Staying on the earthquake

Dear readers of IT, if you ever feel the need to stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood I recommend you read Diane Di Prima. Di Prima (1934-2020) was an American poet/artist/activist and part of The Beat Generation with which she strongly identified. Her book Revolutionary Letters urges you – directly or indirectly – to (wo)man the barricades. Before my 2007 paperback edition (160pp) was published by Last Gasp of San Francisco, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights had also published four editions and all have been continuously updated. I don’t know how or where I got my edition; Better Books and Compendium Bookshop had closed by then so maybe it was a gift?

The first poem in RLs is not a numbered revolutionary letter but a preface I suppose and is April fool birthday poem for Grandpa. Her grandpa was an Italian anarchist ‘who read me Dante at the age of four & named my mother after Emma Goldman’. The book is dedicated ‘to Bob Dylan and to my grandfather Domenico Mallozzi’. It’s a lovely poem which talks of ‘young men with light in their faces/at my table talking love talking revolution/which is love spelled backwards….we do it for/the stars over the Bronx/that they may look on earth/and not be ashamed’.

Revolutionary Letters are just that. Di Prima’s urge to make non-violent revolution inform nearly every letter-poem though sometimes  – from despair? – she seems to advocate violent revolution as well.  In Revolutionary letter # 14 she writes of the need to

     cross the Canadian border with a child
     so that the three of you/look like one family no questions asked
     or fewer to stash letters guns or bombs
     forget about them
     till they are called for….’

As far as I can tell her Revolutionary Letters were first published in book form in 1971 though a number were written in the 1960s.

Some, most perhaps, are angry some are beautiful and some fuse together in the same poem. In the following prescient letter – or is it just resigned to capitalism’s determination to spread The American Way of Life across continents? – Di Prima has. written a great poem for our times and it’s worth printing in full:

     REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #76

     ANOTHER REVOLUTIONARY LETTER, 1988 
      (Gestapo Poem)

     Where is gestapo, where
     does it end? Where 
     is it? Soweto, it is. Where
     does it end? Not
     Oakland it doesn’t 
     not B’nai Brith.

     Where 
     is it? Gaza, it is. Where 
     is it? San Quentin, it is. Where?
     Peru. Where? Paris. Where? in Bonn
     & Prague & Beijing, it is 
     in Yellow River Valley. Where 
     is it? Afghan, Guatemala, Rio,
     Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, the
     wasted taiga, it is 
     where is it?
     & where 
     does it end.
                        Not in
     Oakland it doesn’t, 
     not in London. Not in the Mission.
     Don’t end in Brooklyn
     or Rome. Atlanta. Where?
     Morocco, gestapo is 
     Sudan (& death)
     Where end? not Canada sold to
     Nazi USA 
     not Mexico, Kenya, Australia
     it don’t, not end 
     Jamaica, Haiti, Mozambique 
     not end. Maybe
     someplace it isn’t maybe 
     some place it ends 
     some hills maybe 
     still free 
                   but hungry 
                                    (eyes 
     blaze
             over ancient guns

I’ve always found Diane Di Prima’s work challenging inspirational and full of fire and brimstone and she’s very well served by this excellent Last Gasp Of San Francisco edition. Unfortunately I’ve no idea where you can obtain a copy now but it’s worth tracking down.* In any case I think it fitting to leave the last word to her…

     REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #84

     FEBRUARY 14, 2001

     someone 
     put out a flag for 
     Valentine’s day, as if 
     the domain of the heart 
     could belong 
     to this heartbroken nation—

.

Jeff Cloves

diane di prima reads revolutionary letters #29 & #19

*NOTE
A PDF version of the Last Gasp of San Francisco 2025 edition is available here.
The Anarchist Library has a PDF of the City Lights edition here.
A 2021 edition, with 15 new poems, was published by Silver Press.

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