The Poetry Deal
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- Transcript
She remains the most famous woman poet of the Beat Generation; her friend Allen Ginsberg called her “heroic in life and poetics.” THE POETRY DEAL is an impressionistic documentary about legendary poet Diane di Prima. Still actively writing in her late 70s in San Francisco, where she is poet laureate, di Prima is fierce, funny and philosophical. She is a pioneer who broke boundaries of class and gender to publish her writing, and THE POETRY DEAL opens a window looking back through more than 50 years of poetry, activism, and cultural change, providing a unique women’s perspective of the Beat movement. Much of the story is told through di Prima’s recorded readings, including a deeply moving reading of her unpublished poem The Poetry Deal, reflecting on her relationship with her art. Essential for women’s studies, poetry studies, women’s history courses and more, THE POETRY DEAL puts di Prima’s life and work on screen in a unique, beautiful portrait using rare archival footage, impressionistic scenes and powerful stories told by friends and colleagues.
"In just 27 minutes, The Poetry Deal brings into clear view the strong determination and e’lan vital of this remarkable poet."
Ingrid Swanberg Feminist Collections
“[V]isually powerful and provocative, and a tribute to this unique poet’s transformative alchemy as thinker, visionary, and trail-blazer. I highly recommend this documentary to literary scholars, students, writers and anyone interested in the culture of these complicated times.”
Anne Waldman, Poet Co-founder, Distinguished Prof, Jack Kerouac School, Naropa Univ.
“The film is a visual poem -- a great way to experience DiPrima direct."
Bob Holman, Bowery Poetry Club Endangered Language Alliance Visiting Professor of Writing
Citation
Main credits
Di Prima, Diane (on-screen participant)
La Rosa, Melanie (film director)
La Rosa, Melanie (film producer)
La Rosa, Melanie (screenwriter)
La Rosa, Melanie (director of photography)
La Rosa, Melanie (editor of moving image work)
Other credits
Camera, Andres Otero; Super8/16mm cinematography, Melanie La Rosa; editors, Melissa B. Hacker, Melanie La Rosa; original music, S. "Strafe" Standard.
Distributor subjects
Documentary Films; Literature; Media StudiesKeywords
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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:0
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- A poem from about 1957 called
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What Morning Is from this Freddie Poems book.
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What Morning Is.
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First you wake up and it is daylight but wrong
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with some hood honking a horn in the street
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and again \'til you think you\'ll go out of your mind
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and you\'re not quite awake so you think rocks, yes,
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a rock at his head, smash his face, the bastard
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and then awake with eyes open and Freddie at
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the window standing all floppy in silly pajamas
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saying some people are rude and you think rude\'s
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not the word, smash his face and you say \"Good morning baby\"
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and then you sit up and then it\'s breakfast.
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Feel foolish, old world shirt, mothballs too
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and all the pots dirty, cooked eggs over
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yesterday\'s eggs, so what and the cat
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climbing up and down your pants leg,
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four weeks old and a plague.
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How I hate instant coffee and Freddie says
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\"You\'re sad today doll,\" I don\'t know.
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I never know how I feel, I only guess when I write
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and then there\'s how much weighs the laundry
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and Freddie late as usual coming out.
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So you bathe in hot water thank God
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and upstairs yes, sun and the record Eroica
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and then find a book.
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Stein, yeah Stein and Picasso.
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Wish Freddie had books but she\'s cool.
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Still life swings, then standing in sun,
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robe outstretched and again still life swings.
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42 Paris, yeah German shit and what else?
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He\'s not screaming, lived through it.
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Beethoven too, darn cat lived through anything.
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Lovely guitar, not to a morgue, yes.
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Calmer than life, wow.
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Brighter than cool, we\'re so stupid.
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Just stand, nothing on but the sun and lots of it
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and you think yes okay, I\'ll swing it.
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(applause)
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(relaxed electronic tones)
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A poem can be anything.
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You have a blank piece of paper, you can go anywhere.
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You can do anything, you can make anything happen.
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(relaxed electronic tones)
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The ground of imagination is fearlessness.
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Discourse is videotape of a movie of a shadow play.
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But the puppets are in your hand.
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Your counters in a multi-dimensional chess
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which is divination
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and strategy.
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The war that matters is the war against the imagination.
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All other wars are subsumed in it.
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I had read a lot of philosophy before I found the poets.
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I had read my way through Plato and everybody else
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in the Brooklyn Public Library on Clinton Street.
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Up through Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
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I was in love with Schopenhauer.
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I thought oh, if he had known me, I was 13,
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if he had known me, he wouldn\'t have been so despairing.
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I was like that.
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Once I found the poetry, I couldn\'t understand
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why anybody bothered with philosophy because in
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poetry, you didn\'t have to stick to one point of view.
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You could hold paradox in a poem.
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You didn\'t have to be consistent,
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you didn\'t have to be logical
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and logic seemed like such a limiting box.
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I was about 13 or so when I found the poets.
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So it seemed, there was never any thought
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in my mind of being a prose writer really.
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(light up tempo drumbeat)
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- In 1961-62, beat poetry didn\'t have a very good reputation
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in the general public or in the academic community either.
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They were considered drug addicts,
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good-for-nothings and what they
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offered as poetry was considered terrible.
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- I hope
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you go through hell
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tonight,
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beloved.
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I hope you choke to death on lumps of stars
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and by your bed a window with frost
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and moon on frost and you\'ll want to scream
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and can\'t because your woman is I hope
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right there
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asleep.
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Baby, I hope you never close your eyes
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so two of us
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can pick up on this dawn.
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(applause)
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- When I did my first poetry reading with
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Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and Philip
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Whalen and Philip Lamantia the Six Gallery,
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Allen Ginsberg read Howl at the time,
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our object was to lift poetry off the page
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and to take it to people, to tell \'em what
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our politics were, what our feeling about
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the environment was, what our feeling about
05:58.840 --> 06:02.210
Asian art and mysticism was
06:02.210 --> 06:03.043
and to
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be speaking for a lot of people who
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wanted to say or hear those things because
06:08.960 --> 06:11.130
it was a time of terrible convention
06:11.130 --> 06:14.870
and overweening silence from a gray,
06:14.870 --> 06:19.030
crew-cutted, gray-suited masses who were
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just getting their first taste of the new
06:21.410 --> 06:23.860
chemicals in the form of anti-psychotics
06:23.860 --> 06:25.760
and were drugging themselves with them
06:25.760 --> 06:28.180
and at the same time pushing for war.
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So you\'d get into an elevator
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and you\'d feel like these gray,
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gray army men standing there and looking at you
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like you\'re misplaced cannon fodder because your hair is
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a little too long and your clothes are a little too tight.
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It was ugly.
06:45.463 --> 06:47.977
- A lot of young people were coming in and asking,
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\"Do you have the latest book by Allen Ginsberg?\"
06:50.240 --> 06:51.890
And I thought Allen who?
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- These are some poems from Revolutionary Letters,
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a book written in the 60s
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and still being written from time to time.
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- And I fell in love with the poetry myself.
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- Beware of those who say we are the beautiful losers
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who stand in their long hair and wait to be punished.
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Who weep on beaches for our isolation.
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We are not alone, we have brothers in all the hills.
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We have sisters in the jungles and in the Ozarks.
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We even have brothers on the frozen tundra.
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They sit by their fires, they sing,
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they gather arms, they multiply.
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They will reclaim the earth.
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Nowhere we can go but they are waiting for us.
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No exile where we will not hear \"Welcome home.
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\"Good morning sister, let me work with you.
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\"Good morning brother, let me fight by your side.\"
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(light up tempo drumbeat)
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When I was a young quotes Bohemian I was
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running around and having all these lovers,
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still in the morning I went to the Park and wrote,
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we were near Central Park, because there were
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so many of us living so close on top of each other,
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we needed to separate to get work done and then
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in the afternoon I studied at the house and was infallible.
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- As badass as the boys are always portrayed
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as being in the beat scene, really Diane was badass
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and the females involved in that scene were badass.
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They were doing everything that the guys were doing
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and they were raising children and they were you know,
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they were transgressing cultural norms about femininity.
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So it\'s just important to know there were women involved.
09:00.120 --> 09:05.010
- When I was in North Beach as a young woman poet
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and I was feeling like the only woman in North Beach,
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I think I wrote a poem once with that title
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and Diane di Prima in New York often seems like one of the
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first powerful women writers to come out of the beat scene.
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- She
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forced what she wanted to be
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into being
09:26.640 --> 09:28.800
with a very big and good soul.
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It wasn\'t like I\'m gonna trample on your face to get this.
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It was like I\'m gonna, she was interested
09:35.050 --> 09:38.020
in what hadn\'t existed before as we all were.
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- I used excerpts from a segment called What I Ate Where
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and it\'s just great, it\'s like the first part of it is
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a diary of the food she ate and I love that.
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I love just capturing what kind of seems
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like the mundanest aspects of your days
09:55.480 --> 09:58.780
and it actually ends up being the best, juiciest details.
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Fall 1953, Craft Cheese spreads
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on Pepperidge Farm bread for lunch.
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This at work while doing Latin,
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I was reading Virgil I think.
10:06.360 --> 10:09.280
I worked in the credit department of a large sugar company.
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February 1954, lunch tongues, liver spread, caviar,
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Vienna sausages, anything that came in small enough jars.
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We lived off what we could steal from the ANP.
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Garbage soup which was everything thrown into the pot
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cooked in a four gallon kettle, enough for everybody.
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Payment was you always brought up
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some wood for the fireplace.
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Food was warm all night, you just took a bowl and sat down.
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Nobody ever talked much, we just looked at the fire.
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(anxious soft guitar tones)
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- [Diane] There was nothing as important in
10:47.447 --> 10:50.523
the world as doing your work, whatever that might be.
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Making a garden to making the Divine Comedy to,
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or Howl or whatever, whatever it is, making a quilt.
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It\'s like what you make is like the center of one\'s life.
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- She lived her life in New York
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and here in California
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as
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a woman really dedicated to her art
11:39.330 --> 11:43.320
but also dedicated to being a full woman
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and having children and everything that entailed
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and
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somehow bringing her children into her
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full life of Poet\'s Theater
11:57.994 --> 11:59.040
and
11:59.040 --> 11:59.873
living
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on her own, completely on her own.
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Heartbreakingly on her own at many points
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in her life and it\'s something that I\'ve
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always really admired and identified with.
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- It\'s the stuff I wrote in the 50s
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and I was carrying my first baby by choice.
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I didn\'t want a man, I didn\'t want a husband.
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I\'m having a kid.
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So this is to her, Jeanne, I tell her,
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Song for Baby-O, Unborn.
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Sweetheart,
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when you break through
12:34.420 --> 12:36.100
you\'ll find
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a poet here, not quite what one would choose.
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I can\'t promise you\'ll never go hungry
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or that you won\'t be sad on this gutted,
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breaking globe.
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But I can show you baby
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enough to love,
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to break your heart forever.
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- [Cameraman] Actually, that\'s great.
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Eric says thanks for the ice scream.
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- Oh, you\'re welcome.
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It\'s nice if you\'re coming to the bookstore in the morning.
13:21.689 --> 13:24.120
It\'s easy to park and it\'s laid back
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and everybody\'s gone off to some stupid job.
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- I basically kind of just try to do my thing
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regardless of whatever the culture is dictating.
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She\'s clearly done that her whole life but damn,
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it must have been hard sometimes.
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I can\'t imagine what it was like in the 50s and 60s
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and just living outside the mainstream when it just seemed
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to me, not that I was there, it seemed just
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so much more difficult for women to break out of
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the cultural molds that were set for them.
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- I met Diane in the 50s but long after that in \'68,
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my husband and I started a commune which
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Diane came to and stayed with us for a year
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and lived in this barn loft here.
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The women really loved her because she bought everybody
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a case, a big case of pampers when we had
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eight two years old running around at the same time.
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So there was a lot of dirty diapers to wash.
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It was the middle of winter,
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the winter before we\'d been snowed in for six weeks.
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It was like the Donner Party.
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- That was a Christmas present.
14:32.330 --> 14:36.090
She bought the diapers from
14:36.090 --> 14:39.680
getting some kind of royalty for her books from
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Holland I think or some place, you know?
14:41.720 --> 14:44.033
So that was what she did with the royalty.
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The men hated it because
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in some ways, she was upstaging them but
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another was \"This is un-ecological and we can\'t,
14:55.367 --> 14:58.040
\"how are we gonna dispose of pampers?\"
14:58.040 --> 15:00.740
And blah, blah, blah and the pampers were kind of
15:00.740 --> 15:04.540
a signal to be down on her without saying pushy woman
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and so she kind of, the guys were I think
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really kind of threatened by Diane really.
15:13.140 --> 15:17.890
- Although all of the beats, all of you know,
15:17.890 --> 15:22.890
all of the big named writers of the beat generation
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gave her incredible props and were
15:27.080 --> 15:29.403
incredibly impressed by her work,
15:31.957 --> 15:34.840
it was I think a lot more difficult for her to get
15:34.840 --> 15:38.123
published and get the kind of distribution for her books,
15:39.590 --> 15:43.643
get the kind of recognition that all the boys did.
15:47.140 --> 15:50.220
- Okay, here\'s one, just a random selection
15:51.862 --> 15:55.447
from Loba, Part One which came out as a chop book
15:56.770 --> 15:59.790
and I think it was published in
16:01.200 --> 16:03.410
1973,
16:03.410 --> 16:06.080
about the time that this photograph was taken
16:08.030 --> 16:11.690
and it says, this is part of the poem but I\'ll
16:11.690 --> 16:16.690
pick out this part, I am you and I must become you.
16:16.870 --> 16:21.830
I have been you and I must become you, I am always you.
16:21.830 --> 16:23.820
I must become you,
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aye-a,
16:25.160 --> 16:26.866
aye-a-ah,
16:26.866 --> 16:27.699
aye-a,
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aye-a-ah,
16:30.323 --> 16:31.220
ah,
16:31.220 --> 16:32.750
my ah-ma,
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my ah-ma.
16:34.280 --> 16:36.360
Om, star mother,
16:36.360 --> 16:38.260
ma-om.
16:38.260 --> 16:39.850
My a-ma,
16:39.850 --> 16:40.683
ah.
16:43.788 --> 16:45.100
- It looks as though I have that in a book.
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Thank God I have something in a book.
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When I was 14 I knew and the day that I knew,
16:53.750 --> 16:55.450
I write about this in Recollections,
16:55.450 --> 16:57.410
the day that I knew I had to be a poet
16:58.400 --> 17:01.280
and I\'m not saying I aspired to be a poet,
17:01.280 --> 17:03.920
I felt on the same eye to eye level with Keats,
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who I\'d been reading for years.
17:05.470 --> 17:08.040
I knew it wasn\'t any question of like oh,
17:08.040 --> 17:11.010
he\'s this great hero and I\'m this little person.
17:11.010 --> 17:13.550
I never felt that with anyone anyway but,
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from that point on but the day that I knew that,
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I also knew what I wasn\'t gonna have.
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I knew that I was excluded from something
17:23.150 --> 17:25.823
that I was thinking of then as regular human society.
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He picked up his bag and started to go out the door.
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Then he came back and kissed me on the mouth.
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His lips were shut.
17:33.267 --> 17:35.820
\"I love you,\" he said, \"But I\'m queer.\"
17:35.820 --> 17:38.847
I touched the hollow in his face just under the cheekbone.
17:38.847 --> 17:42.450
\"I know,\" I said, \"Don\'t worry, it\'s not important.\"
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A typical morning in 1955. (laughs)
17:52.386 --> 17:53.986
It\'s a wonder I survived it all.
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- But in fact we never expected to be published, never once.
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There were no publishers to publish us.
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There were no galleries to show us except
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those that were owned and run by artists
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and we were artists, we were all artists
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and we were all being artists together
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and we fought with each other and we supported
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each other and we cared about each other
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and we hated each other but we were all artists
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together and we didn\'t expect a University job
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and we didn\'t expect a government grant
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and we didn\'t ever expect to find a publisher
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and Diane grew up in that world.
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Whether it\'s East Coast or West Coast,
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it was the same in both places.
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- She was producing little mimeograph pamphlets as
18:42.130 --> 18:45.613
a way of supporting herself and I would buy a few of them.
18:45.613 --> 18:50.270
Then one time she came in, she had sold me
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10 copies of a little play, a six page
18:52.870 --> 18:54.680
mimeograph play that she had written
18:54.680 --> 18:56.950
and a couple months later she came back in
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with some that she had put cardboard covers on,
18:59.760 --> 19:03.753
that had a drawing on and said this was the deluxe edition.
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I was taking home maybe $20 a week,
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just enough to eat off of and I knew that I couldn\'t
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send the same thing at $5 a copy instead of $2 a copy
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to the University, so I said
19:18.477 --> 19:19.820
\"No, I\'m not buying any of them.\"
19:19.820 --> 19:22.790
She was both unhappy and angry and when she
19:22.790 --> 19:24.007
got to the door, she turned around and said
19:24.007 --> 19:26.540
\"I don\'t know how you run your business.\"
19:26.540 --> 19:31.110
And I said \"Well unfortunately I do know how you run yours.\"
19:31.110 --> 19:31.943
Well,
19:33.317 --> 19:36.100
a couple weeks later she came back
19:36.100 --> 19:39.100
and we both got past this burst of temper
19:39.100 --> 19:42.030
on both our parts and I think maybe that
19:43.121 --> 19:45.430
was the real beginning of our friendship.
19:45.430 --> 19:49.063
- This is me, I\'d already had my first child.
19:50.130 --> 19:52.290
Somebody there had gotten ahold of a copy
19:52.290 --> 19:55.600
of that first book, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward
19:55.600 --> 19:58.330
and somebody there had actually typed it
19:58.330 --> 20:01.030
with 12 carbon copies because there was no
20:01.030 --> 20:04.150
copying machinery technology then and he
20:04.150 --> 20:06.830
told me there were 12 carbons of This Kind of
20:06.830 --> 20:10.060
Bird Flies Backward going around Leavenworth Prison.
20:10.060 --> 20:12.663
That to me is the definition of success.
20:13.650 --> 20:14.920
That it meant something to people,
20:14.920 --> 20:16.370
that it spoke to their heart.
20:18.030 --> 20:20.300
- Here is the shelf, Diane begins here
20:20.300 --> 20:22.760
and goes all across here and across there.
20:22.760 --> 20:25.510
Now those are the things that fit on a standard bookshelf.
20:25.510 --> 20:29.900
There\'s a lot more down below that\'s oversized stuff.
20:29.900 --> 20:34.220
But my favorite poem is one of the Revolutionary Letters
20:35.670 --> 20:36.900
which is called
20:38.470 --> 20:41.784
April Fool Birthday Poem For Grandpa.
20:41.784 --> 20:45.350
(light up tempo drumbeat)
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We do it for you and your ilk.
20:47.870 --> 20:50.970
For Carlo Tresca, For Sacco and Vanzetti.
20:50.970 --> 20:53.450
- Without knowing it or thinking about it
20:53.450 --> 20:57.780
as we do it for Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde,
20:57.780 --> 21:00.480
all street lights shall be purple.
21:00.480 --> 21:05.480
Do it for Trotsky and Shelley and big, dumb Kropotkin.
21:06.010 --> 21:10.303
Eisenstein\'s Strike people, Jean Cartough\'s Ennui.
21:11.240 --> 21:14.740
We do it for the stars over the Bronx,
21:14.740 --> 21:18.833
that they may look on earth and not be ashamed.
21:21.910 --> 21:25.077
(relaxed piano tones)
21:51.390 --> 21:54.049
There\'s no words in color in a way
21:54.049 --> 21:56.413
and yet it wakes up all of your feelings.
22:01.460 --> 22:04.810
When I was doing Recollections of My Life as a Woman,
22:04.810 --> 22:06.440
I would get up from the computer and just
22:06.440 --> 22:08.560
come over to something I was working on and I\'d
22:08.560 --> 22:10.760
paint what I thought and then I\'d come back.
22:14.350 --> 22:16.540
There was a period of time where I was thinking about
22:16.540 --> 22:19.660
the fact that we all have a secret deal
22:20.560 --> 22:23.530
that we made with the art of our choice.
22:23.530 --> 22:26.150
Like what we secretly hope that we\'ll get out of it.
22:26.150 --> 22:28.410
Meanwhile I had written a poem and I was thinking about it
22:28.410 --> 22:31.983
a lot called The Poetry Deal and I\'m gonna read that.
22:34.160 --> 22:36.840
So in this poem the you is poetry.
22:36.840 --> 22:38.743
I\'m talking to poetry itself.
22:39.700 --> 22:40.823
The Poetry Deal.
22:42.670 --> 22:46.030
I want to say that I don\'t want anything
22:46.030 --> 22:48.830
but the whisper of your scarf as you do
22:48.830 --> 22:51.610
the Dance of the Seven Veils, the soft
22:51.610 --> 22:54.100
sound of your satin slippers on the carpet
22:55.240 --> 22:59.410
and the raw, still bloody meat you toss my way
22:59.410 --> 23:01.843
that I chew on all night long.
23:03.060 --> 23:06.290
I don\'t want anything you don\'t already bring.
23:06.290 --> 23:11.183
Trips to other worlds, dimensions of light or sound.
23:12.320 --> 23:15.170
The rides on the back of a leopard on those
23:15.170 --> 23:19.173
black rocks high over some sea or gorge.
23:20.560 --> 23:21.743
But it isn\'t true.
23:22.970 --> 23:24.830
I want all that.
23:24.830 --> 23:26.660
The sheet lightning of quasars
23:26.660 --> 23:29.383
you dance between, those colors yes.
23:30.410 --> 23:34.250
But I want you as a mother, a sister,
23:34.250 --> 23:37.160
the stone walls of the cave I lie in
23:37.160 --> 23:39.640
in trance for seven days.
23:39.640 --> 23:42.653
The mist around the cabin that makes it invisible.
23:44.820 --> 23:48.250
I want the flare and counterpoint of words
23:48.250 --> 23:50.960
and I want the non-verbal,
23:50.960 --> 23:54.133
what can never be spoken as a foundation.
23:55.610 --> 23:59.300
I\'d like my daily bread, however you arrange it
23:59.300 --> 24:02.180
and I\'d also like to be bread
24:02.180 --> 24:06.763
or sustenance for some others even after I\'ve left.
24:07.880 --> 24:10.193
A song they can walk a trail with.
24:12.230 --> 24:14.960
I don\'t think we\'ve talked about money or success
24:14.960 --> 24:18.153
or fame, whatever that is, for a long time.
24:19.380 --> 24:21.503
I hoped you\'d forget that part.
24:22.580 --> 24:25.380
Now I\'ll do as you say about all that,
24:25.380 --> 24:27.023
what seems most useful.
24:28.910 --> 24:31.940
I\'d like to keep learning how to brew bitter herbs
24:32.890 --> 24:35.560
and how to make them translucent,
24:35.560 --> 24:37.010
edible,
24:37.010 --> 24:38.333
almost crystalline.
24:40.397 --> 24:42.563
What I offered you wasn\'t much.
24:43.410 --> 24:45.240
You can always wake me,
24:45.240 --> 24:48.393
like my closest friend or most loved lover.
24:49.870 --> 24:52.993
You can burn my favorite snapshot of myself,
24:54.070 --> 24:58.360
lead me on paths or non-paths anywhere.
24:58.360 --> 25:01.663
You can not make sense for years and I\'ll still believe you.
25:02.610 --> 25:07.123
Drop husbands, tribes and jobs as you wish.
25:08.850 --> 25:12.040
You mostly aren\'t jealous.
25:12.040 --> 25:14.730
Have taken your place alongside gardens,
25:14.730 --> 25:18.023
bread making, children, printing presses.
25:20.320 --> 25:24.050
But when your eyes shoot sparks and you say
25:25.249 --> 25:27.817
\"Choose between me and it,\"
25:29.170 --> 25:32.020
it has always gone
25:32.020 --> 25:35.090
except when it was my kids.
25:35.090 --> 25:38.363
I took that risk and we worked it out somehow.
25:40.740 --> 25:44.130
Now I\'ve come to a place where there are no kids,
25:44.130 --> 25:45.720
no tribe,
25:45.720 --> 25:47.773
no bread, no garden.
25:49.240 --> 25:50.820
Only you
25:50.820 --> 25:52.563
in your two faces,
25:53.695 --> 25:55.633
formed and formless.
25:57.180 --> 26:01.563
Nothing to hold back now and nothing to offer.
26:03.040 --> 26:06.633
I stand before you a piece of wind with a notebook and pen.
26:08.150 --> 26:13.150
Which one of us is it that dances and which is the quasar?
26:18.580 --> 26:22.390
Remember you can have what you ask for.
26:22.390 --> 26:24.070
Ask for everything.
26:26.109 --> 26:29.526
(relaxed light drumbeat)
26:41.625 --> 26:45.542
(relaxed jazzy ensemble music)
