Full Description
"The Poetry Deal: San Francisco Poet Laureate Series No. 5 gives us di Prima's vision as she looks back at a life lived truly and looks out at a society she still has hope for even as it grieves its failings."--David Nilsen, Fourth & Sycamore: A Literary Journal "The Poetry Deal shines with eros and kindness and the reality of inspiration. No American or Anarchist voice or soul-building heart has ever been more clear. The pages are fierce with love and generosity."--Michael McClure, author of Ghost Tantras "The Poetry Deal is fresh flame from a revolutionary fire that continues to burn. Every woman of every age should carry it in a purse with their pepper spray. Diane is the ultimate weapon."--Amber Tamblyn, author of Dark Sparkler "In her latest collection as San Francisco Poet Laureate, di Prima is again at the height of her powers, with 'the act of writing itself more compelling than ever.'"--Micah Ballard, author of Waifs and Strays "I return to this book again and again to remember what it means to own and further a poetic and political lineage."--Ana Bozicevic, author of Rise in the Fall "The Poetry Deal [is] an urgent success of the highest order ...Diane di Prima should always be high on the American poetry play list.
"--Barbara Berman, The Rumpus "Recounting a life in poetry, her commitment to progressive thought and action, and a half-century of Bay Area culture, crises, and change, di Prima writes at the top of her game ...di Prima recalls the time an institutionalized Ezra Pound told her that 'poets have to eat'; rarely has a poet left so much bread on the table for future poets."--*Starred Review, Publishers Weekly "This is a volume that traverses the specific and reaches the universal. She marks her poems with great strength and utmost sensitivity. They are poems that live in real time; not cyberspace. di Prima's poetry is well-lived and poetry worth living in. She is a gifted teacher enjoining the reader to face life's lessons for the attendant dilemmas of old age. Carry this book with you. It will arm you with continuous insight and flaming provocation."--Robert Sutherland-Cohen The Poetry Deal is the first full-length collection of individual poems in decades from legendary feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima.
Framed by two passionate, and critical, prose statements assessing her adopted home city, The Poetry Deal is a collection of poems that provide a personal and political look at forty years of Bay Area culture. Often elegiac in tone, the book captures the poet's sense of loss as she chronicles the deaths of friends from the AIDS epidemic as well as the passing of illustrious countercultural colleagues like Philip Whalen, Pigpen from the Grateful Dead, and Kirby Doyle. She also recalls and mourns out-of-town inspirations like Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Audre Lorde, and Ezra Pound. Yet even as she laments the state of her city today, she finds triumph and solace in her own relationships, the marriages of her friends, the endurance of City Lights, and other symbols of San Francisco's heritage. Born in Brooklyn in 1934, Diane di Prima emerged as a member of the Beat Generation in New York in the late '50s; in the early '60s, she founded the important mimeo magazine The Floating Bear with her lover LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). In the late '60s, she moved to San Francisco, where she would publish her groundbreaking Revolutionary Letters (1971) with City Lights.
Her other important books include Memoirs of a Beatnik, Pieces of a Dream, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, and Loba. She was named San Francisco Poet
Contents
INAUGURAL ADDRESS AT KORET AUDITORIUM
THE POETRY DEAL
CITY LIGHTS 1961
FOR PIGPEN
MISSING THE GRATEFUL DEAD
FILLMORE & HAYES
350
DEATHS: PHILIP WHALEN
A SHORT HISTORY OF BYZANTIUM
ALCHEMICAL SIGNALS
LINGUISTICS
NOVEMBER 2, 1972
OCTOBER
I DREAM OF AMY EVANS AND MICHAEL MCCLURE
WISTERIA LIGHT
FOG: SAN FRANCISCO
POSTCARD FROM MARSHALL, CA
LOT'S WIFE DOESN'T HAVE
KIRBY DOYLE
ON THE TRAIN
at least the Bay Bridge snapped
ESCAPES
FOR A STUDENT
DOMINIQUE
MAX ERNST IN SUBURBIA
GERI'S GARDEN
GRACIAS
CLEARING THE DESK
NOTES ON THE ART OF MEMORY
MEMORIAL DAY
SUNDAY MORNING SAUNA, SAN FRANCISCO
MEANWHILE THE WORLD GOES DOWN
WAR HAIKU: LEBANON
MAY-DANCE 2011
& ABOUT OBAMA
HAITI, CHILE, TIBET
CARTOGRAPHY
THE POETRY READING
in jazz in poetry
KEEP THE BEAT
SHIRLEY HORNE AT YOSHI'S
tender not fragile
the Phoenix is
AUDRE LORDE
the light, the splintered
FOR SHEPPARD
wind chime sends ripples
THE LAMA
THREE DHARMA POEMS
HEALING SPELL FOR MOUSE
A FAREWELL RITE
ZORON, YOUR DEATH
WHERE ARE YOU
my dream from last night
TRAVEL POEM FOR SHEP
EYE CLINIC WAITING ROOM
OLD AGE
SOME WORDS ABOUT THE POEM
