Times and Spaces Never Dreamed of in Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters

Abstract

Times and Spaces Never Dreamed of in Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters Ian Davidson (bio) In her long poem, Revolutionary Letters (1968–2007), Diane di Prima is constructing a world at the same time as she is narrating its environmental and military destruction. As she says in #75: You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmologya cosmogonylaid out, before all eyes (103) Earlier in the poem she asserts the revolutionary “need to know laws of time & space / they never dream of ” (76) as alternative cosmologies that will “outflank” and “short circuit” repressive forces. Di Prima’s cosmology is constructed from the materiality of everyday life, including the temporary spaces of the body and the home; it is neither eternal nor outside the simultaneously entropic and fertile narratives of the material and natural world of living things and their spatial relationships. In di Prima’s world, the private locations, traditionally constructed as the preserve of the biological family, become increasingly public and reconstructed as “revolutionary spaces.” The poem’s ambitions are not, however, limited to the domestic. On a larger scale, Revolutionary Letters produces a sense of the American nation through the histories of land ownership and inhabitation. This narrative is further contextualized within a political world of revolution and activism, and the poem provides a counter history, as well as potential [End Page 314] alternative futures, through a roll call of forgotten or neglected figures, many of them engaged in armed and violent struggle. The poem’s politics, as its title suggests, are those of the militant counterculture, committed to revolutionary action. Revolutionary Letters not only incorporates public and private spheres, but blurs the distinctions between them, producing a world that deals with the histories of things that have happened and those fictional things that might have happened.1 The poem does this through the narrative of the life story of its speaking voice, that of di Prima as subject and author of the Revolutionary Letters. Rather than mimetically mirroring, doubling, or representing the experience of the speaking voice, the poem is integral to its production. In #75, speaking of the poetic work, the narrative voice says: “there is no part of yourself you can separate out” and “it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole / you do not ‘make it so’” (103). Through its self-conscious use of literary forms, the poem also works with and against the development of a single speaker. The poem uses the idea and the practice of multiplicity as a pedagogic practice. The potentially revolutionary audience is not taught things by an authoritative speaker, but learns by being part of the development of many voices. Rather than functioning as a form of individual consciousness-raising or heroic address, the poem combines and sustains critical and discursive conversations between forms of poetry, revolutionary politics, and aesthetico-political philosophies that inform the work.2 Revolutionary Letters and the American Long Poem Revolutionary Letters is, at least in part, informed by the predominantly masculine history of the American long poem. While there are earlier examples of long form experimentation by women, which could serve as models for some of di Prima’s strategies in Revolutionary Letters, many of these received little attention at the time of their writing. Mina Loy’s “Love Songs to Joannes” (1915–17) explores the nature of sexual relationships in a sequence that adopts typographical modernist tropes. Her use of gaps between words to indicate the rhythms of the poem was ahead of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” by some four decades. Loy’s use of asyntactic grammar and the free verse sequence anticipates the interests of later experimentalists in constructing works that articulate, simultaneously, diverse [End Page 315] perspectives on a single topic. Loy’s emphasis on the fluidity of the body and of sexuality outside of romantic love is feminist, and close in many ways to di Prima’s concerns in poems such as “The Practice of Magical Evocation” (Pieces of a Song 20). Muriel Rukeyser’s multi-voiced documentary epic, The Book of the Dead (1938), uses a range of material to document the Gauley Bridge construction project, which resulted in the...