by Joe Pachinko
07.08.05

iane DiPrima is responsible for more than 40 books of poetry, prose, and letters and over 100 anthologies, and has been translated into at least 20 languages. Her works include the landmark novel Memoirs of a Beatnik and the epic feminist poem cycle Loba, Books 1&2. Her autobiographical My Life as a Woman was released in 2003. She is popularly known as a trailblazing feminist, lifelong political activist, lecturer, and visual artist, and is regarded by many as a living legend. DiPrima, now 70, 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.

LiP: You've had a long career and have done a lot of different things. Do you ever find the "Beat" label constricting?

Diane DiPrima: Yeah. I used to definitely argue with it, and say, "That's what I was doing up till 1959—[after that] I was doing something else." 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 [literary] movement of one period of time. Then I began to think about certain kinds of poetry that've been written all through time, and one of them is Beat - take it back to Villon. There's always this search for the vernacular. There's always this search for emotional honesty in a poem. 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. If you think of Beat in those terms than I have no quarrel with it, but if you think of Beat as a movement with a few people leading it and happening at a certain period, what the hell are they still talking about it for? Poetry and literature have strayed very far from honesty. There's [only] a few places where you hear some truth in our culture, and people are hungry for it, even non-literary types. I think that part of Beat is what people still look for now. Some directness, no bullshit, and not being afraid of having feelings, or having a body. We've all strayed from that again. People are afraid of the truth, and also afraid of speaking the truth.

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

It's much scarier now. First of all, they have a lot of technology in their hands. We don't have any sense of having 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. I'm glad that I'm older, 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? If I had a one year old child and I was trying to be an activist, or if I was 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. We have to look at the fact that there are now "disappeareds" in the United States, lots. And we're creating disappeareds all over the world, [with] secret planes, hidden prisons. In some ways the repression [in the 50s] was more overt. The FBI would come pounding on your door. They don't have to pound on your door now. All they have to do is read your e-mail.

If you look at history, after the French Revolution [there was a] backlash in England that went on almost through the whole 19th century. So I think that it may be a long time before we see the end of the backlash [against] the wonderful flowering that happened in the 60s and early 70s. People have been told so many lies about the original events. It's very important that we try to tell what we remember of that time. I'm trying to write the second volume of my autobiography now, and where the first one [My Life as a Woman] was [about] the coming of age of a woman artist and the problems of being a woman and blah blah, this one is more about the political quest, the drugs as a quest. I mean, there's not a single drug I've ever taken that I'm sorry I took. We lived in a time of possibility. I want to write about my being at Millbrook with [Timothy] Leary and the things we learned about what makes a trip work,how to set up for a good psychedelic trip. Because kids don't know that stuff. I've sat in my kitchen and taught my sixteen year old's friends if you're going to do that, this is how to have the best possible experience. Nobody tells them. But more than that - there's the whole vision that was in the air of a possibility of a different society. Because all [this generation] is 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. Nobody's ever going to tell them about the Diggers. 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 1982 at Naropa there was a conference for the 25th anniversary of On the Road, 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 could say anything. Leary was waiting for some court thing, and I don't know why Ginzy was behaving like that, but he was.

I've noticed that a lot of people who survived that period seem very reluctant to discuss the drugs they did.

Well, Michael McClure didn't. He came out in a POETRYFLASH interview and said "There's isn't anything I've written since that hasn't got to do with my psychedelic experiences."

A lot of musicians are running around saying "I never took any drugs!" Frank Zappa was fond of saying that.

Maybe he was getting conservative because of having little kids at that point. That'll do it to people.

I like your approach, just tell them everything.

And also [to tell kids] that if they want to do it they should do it as safely as possible. And to come home if they want to and to not be out on the street if they don't want to be there. Come home and trip, it's fine. I used to feel so good if they came home, and I woke in the morning and they were there with their lover. I felt honored that they trusted me. Young love in the house is always good.

When I first hit the Village, you know, my family [had been] kind of conservative, but I remember these ladies who had been involved in the Spanish Civil War took me in. And they had the same approach: free love was good, experiments were good, the world was there for us to work with, and not to let it frighten us.

Like you said, there's always been people...

Right. There's always a beat thread as there's always a classic conservative thread. In that sense, I don't care about being a "Beat" or not being a "Beat." It really gets boring when they tie it down to two or three names, and they forget. What was going on out here on [the west] coast? A million things! [Kenneth] Rexroth, [Robert] Duncan, [Charles] Olson…

And then there's the women.

Yeah! What happened to the women?

It seems like women had more trouble getting into print.

The women were also divided in what their aim was because they did want the home, a lot of them, they wanted a lot of the regular things in life, or some of the ones I knew did. Some of the others that didn't, they had trouble getting into print and also it was always on their shoulders how the whole scene was going to be supported. The guy wasn't going to work while he was writing, so somehow the woman was supposed to be able to work and write. And take care of the kids. And it hasn't changed. One of my students, her husband was playing music, so he wasn't also going to work. So she had full time work, plus she raised the kids. Another one was a painter, but she took in daycare kids [to support] her husband's work. And this is [happening] now. It hasn't gone away. It's gone underground, because people are supposed to be all free and liberated.

You managed to juggle all that.

Yeah, but I didn't want a house and a marriage. I wasn't as divided. I was an artist, [and] I knew when I chose to do that I was never going to have, you know, regular "stuff," or a regular life. And I was not at all sure I wanted any of that. I didn't want any guy controlling what I did or how I raised my kids. I didn't want to be married to the writer I was making love with. I never expected to have money. [Writers] that I knew all expected to have something they did to earn a living [in addition to] their work. They didn't expect that [their] first book was going to support [them.] Somehow that expectation has been added to the literature scene.

You did "Memoirs of A Beatnik" for Maurice Girodias [of Olympia Press, publisher of the SCUM Manifesto] How did you hook up with him?

I can't remember where I first met him. I know that around that time [1967], the first work I did for him was completely hack work. He would buy up these absolutely terrible novels, and then he would hire somebody to add the sex scenes. I did two of those books for him. All the writers were writing porn under false names, and he offered me an extra $1000 to use my own name, and I didn't give a fuck, so sure. At that time I was studying with Zenryu Suzuki, and I talked to him about this kind of work, about the "selling out" thing. He said, "Just know the difference." He said, "One of my friends is one of the greatest sumi painters in Japan. He paints murals in the department store for a living, but he knows the difference. He knows when he's doing one kind of work and when he's doing the other."

When you started out in the 50s, and even through the 60s it seems that one of the things that tied everyone together was this conviction that they were opposed to "selling out."

Yeah. It was a big deal.

Whereas now a lot of creative people are falling all over themselves trying to sell out.

There's a couple of mistakes they're making. If you sell out and you succeed, you're stuck with it. That's the period that you're gonna be. That's the work that people are gonna want. I'm not saying that he sold out—he certainly didn't—but I remember that galleries wouldn't take Franz Kline's color paintings. They didn't want to know that he was doing color paintings. "Stay black and white. That's what's selling!" That's one big mistake, the confidence that they can keep their own inner integrity and really work with "the Man." That's why we expected to have a job that was outside of our field.

[Another mistake] is the assumption that you come into your power or your maturity as an artist pretty fast. You don't. You have to give yourself 20 years, at least. I didn't even want to teach till 1971. [At the age of] 36, 37, I didn't feel I was ready to teach anything about poetry. And I had been writing very seriously since I was 14, and dropped out of school when I was 18 to just do that. So I gave myself a long time before I felt I had anything to sell at all. Even on the level of just passing on craft and information. I guess the whole culture makes you think that everything is very fast. I remember I was teaching at Naropa one time and I was talking about some technique, and I said, "And when you've done that for about 10 years…" and somebody yelled "Ten YEARS! I thought you were going to teach us everything about poetry this summer!"

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

It goes through cycles. Right now I'm teaching my "advanced" class, the ones that have studied with me for more than one year, and we're doing something called "The Theory and Practice of Poetics." And [that class is] very committed to learning about the craft, learning about the poem, but when I teach in [most] schools now nobody wants to know that stuff anymore. They want to know how to publish.

So your allegiance is to the art. Not to what you can get from it.

What's that? I mean, no matter what's happening in your life—you can be out on the street, you can just have broken up with the love of your life, you can have lost someone very dear to you in some tragedy—work is always there. You can always go to your desk. Even if you're just writing the same word over and over because you're too broken up to do anything yet, you know that that's there. It's like the one thing you're never going to lose is that ability to turn back to poetry, or music, painting, whatever. It's your lifelong sustainer. That's how I always felt about it. Creativity is the most important thing in our lives. I mean, what are you going to sell it for? What can you trade it for that's gonna be anything like its equivalent?

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