REVOLUTIONARY LETTERS

REVOLUTIONARY LETTERS

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by Diane di Prima

$14.95

112 pages

ISBN-10: 0867196602

ISBN-13: 9780867196603

Publisher: Last Gasp

Revolutionary Letters is an American classic arising from the utopian anarchism for which Diane di Prima has long been a spokesperson. The first of these poems were written during the active days of the late 1960s, and published by the underground press throughout the U.S. and abroad. The new poems in this edition address some of the history of the past twenty years, and were written as the various occasions arose.

"Diane di Prima is the original outlaw poet; she wrote herself a wild, authentic life without regard for the rules during an era when being such a female creature was truly transgressive. Her writing is crucial as history; as literature it is enduring and bewitching. She illuminates the female experience while simultaneously bowing to its final, holy mystery." -Michelle Tea.

"A few people like her get made every few thousand years, in order to highlight the dullness of the rest." -Andrei Codrescu.

Diane DiPrima is the author of 42 books of poetry and prose, including Pieces of a Song (City Lights, 1990). Her work has been translated into at least twenty languages. She has received grants for her poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1993, she received an Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry from the National Poetry Association.

 

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Originally posted at Exquisite Corpse - www.corpse.org - 01/07/2009

by Andrei Codrescu

Talk about timing! When the first edition of the Revolutionary Letters appeared in 1971, the U.S. was making its first world-wide bid for a merger between a collapsing economy and the Apocalypse. The war in Southeast Asia was spreading, half the young men in America were dying in the jungle, while the other half was ready to abandon the "american way of life" for good. And on top of all that, the old people who sent their kids to war or banished them from the house, couldn't sell enough vacuum cleaners to justify their existence or generate enough taxes for the war. Those of us who navigated the cosmos without a map, looked with exceedingly critical eyes at all the proffered maps, and there were plenty of them. The Revolutionary Letters couldn't have arrived at a more opportune time: in poem-form they were a guide for how to live, steeped in the anger and emotion we all felt. "not western civilisation, but civilization itself/ is the disease which is eating us" (no. 32) followed by ''turn off the power, turn on/ stars at night, put metal/ back in the earth, or at least not take it out/ anymore" (no. 34) and "take vitamin B along with amphetamines, try/ powdered guarana root.../it is an up/ used by Peruvian mountainfolk." All that must seem so new to the freshly panicked, was spelled out with passion in these poem-manifesto-wisdom works: the energy crisis, the need to renew the polis on love for human beings, the murderous greed of capital, the urgency of returning to sacred roots, and a whole new outlook on nature. The revised and new letters in this edition, continue filling in the radical philosophy the poet developed over a lifetime, a philosophy that was a guidebook in 1971 and it's a still better one in 2008. There is an increasing feeling for the cosmos, the result of magical and buddhist practice, but there is never a slackening of practical detail, or a loosening of the poet's grip on the gritty and very real world we are in. The Revolutionary Letters is one of the masterworks of late 20th century poetry that proves its mettle every time the world goes to hell, which it is doing now (again).