Diane di Prima

Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions

David Stephen Calonne

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501342912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions reveals how central di Prima was in the discovery, articulation and dissemination of the major themes of the Beat and hippie countercultures from the fifties to the present. Di Prima (1934--) was at the center of literary, artistic, and musical culture in New York City. She also was at the energetic fulcrum of the Beat movement and, with Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), edited The Floating Bear (1961-69), a central publication of the period to which William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and Frank O'Hara contributed. Di Prima was also a pioneer in her challenges to conventional assumptions regarding love, sexuality, marriage, and the role of women. David Stephen Calonne charts the life work of di Prima through close readings of her poetry, prose, and autobiographical writings, exploring her thorough immersion in world spiritual traditions and how these studies informed both the form and content of her oeuvre. Di Prima's engagement in what she would call "the hidden religions" can be divided into several phases: her years at Swarthmore College and in New York; her move to San Francisco and immersion in Zen; her researches into the I Ching, Paracelsus, John Dee, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, alchemy, Tarot, and Kabbalah of the mid-sixties; and her later interest in Tibetan Buddhism. Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Religions is the first monograph devoted to a writer of genius whose prolific work is notable for its stylistic variety, wit and humor, struggle for social justice, and philosophical depth.

1

The Blood of the Poet:

1934–52

Born in Brooklyn, New York, on August 6, 1934, Diane di Prima’s childhood was suffused with the language and culture of Italy. She retained only vague memories of her paternal grandparents, Rosa di Prima, who died when Diane was two years old, and her husband; however, maternal grandparents Antoinette Rossi and Domenico Mallozzi were significant influences. Most Italians arrived in the United States between 1880 and 1920 and during peak years there were more than a quarter of a million immigrants. Out of the total of 2,300,000 Italians who arrived between 1899 and 1910, only 400,000 came from the northern regions: the vast majority were from the provinces of Southern Italy—Calabria, Basilicata (Lucania), Apulia, Campania, Abruzzi—and the island of Sicily. Di Prima’s maternal grandparents were Sicilian, and grandfather Domenico—a striking man with blue eyes (uncommon among Italians Di Prima tells us in her poem “April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa”) and white hair—often took his granddaughter to the opera. Di Prima recalled that Domenico “wasn’t allowed to listen to operas because he got so emotional about them, so he and I would sneak off and listen to operas, and he would tell me the stories of them.” This is likely one source of the often-soaring bel canto lyricism of Di Prima’s poetry: she recalled hearing celebrated baritone Tito Gobbi (1913–84) as well as the renowned tenors Enrico Caruso (1873–1921), Mario Lanza (1921–59), and Beniamino Gigli (1890–1957) frequently played on phonograph records during her childhood.¹ Domenico read Dante to his granddaughter and introduced her to the great “heretical” philosopher, mathematician, and theorist of the infinite universe Giordano Bruno (1548–1600): Bruno’s rejection of orthodox Christianity and his attraction to the “hermetic” wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus—“Thrice-Great Hermes”—would shape Di Prima’s own intellectual trajectory.

The texts of Trismegistus were thought to have been written at the time of Moses, but later research by Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) determined that they originated between second and third century CE. Antoine Faivre has remarked that “Bruno did not desire a reformed Christian church but rather a return to the cults or beliefs of ancient Egypt as described in the Corpus Hermeticum and particularly in the Asclepius.” Bruno would undergo eight years of imprisonment and interrogation by the church authorities before being declared a heretic by Pope Clement VIII and condemned to death. On February 17, 1600, Bruno was led on a mule into the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome, hung upside down, naked, and gagged.

FIGURE 1.1 Bronze statue of Giordano Bruno by Ettore Ferrari (1845–1929), Campo de’ Fiori, Rome. Wikimedia Commons.

Some accounts claim a metal spike was driven through his cheeks to pin his tongue and a second spike vertically through his lips—due to his record of supposedly impious words—before being burned at the stake: his ashes were cast into the Tiber river. Bruno’s persecution, death by fire, and martyrdom became, for Di Prima, symbols of the ways unwelcome antinomian ideas may be crushed by those in political or religious power. Bruno represented the heroic example of dying for a cause which would also mark the idealistic, revolutionary fervor of the 1960s when members of the counterculture challenged the orthodoxies of what was then named “The Establishment” of the American government, reactionary religious institutions, and monolithic, ecologically destructive corporations. As we shall see in Chapter 4, Di Prima would devote one of her greatest poems to Joan of Arc whom she also depicts as sacrificing herself for a greater cause which emphasizes Joan’s roots in heterodox beliefs. Martyrdom and self-sacrifice could take extreme forms during the 1960s, as when Buddhist nuns immolated themselves in protest of the war in Vietnam—an event which Di Prima would memorialize in a moving poem.

Di Prima was deeply influenced by her grandfather’s participation in the robust tradition of Italian American radicalism: Domenico, an atheist, was friends with Emma Goldman—also a great influence on the young Henry Miller—and would name Di Prima’s mother Emma after her. He also counted among his comrades the famous anarchist Carlo Tresca who was assassinated in 1943. Domenico wrote for Il Martello, The Hammer—an anarchist newspaper located on the Lower East Side—and brought the young Diane with him to revolutionary rallies.² Philip Lamantia (1927–2005)—the great surrealist poet who like Di Prima had Sicilian roots and whom she would later meet in California—became involved in the Italian anarchist movement in San Francisco during the 1940s: Lamantia distributed leaflets, attended rallies, and corresponded with fellow anarchists in America and abroad. Dana Gioia in “What Is Italian American Poetry?” has emphasized the fact that the status of Italians “as economic and social outsiders in America also colors their political views. It often makes them suspicious or critical of established power. Anarchy appeals to the southern Italian worldview. Revolution and resistance also exercise a mythic charm. Early Italian American poets were usually political radicals, though rarely loyal and obedient members of any party.” Domenico memorably told his granddaughter that if you are hungry, have a piece of bread and then proceed to eat it, you will still remain hungry. However, if you sit with a friend, break it in half and eat together, your hunger as well as your friend’s shall be assuaged: Domenico considered this communitarian motto a “law of nature.” This philosophy of life is of course diametrically opposed to the greed, selfishness, and materialism characteristic of American capitalism with its relentless emphasis on individual “success” and rampant consumerism. Di Prima’s familial background accounts for the coalescence in her sensibility of practical political theory and high idealism, a communal radical politics linked to esoteric philosophical traditions. Her grandfather’s search for the significance of life, he once told her, had ended in “nothing.” But Diane vowed she “would make meaning in the world. Make meaning for him, for myself. The dark was luminous, of that I was certain. That much I knew.”³

Di Prima’s allusion to the luminous dark recalls the conceptions of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (fifth to sixth century CE), an important figure for Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Alan Watts, and several Beat writers including Michael McClure and Philip Lamantia. His via negativa or “negative theology” held that the divine cannot be described in words and this concept would greatly influence the evolution of Christian mysticism. The opening of Chapter One of Pseudo-Dionysius’s The Mystical Theology asks: “What is the divine darkness? . . . Lead us up beyond unknowing and light,/up to the farthest, highest peak/of mystic scripture,/where the mysteries of God’s Word/lie simple, absolute and unchangeable/in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.”⁴ In her autobiographical Recollections of My Life as a Woman (2001), imagery of “light” is pervasive and in the section about her grandfather “light” and “stars” recur, suggesting Domenico’s studies of Giordano Bruno and Di Prima’s own engagement with mathematics, astronomy, and cosmology was inspired by Bruno’s life and work. At age six, she wrote her first, brief rhyming poem in order to “remember forever” the stars over an apartment from which her grandparents were relocating: the poem sprang from “an impulse to try to hang on to moments of time.”⁵ Domenico—who died when Di Prima was eleven—worked in the pharmacy of his nephew and Diane felt at home when she spent time with him there: “Is it we have been alchemists together? We are so still. High windows in the back, with stained glass on the borders. We meet each other, timeless, in this light.”⁶ Larissa Bendel in The Requirements of Our Life Is the Form of Our Art: Autobiographik von Frauen der Beat Generation has noted that Domenico’s world for Di Prima “represents safety, security, but also initiation, conspiracy.” The imagery here also suggests a kind of sacred space—note the “high windows” and ”stained glass”—a cathedral of love where grandfather and granddaughter, both secret magicians “conspire” together, share an eternal, illuminated sanctuary away from the modern world’s uncertainty, anxiety, chaos, and faithlessness where they pursue the alchemical quest for the Philosopher’s Stone. As we shall see in Chapter 3, alchemy would also become a central fascination for Di Prima later in her career when she discovered the writings of Paracelsus.

Her grandmother Antoinette would hide her rosary beads whenever her atheist husband Domenico appeared, and her “pagan” Italian Catholicism and reverence for St. Lucy made an indelible impression upon Di Prima. In the section entitled “The Southwest” from The Calculus of Variation (1972; written 1960–63), she recalls her grandmother’s relationship with the saint: “Was it St. Lucy carries her eyes in a dish. And you do not eat bread on her day, or wash. And the one where you bless the salt, which one was that? Fingering my grandmother’s rosary, what I thought was my grandmother’s rosary.”⁷ As a Sicilian, St. Lucy—Lucia of Syracuse (283–304 CE)—would of course have special importance to Di Prima’s grandmother: “her eyes in a dish” alludes to the legend that when Lucia was tortured her eyes were gouged out, or in another version she removed her own eyes in order to discourage an admiring suitor. This “pagan” honoring of light—the name Lucy is derived from Latin lux, light—and the changing of the seasons become a dominant theme in Di Prima’s thought: she would later read Martin P. Nilsson’s Primitive Time-Reckoning (1920), devoting several poems to recording and celebrating the equinox and the summer solstice. In addition, due to this powerful matriarchal environment represented by her grandmother, young Diane began to see men as “peripheral” to the lives of independent and self-sufficient women: they were a kind of exciting luxury, but essentially “fragile.” The strength of these powerful Italian women is memorably evoked by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his poem “The Old Italians Dying” in which he recalls elderly anarchists who had been devoted to Sacco and Vanzetti as they peruse L’Umanita Nova newspaper and who are now dying. Ferlinghetti then turns to the death of these venerable patriarchs and their widows who wear black, long veils. They will live longer than their husbands and they are both madre di terra and madre di mare.⁸ The powerful matriarchs are mothers of the earth and mothers of the sea. It is from her strong Italian grandmother that Di Prima perhaps first encountered the notion of the Goddess, the Earth Mother, the fecundating and eternal cycle of life as incarnated in the creative and sexual power of woman which would become a central theme in her poetry and prose.

It would be an understatement to suggest that Di Prima’s parents proved more problematic than her maternal grandparents. To punish her daughter for supposed misbehavior, mother Emma would instruct Diane to “pull up your skirt and pull down your pants,” command her to go retrieve a hairbrush, and proceed to beat her. Dressing Diane and performing the morning ablutions were often accomplished with fierce anger: she scrubbed her daughter’s flesh during baths until it reddened. Di Prima’s father Francis would strike her with a belt, slapping her face until her nose bled, and during these merciless thrashings became sexually aroused: he “would sit me on his lap with a hard-on to ‘comfort’ me—or worse, I don’t remember, only sense.” In her poem “To My Father,” Di Prima remembered:

You are still the fierce wind, the intolerable force

that almost broke me.

Who forced my young body into awkward and proper clothes

Who spoke of his standing in the community.

And men’s touch is still a little absurd to me

because you trembled when you touched me.⁹

Following these vicious attacks, Di Prima confessed to sometimes hitting herself to assure herself she was “real,” that she in fact existed: a typical maneuver of those traumatized by childhood sexual abuse. There is sometimes a connection between such victimization, the resulting psychological dissociation, and a mystical temperament, a yearning to escape to a better, more just world where such transgressions would not be tolerated as well as an affinity for a profound inner life. As Di Prima declared:

The secret g nosticism of Dante, of my grandfather, who so claimed the here and now in his politics, passed through the hysteria and grief of my mother, and arrived as the message “this world is intolerable.” Translated by me, age two or three, to “This world is not real. Does not take precedence.” Skill at astral travel, at “seeing” other worlds, not separate from the inability to see my own face.¹⁰

In esoteric thought, the “astral body” is capable of voyaging outside the physical self throughout the universe. In an essay she would compose late in her career on poet Hilda Dolittle—The Mysteries of Vision: Some Notes on H.D. (1988)—this conception of discovering a kind of fissure in reality returns:

In my own imaginings of the world as a child, I saw time as running in a straight line in which there were infinitesimal openings, or pockets. If you should “slip into” one of these, it led into a pocket of infinite dimension, a kind of detour, which however could not be seen from “above” and did not in any way break the continuity of the time line. In these pockets I included daydreams, some music, sudden realizations, imaginary friends, dreams, etc.¹¹

Sight and vision have very different connotations: one can see the world, but not possess a deeper, wider, or more encompassing insight into its deeper nature, meaning, and purpose. We call poets such as William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, Hart Crane, or H.D. “visionary” because their work is inextricably bound to a complex manner of imaginative perception which seeks precisely this more profound knowledge of the universe. Furthermore, chronological time measured by the clock is only one kind of time: the imagination, music, art, love, and intense experiences in nature can allow us momentary glimpses of another mode of temporality in which the divisions between self and cosmos seem to dissolve. These sometimes ecstatic experiences would become an inextricable aspect of Di Prima’s visionary poetics which would be tied to the “hidden religions”—Gnosticism, Kabbalah, astrology, alchemy, shamanism, and Eastern thought—which began to command intense interest on the part of the nascent counterculture. The hidden religions would in fact become “alternative spiritualities” which were explored and practiced due to the prevailing dissatisfaction with “orthodox” monotheism in the forms of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

Di Prima’s relationship to her Italian heritage is complex. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 The Blood of the Poet: 1934–52
• 2 Return to New York: From Ezra Pound to the I Ching, 1953–60
• 3 Tell all the gods we’re turning back to find them: From Dinners and Nightmares to Paracelsus, Alchemy, and Tarot, 1961–67
• 4 The Age of Aquarius and the Wolf: Revolutionary Letters, Monas Hieroglyphica, Loba, 1968–79
• 5 The Hidden Religions, H.D., Angels, and Tibetan Buddhism, 1980–92
• 6 Speech of the Heart: Poet Laureate of San Francisco, 1993 to the present
• Notes
• University Library Collections of Diane di Prima’s Work
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright