by Cedar Sigo
Are the best of di Prima’s poems those that compel the reader to act? The recurrent listing throughout the book helps to invite the reader into enacting the aspirations of her words. I think of the activist Assata Shakur’s incredible statement, “I see myself struggling / in whatever way / I can.” I feel the same pulse running throughout di Prima’s work, that to struggle or to be in the movement is an eternal and aspirational state, wherein poetic forms themselves are offered as strategies for change. I think again of Amiri Baraka, at the end of “A New Reality Is Better Than a New Movie!” where he attempts to refine and question our present-day movements and strategies for liberation:
If you don’t like it, what you gonna do about it. That was the question we asked each other, & still right regularly need to ask. You don’t like it? Whatcha gonna do, about it?? The real terror of nature is humanity enraged, the true technicolor spectacle that hollywood cant record. They cant even show you how you look when you go to work, or when you come back. They cant even show you thinking or demanding the new socialist reality, its the ultimate tidal wave. When all over the planet, men and women, with heat in their hands, demand that society be planned to include the lives and self determination of all the people ever to live. That is the scalding scenario with a cast of just under two billion that they dare not even whisper. Its called, “We Want It All…
The Whole World!”
We understand the way the frame hangs together throughout, that once a point of view is unlocked through a prompt, through a line, it becomes accessible and part of a new armory of voices. The list, the portrait, the chant: these are individual variations that we must test our line against. Gaining and maintaining a stylistic virtuosity is part of revolutionary poetry, part of making it new for yourself. This is a quality of energy that the great poets can scare up over and over. “Revolutionary Letter #110” is an elegy, written after Baraka’s death in 2014. He was an early collaborator, ally, and lover of Diane di Prima and father of her second child, Dominique. I will read just the tail end of the poem:
what matters:
every place
you read
every line
you wrote
every dog-eared book
or pamphlet
on somebody’s shelf
every skinny hopeful kid
you grinned that grin at
while they said
they thought they could write
they thought they could fight
they knew for sure
they could change the world
every human dream
you heard
or inspired
after the book-signing
after the reading
after one more
unspeakable
faculty dinner
What matters:
the memory
of the poem
taking root in
thousands
of minds…
■ ■ ■
The Cancer Journals came to be written as an attempt to break one silence, one aspect of the kinds of silences that we partake in as women. But I was also thinking as the announcements went on, Sarah mentioned Botha’s visit here. Actually, it was not the prime minister, it was his brother, who was the foreign minister. I mean, well, it’s about keeping it in the family. But it’s pretty much the same. This has been in the wind for weeks, and I wonder how many of you agree, think it’s fine, think it’s wonderful, that even now, the policy of this country, which at least on paper was not accepting or underwriting apartheid in South Africa, is now in the process of being turned around…right? Do you know about it, how do you feel about it, how have you made your feelings known? Even a postcard, right? To Washington, that this is not acceptable, that South Africa is not to lie down with us…right? Or at least when it happens that there are people, there are voices in this country who resent it, who do not want this to happen. I mean, once we start thinking of ourselves as active people, once we realize that we have a power and that that power is relative, that we have a responsibility, I have a responsibility to speak out about what I feel, about what I think, that each one of you do, then the climate, then the whole aura begins to change. It becomes not one of simply acceptance, right?
What can we do about it? But a different stance, which is, I have a voice and I have to use it. So it’s just something that I’d like you to keep in mind when you hear announcements, when you recognize things are happening that you do not wish to happen, that it’s not enough just to say, “Isn’t that terrible?” You have a responsibility to yourselves, to our lives!
That is from a 1982 Audre Lorde reading, from in between poems, speaking out on apartheid and the US diplomacy around it. Apartheid would go on (officially) until April 27, 1994.
I have come to realize that my dream is not simply to turn students into revolutionary poets, but to turn them into compassionate teachers and publishers of the art themselves, not only teachers that land jobs at the university level, per se, but those with visions that are tied to the other kinds of community, purposely forming a free workshop. Establishing a time and meeting place for those that need to hear poetry in a group. Giving precedence to the emerging smaller networks just to see what happens. Or letting poets pay what they can. There is a long tradition of poets teaching out of their apartments, or their friends’ apartments, having the same students for ten years or more.
Poetry has always been such an underground endeavor in my life, meaning that the tradition I stepped into was always excited to make its own stapled books. This impulse to have a press of my own was partly inspired by Diane di Prima’s work as a printer. She would operate the Poets Press from 1964–1970, publishing over 30 titles. Once I had read all of her poetry collections I looked into the books she herself had published, books like Huncke’s Journal, Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Prayers, and David Henderson’s first collection, Felix of the Silent Forest. I was also inspired by the more punk aesthetic of The Floating Bear, a mimeographed newsletter of new writing that di Prima would edit with Amiri Baraka (back then he was still LeRoi Jones).
I began to get caught up in the mythologies of these underground presses and their various overlays and offshoots. That is to say they began to occupy my imagination. Poets Press books are now relatively rare. Di Prima printed a lot of first books by poets as a way of offering not simply an object but an actualized pathway to the writer.
Di Prima published Audre Lorde’s first book, a collection of poems titled The First Cities. The book was published in 1968, the same year di Prima began to write the Revolutionary Letters. She provides a short, illuminating, two-part introduction to Lorde’s work. The first part is simply a catalog of what di Prima finds appealing about the poetry:
Audre Lorde’s world is all colors. Its songs move thru large areas of light & darkness.
They take us with them thru their landscape, which is circular like Chinese painting.
Part two simply says:
I have known Audre Lorde since we were fifteen, when we read our poems to each other in our Home Room at Hunter High school. And only two months ago she delivered my child.
A woman’s world, peopled with men & children and the dead, exotic as scallops.
The birth mentioned is that of Diane’s fourth child, Tara Marlowe. She was delivered by Lorde on December 23, 1967, at the Albert Hotel, which was a residential hotel on University Place in the West Village. Diane would actually hold poetry readings in an old trunk room there during her year-long stay.
Di Prima’s intro to The First Cities is prophetic of the work Audre Lorde would go on to do throughout the 1970s and into the ’90s.
In her introduction to Lorde’s collection of essays, Sister Outsider, the editor of the Crossing Press, Nancy Bereano, writes tellingly of working with Lorde on the manuscript:
When we began editing Sister Outsider—long after the book had been conceptualized, a contract signed, and new material written�
��Audre Lorde informed me, as we were working one afternoon, that she doesn’t write theory. “I am a poet,” she said.
So then, for all of her transformative work in teaching, organizing, writing speeches, editing, and publishing, all of this is regarded as belonging to the work of poetry. In fact, Audre Lorde was famous for how she introduced herself as a black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet. The following is from an anthology titled Woman Poet: The East, published in 1981. This is lifted from a section titled “Biographical Notes”:
I am a black woman warrior poet doing my work. For poets and other live human beings, those designations used to widen and expand identity are precious, but those categories used to restrict or narrow identity are death.
In the interests of expanding identities, poetic and otherwise, you can say Lorde is woman, black, lesbian, urban, mother, cantankerous, warrior, revolutionary, uppity, feminist, and fat—all precious and inseparable aspects of my living that infuse energy into my work.
I write as I live, teach, love, garden, etc.—with the absolute conviction that all my activities are only different faces of the same task, surviving and spreading the word (teaching as a survival skill, the task facing all of us). By us I mean those who are moving through the categories used to divide us, toward an acceptance of the creative need for human difference and the value of change.
I love her use of the phrase “moving through the categories used to divide us,” meaning that all of us must put in check that sense of obstruction when we first meet, that conditioning, whatever it is that we can’t get over or see past. Poetry can be used to draw out new and secret sides of ourselves. If we choose to meet and to study together, we can’t help but reveal something in common. The workshop becomes an arena so attuned to listening, especially as you get into the second, third, and fourth meetings. It is not just the writing element that sparks a trust between participants, it is also the reading of our work, sounding it out together. I try not to crush them with feedback: it can seem inorganic. I seem to prize a poet’s simply reading yesterday’s assignment aloud, in order to allow the mind to click forward.
I find the concision of language within her essay writing to be so disarming. The best description I have come across of first reading Lorde’s work belongs to the Afro-Caribbean writer and activist M. Jacqui Alexander, who wrote:
But in honoring Audre Lorde we are also honoring ourselves, our struggles and our victories, for whether or not we know of Lorde’s work, we have lived it.
When I first began to read her essays, Lorde’s perceptions around race, sexuality, and class seemed to put me within reach of emotions I have kept buried for twenty years. Her writing has aided in dissolving some of my own (deranged) interpretations, thinking that I am in fact kept safe by not discussing aspects of race and sexuality, and largely because these elements get paraded around, or instantly processed as a rare and blinding amusement. I sensed this after going away to college and was bored immediately and never wanted to see that narrative again. I was already signaling (through the flames) against tokenism far into the future.
In the essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” Lorde writes:
For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Lorde has also helped me to see that terms like “confessional” are often class-ridden designations designed to divide us. Sometimes poets can literally not afford to shroud their language in objectivity. The source of the poem can be pain, and arranged into an object we cannot turn away from, like strains of a popular song that become stuck in your head. Audre Lorde has terms like “difference” and “survival” and “silence” that reoccur as strands throughout her essays. This sense for constant redefinition builds a coalition across her books. I would like to read what is perhaps her best-known poem. One that I began to cling to after the very first hearing. This is from Lorde’s 1978 collection, The Black Unicorn:
A LITANY FOR SURVIVAL
For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours;
For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid.
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.
“We were never meant to survive”: a million forms may spring up around that statement and then get narrowed depending on who the “we” is. Who is the we? In my case it brings to mind the reality of the Suquamish People, our history as it is transposed to the present day. The fact that our longhouse was torched by Catholic missionaries in 1870, our ceremonies and songs and dances outlawed, our children forcibly removed from their families and relocated to boarding schools, flagrant attempts (laws) to starve us out at every turn. It reminds me of the famous chief of the Suquamish and Duwamish tribes, Chief Seattle, and his speech during the treaty negotiations of 1854: “These shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe….In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude.” This feels similar to Assata Shakur’s statement, one I was leaning on earlier, “I see myself struggling in / whatever way / I can.” For those of us who continue to be imprisoned and harassed, silence becomes impossible, and moving toward insurrection becomes the only viable option. Or as Lorde would come to remind us so often in her collection Sister Outsider, “Your Silence Will Not Protect You.” She provides her readers with so many lines to carry in mind. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” is another classic. They tend to stick in your head after the first hearing.
I often teach “A Litany for Survival” not only to allow students to feel acknowledged, but also to encourage them to speak out. This is why I say I cling to it. The transformation it brought to my writing hinged on the realization that I could use poetry to address personal and historical trauma, and that this could be an interesting objective going in. I was able to find a little background on the actual composition of “A Litany for Survival” in an essay of Lorde’s titled “My Words Will Be There,” first published in 1983:
I went through a period when I felt like I was dy
ing. It was during 1975. I wasn’t writing any poetry, and I felt that if I couldn’t write it, I would split. I was recording things in my journal, but no poems came. I know now that this period was a transition in my life and I wasn’t dealing with it.
Later the next year, I went back to my journal, and there were these incredible poems that I could almost lift out of the journal; many of them are in The Black Unicorn. “Harriet” is one of them; “Sequelae” is another. “A Litany for Survival” is another. These poems were right out of the journal. But I didn’t see them as poems prior to that…
I write this stuff in my journals, and sometimes I can’t even read my journals because there is so much pain, rage, in them. I’ll put them away in a drawer, and six months, a year or so later, I’ll pick up the journal, and there will be poems. The journal entries somehow have to be assimilated into my living, and only then can I deal with what I have written down.
It did not surprise me to learn that this classic poem almost went unrecognized. When we write poetry we sometimes have to lock it away at the ending stages, almost with the intention of letting it dry like glue or a piece of pottery. It’s a recognition that art might have to catch up with our experience of everyday reality. The poet is so far out in front but doesn’t quite realize it until later.
Audre Lorde and Diane di Prima would continue to work and read together until Lorde’s death from liver cancer in 1992. Lorde would publish di Prima’s work as poetry editor of the feminist magazine Chrysalis in 1980. Di Prima would publish an additional collection of Lorde’s poetry titled Between Our Selves in 1976 on her new imprint, Eidolon Editions. These poems would later be incorporated into The Black Unicorn. The cover for Between Our Selves is a drawing by Lorde of a symbol she had discovered in Ghana, depicting two crocodiles whose trunks intersected. Di Prima remembers Lorde being very particular as to the color of this image. “Audre said that she wanted an all brown book.” Here is the opening stanza of the title poem, “Between Our Selves”:
