Encyclopedia of Beat Literature

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
. Dinners and Nightmares is a highly exper- domestic life and her struggles to construct thatimental collage of genres, including plays, conver- family compatibly with poetic production.Hersations, interior monologues, free verse, and lists, most important poem in this regard is Brass Fur-a postmodern text long before that term become nace Going Out: Song, after an Abortion (1960),mainstreamed.It remains a powerful testament to which draws on lyrical surrealism to express thethe complications and triumphs of Beat bohemia mother s love for all life as she speaks to the spiritfor women.of the lost fetus:With LeRoi Jones, di Prima also published theFloating Bear (1961 69) arts newsletter, named for the lion padsthe boat in A.A.Milne s Winnie the Pooh.Floating along the difficult pathBear, while published with the slimmest of budgets in the heart of the jungleand what is now considered antiquated mimeo- and comes to the riverbankgraph technology, served an essential role in shap- he paws your faceing and maintaining the various literary schools I wish he would drink it upthat are now associated with the mid twentieth- in that strong gut it would comecentury avant-garde.With Alan Marlowe, di Pri- to life.ma s first husband, she also cofounded the NewYork Poets Theatre and the Poets Press, publish- The poem is sometimes read as an anti-abortioning texts by Jean Genet, Audre Lorde, and Herbert poem, a reading that di Prima vehemently rejects,Huncke.Her work with both Floating Bear and the and while Brass Furnace directly addresses the actPoets Theatre led to confrontations with the FBI of abortion, its allegiance to the symbolic and sur-concerning obscenity charges.These exciting and real also speaks to the creation of art the need forturbulent years are covered in MEMOIRS OF A BEAT- Keatsian beauty and truth in all aspects of one s life.NIK, her quasi-fictive autobiography, published in As the Beat Generation evolved into the Hip-1969 by Olympia Press The Traveler s Compan- pie Generation, di Prima moved a great deal, trav-ion, Inc.Recently, she has chronicled the period in eling across country with her children, staying ata more conventional memoir: Recollections of My TIMOTHY LEARY s experimental commune at Mill-Life as a Woman: The New York Years (2001).brook, New York, and joining the San Francisco72 Di Prima, Dianemime troupe called the Diggers, a political activist the vast mythological spectrum that Loba signifies,group that among other activities distributed free however, the collection has become a more contem-food to the indigent.These years, which she has porary portrait of the multifaceted nature of gendercalled her warrior years, led to the publication in identity.Methodologically, the collection exemplifies1971 of Revolutionary Letters, a collection of poems poet Robert Duncan s idea of composition by field:that she often performed on the street.Lines such [T]he poem, she wrote, can include everything;as this list from letter #19 1.kill head of Dow and each thing (image, stanza, song, quote, blobChemical / 2.destroy plant / 3.MAKE IT UN- of light) has equal weight in the Field.implying,PROFITABLE FOR THEM / to build again / i.e., like within an ideogram, the unsaid commonalities,destroy the concept of money exemplify the which themselves form other dimensions. The firstangry and extremely idealistic vision of the col- eight parts of Book I were published in 1978; Bookslection, which reflects the tenor of what some call I and II were published in 1998 by Viking Penguin.the second civil war in United States history.The Book III is in progress.messages conveyed in these poems, with di Prima s Today, di Prima, teaches two private writingsignature use of typewriter abbreviations, colloquial classes each year.She has also taught poetry atlanguage, and uppercase, may strike some as out- Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and indated today, but the letters remain valuable cultural the masters program that she helped to found atcritique, illustrating what critic Anthony Libby de- the New College of California in 1980.Her morescribes as extreme left meeting extreme right in than 30 books exemplify a fundamental messagethe romance of violent revolution or anarchy. from RANT (1984), one of her most-often quotedDi Prima had also begun a serious commit- poems, regarding the inevitable fusion of the do-ment to the study of Zen Buddhism by the time mestic, political, and artistic spheres of life:that she settled in San Francisco, studying withShunryu Suzuki, Katagiri Roshi, and Kobun Chino There is no way out of the spiritual battleRoshi.Her interest in the magical arts attracted There is no way you can avoid taking sidesher to Tibetan Buddhism, and she became the There is no way you can not have a poeticsstudent of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in 1983.no matter what you do: plumber, baker,These practices have remained central to her pro- teachercess of moving from arts and political activism intoa more contemplative, spiritual state of artistic pro-duction.They have also contributed significantly Bibliographyto her evolving aesthetics.For instance, she has Charters, Ann, ed.The Portable Beat Reader.New York:said that in the creation of texts such as The New Penguin Books, 1992.Handbook of Heaven and The Calculus of Variation, di Prima, Diane.The Calculus of Variation [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Linki