Vox Populi
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Diane di Prima: To My Father
In my dreams you stand among roses.
You are still the fine gardener you were.
You worry about mother.
You are still the fierce wind, the intolerable force
that almost broke me.
Who forced my young body into awkward and proper clothes
Who spoke of his standing in the community.
And men’s touch is still a little absurd to me
because you trembled when you touched me.
What external law were you expounding?
How can I take your name like prayer?
My youngest son has your eyes.
Why are you knocking at the doors of my brain?
You kept all the rules and more.
What were you promised that you cannot rest?
What fierce, angry honesty in the darkness?
What can you hope who had preferred my death
to the birth of my oldest daughter?
O fierce hummer of tunes
Forget, eat the black seedcake.
In my dreams you stand at the door of your house
and weep for your wife, my mother.
Diane di Prima (1934 – 2020) was one of the Beat Poets. Her magnum opus is widely considered to be Loba, a collection of poems first published in 1978 then extended in 1998. She edited the newspaper The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and was co-founder of the New York Poets Theatre and founder of the Poets Press. In 1961 she was arrested by the FBI on obscenity charges for publishing two poems in The Floating Bear. From 1974 to 1997, di Prima taught poetry at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, sharing the program with fellow Beats Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso. Di Prima was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009. She was awarded the National Poetry Association’s Lifetime Service Award and the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement, and she also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Committee on Poetry, the Lapis Foundation, and the Institute for Aesthetic Development. St. Lawrence University granted her an honorary doctorate.
From Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems by Diane di Prima
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A poet with such force.
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Yes, she was.
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Painful and difficult. She is a poet, and its suffering is beautifully told!
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Yes, so true.
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O.M.G., a painful novel in such few lines. She is amazing. I am awed.
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She is amazing. She does so much in a short poem, an entire novel.
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I agree with all that was said above — I’m so moved by this poem — that courageous, hurting voice of hers. What a poem! This is a keeper in my “Personal Anthology”
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Thanks, Laure-Anne. It’s a thrill and an honor to publish Diane di Prima’s work.
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Wow! Michael. Wow!
You have introduced me to a poet I didn’t know. Thank you.
I’ve gone back and read Sean’s comment from the post in August before I’d learned of, and signed up for Vox Populi
Thank you. Thank you.
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Cool.
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A greek tragedy, a shakespearean tragedy…all in 22 brave lines.
deep bows.
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Well-said, Margo.
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So much power in so few words.
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Oh, yes.
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The pain in this poem is palpable. How many of us feel part of a similar family knot? How many of us are capable of writing about it as powerfully as DiPrima?
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Perfectly said, Jim. Thank you. You’ve revealed the heart of the poem.
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Michael: Here’s my reply if it didn’t post
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