthy. She began to see di Prima’s curt dismissal of the woman (“she held a straight job, had no imagination, nothing in her mind or conversation flew”) as cruel, perhaps even unfair. “As Diane has felt the class prejudice of the literary world,” my friend writes, “I have felt the sting of elitism within the world of ‘artists.’” Joan McCarthy was doing di Prima a favor, after all. Does she deserve this attack--with full name included? McCarthy was, my friend writes, “a woman who perhaps imagined that if Diane di Prima heard Billie Holiday, it might change her life”--which, indeed, it does. Why is di Prima so cruel to her? Because she is not an artist--only someone interested in di Prima and her friends? Why should di Prima repay a kindness with a cruelty?

These questions cannot be answered within the context of the book. We hear nothing more of Joan McCarthy. Yet, for my friend, there were other disturbing moments as well: “I’m content to applaud artists and be supportive,” she writes: “I haven’t wished for more. In particular, life stories that include extreme selfishness combined with children do not interest me. Deceiving men and then belittling them is not feminist doctrine...I like her work very much and what little I know of her as well. That’s exactly why I’m so angry to discover that she wasn’t all that I wanted her to be.”

My friend remains sympathetic to di Prima, and what she wrote me by no means represents her final judgement: “I’ve written you at least a half dozen unsent letters regarding di Prima’s life. Often, I wish I’d never read the memoir. It lands in my thoughts daily....”

How indeed is one to deal with di Prima’s anger, fear, wilfulness--her paranoid sense of the world as “war” and of herself as one of the very few intelligent people in this life-threatening situation:

War is everywhere. For me it is everywhere: the War between my parents, the War between myself and the entity they are, the War between all the family and what I have gathered is a hostile world. My father goes out into it and returns discouraged. There is War upon War in my world, and they are all muted, hushed--my parents never argue.

There is also some vast global entity called the War which keeps coming closer...In my child’s mind they are all one, these Wars...

And then something else takes over, a fury fills my child’s body, almost burns out the circuits: I am in their hands, and they [her parents] are helpless, cowed people. Anger pours through me...I will have to think to trick them into keeping alive. Into keeping me alive...They are bowed: sad, intimidated people, and I suspect even then, somewhat stupid. I’m on my own from here on out.

At one point Di Prima describes how she came to believe in “the relative uselessness of men”--an opinion which she seems to maintain throughout her life, despite her many connections with men:

In the turbulent 1930s into which I was born, my grandmother taught me that the things of woman go on: that they are the very basis and ground of human life. Babies are born and raised, the food is cooked. The world is cleaned and mended and kept in order. Kept sane. That one could live with dignity and joy even in poverty. That even tragedy and shock and loss require this basis of loving attendance.

And that men were peripheral to all this...I grew up thinking them a luxury.

Are men relatively useless? Do we have to believe that in order to maintain sympathy for this writer? DiPrima certainly likes some men and dislikes others, just as she likes some women and dislikes others. She is probably unfair to many men in the same way that she is unfair to Joan McCarthy. The male Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, however, “was the first person I ever met for whom I felt immediate and total trust.” Di Prima’s married lover, LeRoi Jones /Amiri Baraka--with whom she is “in love” for a long period--is presented rather unsympathetically. The book makes it clear why she is angry at him, but less clear why she should love him. For a sense of her deep connection to this brilliant poet we must go to early di Prima poems such as “The Yeomen of the Guard,” which ends,

But the main point here is that the “unfairness” of Recollections of my Life as a Woman is preeminently di Prima’s, not somebody else’s. It arises out of a life which is lived, if possible, to the hilt: “We had no vocabulary for these things,” she writes. “No concepts, really for what was happening. Another world was breaking through to ours, and we were awash in it.”

Recollections of my Life as a Woman does not offer us a sense of a “complete,” “finished” selfhood, not even the “outlaw artist renunciant” selfhood to which di Prima returns often. The book is passionate moments, extraordinary events, and powerfully-held (“usually strong and vociferous”) opinions. Whether the opinions are “correct” is another matter. They are unquestionably di Prima’s. I believe my friend’s discomfort with this book is precisely the right reaction to it. It is the price both di Prima and the reader pay for the book’s “willingness to peer into darkness. Struggle for Truth.” Di Prima is utterly determined not to be like the people of her parents’ world--and that determination leaves its mark on her. “I proceeded to break the rules of that Italianate familial world, one by one,” she writes. (Note, however, that her opinion that men are “relatively useless” arises directly out of “that Italianate familial world” which she claims to be rejecting.)

Disappointment or loss marked the men of that world. And silence; one simply didn’t talk about it.

Disappointment and silence marked the women too. But there the silence lay deeper. No tales were told about them. They did not turn from one career to another, “take up the law,” but buried the work of their hearts in the basement, burned their poems and stories, lost the thread of their dreams.

Such honesty and eloquence are characteristic of the entire book and make it an enormously important document of the late Twentieth Century. DiPrima’s story is by no means everyone’s--she is in many ways a very odd person and contradictions abound--but there are living insights here which you will find nowhere else.

I want to close this essay with a long, searing, marvelous passage from the book. This statement is at once beautifully written, enormously insightful, and obviously true. It’s a kind of underside to di Prima’s famous poem, “Rant”--and ought to be required reading for anyone even considering being a poet. Di Prima is told by a “prospective editor at Knopf” that an influential neighbor of hers is “ vociferously against publishing [her] work, which--he declared--wasn’t poetry at all.” She comments,

[It] may be that I had run into one of my first real encounters with class prejudice in the literary world. This is something that nobody talks about much, but it is very very real. There are to this day accepted and prestigious modes of entry into that world that are based simply on race, gender, class and/or money, and everybody knows about them and nobody acknowledges them.

Take, for example, the simple expedient of going to one of the right literary colleges, and while there using family dollars to start a slick but arty literary magazine. Many prestigious writers will happily send you work, if your “product” looks tasteful and expensive. And one name leads to another, of course. Presto, before you know it you are not only an editor and publisher, but a writer, for god’s sake, a literary personage to be reckoned with (whether you can really write a word or not). You instantaneously wield a certain amount of power, and--unless you do something unspeakably gauche--no one is going to venture a word against you.

And this is only one of the more innocent and harmless methods of becoming part of the literary landscape.

Look at what it takes in the way of financial backup to be available to travel and read your work at the ridiculously low rates they offer at first. How much money you need to show up in the right places at the right times: poetry conferences, arts festivals, or to publish endlessly in non-paying “little magazines,” spend a small fortune on postage, spend the equivalent of a part-time job in work hours on gratuitous (often inane and pompous) literary correspondence, etc. There is simply no way to persist in all these activities, and not only persist but convey a sense of ease and pleasure in them, in the “literary life,” per se, no way, I tell you, to have the time, space, and finances to continue these games indefinitely, without some kind of private income. So that you are free to make your decisions not based on what will help you survive for the next month, what will get the rent paid and food on the table, but on what will aid and abet your literary career, keep you visible, by god, put you at the right conference, in the right city, the right anthology or magazine, the right agent’s or publisher’s office at the right moment.

And all the other denizens of that world, your fellow-literary-playmates-whatever want and need your unspoken assurance that the living is easy, that no unsightly issue such as the bills, or medicine for the kids, or the bouncing check you wrote the airline to get there to do that reading in the first place, is on your mind when you show up to play with them. They crave this assurance of ease.

It is a gentleman’s life for sure, and my upstairs neighbor--who had no doubt won his own place in that life with just the right mixture of money and academia, subservience and arrogance--was quite right in sensing that I was an upstart who had no place in it at all.

In years to come I would encounter the same barriers time and again; they would rise up in response to my politics, my mode of dress, my deliberately cultivated Italian/American manner, New York accent, the concerns of the characters in my short stories, the street slang in my poems.

Or I would stand stubbornly in the wings at some powerful and prestigious university, refusing to go on, demanding payment in front for some lecture or reading, while the powers-that-be assured me that the check would arrive in the mail in about two months. It was painfully clear at those moments that I was not one of the boys, and it worked against me. It still does, in spite of the alleged gains of the women’s movement. In spite of the vague prestige and respect that simply surviving to the frontier of old age brings an artist, and especially a woman artist, in this all-devouring century.

I showed that passage to still another friend, a poet; he commented, “God bless Diane di Prima for telling out.”

Recollections of my Life as a Woman is an instance of a kind of book one sees less and less these days. It is an interesting phenomenon of current publishing that mass-market books often appear with “Questions for Discussion” at the back. I would have found such questions appalling when, in my adolescence, I read--one would rather say absorbed--Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel. Wolfe’s book seemed to speak to me directly--to see into my soul. That, it seemed to me, was the purpose of a novel: to enlarge selfhood, to give us a vision of ourselves which we recognized as simultaneously true and missing from our lives. The only “question” which arose was how to deal with this invasion and expansion of consciousness. I felt that the experience of Wolfe’s book made me stronger, more certain of myself: it inspired me to attempt to create such an experience in others. I did not see the book as something to be “discussed”--though I would of course have listened to a discussion were one available. It seemed to me that the central purpose of the book was to change my life--and that is exactly what it did.

Publishers are extremely canny: they realize that, these days, the way most people initially experience novels is in the classroom--that the audience for novels is “educated” people, people who are used to “questions for discussion.” From this point of view, a book is not something which speaks to one’s “buried life”--Wolfe subtitled Look Homeward, Angel “A Story of the Buried Life”--but the central focus of a discussion group: an object which will prod us to “express ourselves,” to offer our individual “opinions.” Look Homeward, Angel left me feeling that an enormous number of possibilities had awakened in me--but I was also stunned, something like speechless, hardly in a state to offer my “individual opinion.” To do that, I would have had to diminish the force the book had on me--and continues to have--and I had no wish to diminish the book’s force: rather, to explore it, to see where it might lead.

Recollections of my Life as a Woman is a memoir of Diane di Prima’s individual life, and we can discuss it in those terms--compare her version of “Beat” experience to that of Jack Kerouac or Michael McClure or see the book as a Feminist document in which the primary focus is the author’s struggles as a woman artist. But the book is more than that. It is a book like Look Homeward, Angel. It means to take hold of us and turn us around (“convert” us). It is revolutionary in the only way that a book can really be revolutionary: it forces us to alter our consciousness. Its anger is ultimately liberating and energizing, its passion and commitment to art boundless. It has the courage to present a di Prima who “wasn’t all that I wanted her to be.” Yet, like Rilke’s statue, it is saying, “Du mußt dein Leben ändern”--“You must change your life.”

One final point: Towards the end of the book, di Prima meets the legendary artist, Wallace Berman: “Wallace explained rather proudly that he had drilled a bunch of holes in the wooden floor of his place. All he had to do...was hose the house down. No sweeping, no dusting, no scrubbing. The water just ran out the holes in the floor....”

A knowledgeable friend of mine suggests that Berman “didn’t drill those holes (way too energetic for our Mr. B). He found them and used them. They were just There.”

Diane di Prima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years
(Viking, 2001)

Jack Foley

Diane di Prima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (Viking, 2001)

Jack Foley

Diane di Prima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years
(Viking, 2001)