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(The New York Years)
a memoir by Diane di Prima Putnam Viking 2001 $29.95 hardback
a review by Ronnie Burk
San Francisco
May 7 2001
Poetry lovers will find a lot to enjoy in this frank and artfully written memoir. A virtual who's who of the downtown New York art scene of the late fifties and early sixties is featured in Diane di Prima's splendid Recollections Of My Life As A Woman. Such luminaries as Frank O'Hara, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Jim Dine, James Waring, Cecil Taylor, John Wieners, Audre Lourde, Philip Whalen, Yoko Ono, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jack Smith, Larry Rivers, Red Grooms. Helen Adam, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and many others all come and go as di Prima tells the story of her emergence as a poet during one of the most creative periods in New York City's history.
Di Prima's comments on the creative process while telling the story about The Poet's Theatre's production of Michael McClure's The Blossom with set designs by assemblage artist George Herms becomes a fascinating exposition on the subject of art as magic. This production included the airing of Antonin Artaud's To Have Done With The Judgment of God over the night sky above Bleeker Street. Grounded in the basic hard work of theatrical production di Prima relays the chaos and madness and transforming power that occurs when art enters the realm of the divine. This is art as magick she tells us not art as entertainment and it is this magickal path she has chosen in order to make her way in life.
Through journal writing, fragments of poems written at the time, unsent letters and a rich evocative prose style di Prima skillfully interweaves past and present. With the same voice that gave us Dinners & Nightmares, Memoirs Of A Beatnik and the extraordinary The Calculus of Variations di Prima captures a time of groundbreaking experimentation and risk. Whether she is telling us about her love affairs with Leroi Jones or Bonnie the painter or telling the tragic story of Freddie Herko's demise or with great warmth telling us about her time at The Phoenix Bookshop the reader is struck by the sense of passion and desire behind it all. These are the Eisenhower years a time when being involved in a lesbian affair or in an "interracial" relationship or selling Henry Miller got you sent to jail or worse the nuthouse. Di Prima's decision to do her own thing at whatever cost borders on the heroic. There is a key moment early on when at age nineteen she reacts instinctively as a race traitor and will take no part in the ugly rituals of a hateful society. In line in a grocery store in mid-fifties D.C. di Prima defers to a black gentleman and causes an upset.
"At that moment I realized that Washington was the South - the fabled South of rigid segregation that we in New York avoided and feared. I held my ground behind that anonymous Black man in that supermarket line. I held my ground and he held his, and we faced down the anger around us."
It is di Prima's epic sense of life, her voracious sense of quest that makes this book so emotionally fulfilling. From beginning to end di Prima is painfully honest about her feelings, feelings about her mother, her lovers, her friends even her writing. She questions at one point whether she is a "real writer" only to discover that a writer is simply someone who writes in the morning after the kids goes off to school.
There is much to enjoy and savor in this book of recollections. Stories about meeting Wallace Berman and hanging out in Topanga Canyon where she meets the artist/witch woman Cameron and leaves her a soapstone yoni and lingam. The story of Alan Marlowe walking around in his Hungarian jewelry. The story of Jeannie, her first daughter, displaying her telekinetic powers at age five. The story about the artists who lived in troll houses and did the communal trip before it was called "hippie freak." The story about her grandfather the Sicilian anarchist Domenico Mallozzi explaining to her granddaughter (age four) the mysteries of the universe by reading to her the hermetic visions of Dante and Bruno. The hilarious story of her drive across America with "the LaMontes" landing in the" insipid town of Glendale...looking at those lawns bought and rolled out by the square foot like a carpet. For the first time I wholeheartedly gave myself over to the fantasy of a coming revolution. Imagined with relish that bland obvious world razed to the ground those front lawns pitted and torn by bombs. By grenades, I could almost feel them in my hands."
But of all the stories I found so amusing so delightful none is as lucid and beautiful as the entry about the concert Billie Holiday gave at Carnegie Hall. "She was the Lady, the one who made fire out of the most tired lyric, who turned our ears and our hearts for all time to come to the subtlest inflection, syncopation. Accent of the genuine in a breaking voice." There is no finer writer than Diane di Prima and there was no finer time than midfifties New York. Safe to say this country will never see such a time again. But we can be grateful that her history has become our history and the world is a better place for it.
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