Queen of the Beatniks

Diane Di Prima outlines the ideas of her upcoming Las Vegas appearances

BY JOE PACHINKO

More than 40 books of poetry, prose and letters. Published in more than 100 anthologies. Translated into at least 20 languages. Editor, publisher, teacher since 1970, extensive theater experience as a writer and a performer and a visual artist.

Diane Di Prima will be making two rare appearances in Las Vegas with a free lecture on March 17 at 3 p.m. on the CCSN West Charleston Campus (6375 W. Charleston Blvd., Room D-221), and a free reading from her own work on March 18 at 7:30 p.m. also on the CCSN West Charleston Campus (Room D-152).

Di Prima, now 70, survivor of every major American literary scene since the early 1950s, shows no signs of slowing down. Currently at work on at least three new projects, she answered the door of her San Francisco apartment wearing a black-and-red anarchist T-shirt, fixed my tape recorder and showed me pictures of her great-grandchildren. I asked about her upcoming lecture.

Diane Di Prima: What I'm planning to do is talk about the creative process and how not to fight it. So [that] you're not laying your trip on the poem when the poem wants to come. It will be, I hope, a how-to not only for people who've been writing for a long time, but for new people, too. To just let themselves follow the poem. Not that you don't study craft, but you don't have to do it at the moment that you're writing the poem. Let the poem dictate. Not to think you know what the poem's supposed to do, or where it's supposed to go, because then you wind up repeating yourself. Either you're repeating the content, or you're repeating the forms you already know.

CityLife: You've had a long career, done a lot of different things. Do you ever find the "beat" label constricting?

DDP: Yeah. I used to definitely argue with it, and say, That's what I was doing up till 1959, by then I was doing something else. And since then, I've done a lot of things. ... Michael McClure brought me to this one day when he was giving an interview, and he started talking about beat being more about the expansion of consciousness, taking the poem to whatever frontier it went to, rather than beat as a movement of one period of time. Then I began to think about certain kinds of poetry that have been written all through time, and one of them is beat. If you want to think of it that way like, you take it back to [Francois] Villon. There's always this search for the vernacular. There's always this search for emotional honesty in a poem. Whether you're writing about emotions or not, that's not the point. The attempt to be present, being willing to expose the process in the writing rather than covering your tracks and making it a polished artifact.

CL: When you started writing in the early '50s, the political landscape was in some ways similar to now. Do you think it's worse now?

DDP: It's much scarier now. First of all, they have a lot of technology in their hands. And also, we've just had a coup in this country with the 2000 election. So, we don't have any sense of having any control over our situation at all. I mean, the whole world has got the prisons that the CIA is using, people are being flown anywhere and stuck away. It's hard to storm the Bastille if it's all over the world. [Laughs.] I'm glad that I'm older in this, because the feeling I have is that I have nothing to lose. I mean, what are they going to do? Kill me? Lock me up? I mean who cares? If I had a 1-year-old child, and I was trying to be an activist, or if I were a teenager with my first love and trying to be an activist, it would be very scary -- but I'd love to see what happens if all the old people who really knew they were marginalized and had nothing to lose got together. I mean, now we have to look at the fact that there are "disappeareds" in the United States, lots. And we're creating disappeareds all over the world -- secret planes, hidden prisons. ...

We lived in a time of possibility. I want to write about ... the actual things we learned about what makes a trip work. How to set up for a good psychedelic trip with any psychedelic. Because kids don't know that stuff. I've sat in my kitchen and taught my 16-year-old's friends [that] if you're going to do that, this is how to have the best possible experience. Nobody tells them. But more than that was the whole vision that was in the air of a possibility of a different society. Because all they're ever going to hear about is flowers, flower children, very stupid, thought they could change things, were very lazy, took a lot of drugs, that's it. ... There was serious political experimentation, consciousness experimentation. It was serious, it was real, it was joyful. A lot of people are afraid to talk about it. As far back as '82 at Naropa [University], there was a 25-year anniversary for On the Road conference, and some kid in the audience at a panel asked Leary, [Allen] Ginsberg and three other guys -- they were all guys up there -- about drugs in the '60s, and nobody would say anything. I took the mike. [Laughter.] And I said that every culture has its consciousness-changing substances, blah blah. And they said, "Why aren't you up there?" Because [Timothy] Leary was waiting for some court thing, and I don't know why Ginzy was behaving like that, but he was.

CL: You've been teaching since the '70s. Have you noticed any differences in your students, then and now?

DDP: It goes through cycles. Right now I'm teaching my advanced class, the ones who have studied with me for more than one year, and we're doing something called "The Theory and Practice of Poetics." And they are very committed to learning about the craft, learning about the poem -- but when I teach in schools now nobody wants to know anything. They want to know how to publish. They're interested in expressing themselves, which is fine, but they can do that without me. What I'm there for is to pass on some craft or some piece of history that I find interesting -- how to read an alchemy text, something like that. They don't want to know that stuff anymore. I can't fault them, though. Some of it is the dumbing down of the country, and part of it is that people are being worked to death, literally.

Joe Pachinko is the author of the novel SWAMP! and the poetry collection The Urinals of Hell. He lives in Oakland.