“the only war that matters is the war against the imagination.”

—Diane di Prima

Onehandclapping, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Onehandclapping, CC BY-SA 3.0

We just learned that Diane di Prima passed away on October 25th, 2020.  While we did not publish any of her extraordinary stand-alone works, she and her work appear in many Shambhala Publications books.  Though I had not been in touch in years, I knew Diane, especially after sitting next to her in some longer retreats with Lama Tharchin Rinpoche.  She had an incredible mind.  I remember her often picking up on something someone said, catching a turn of phrase that others less perceptive or less tuned into language would have not noticed, illuminating it and playing with it, making it dance.  I knew her to be a superb student, teacher, friend and inspiration to many.

Allen Ginsberg described her thus:

“Diane di Prima, revolutionary  activist of the 1960s Beat literary renaissance, heroic in life and poetics: a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated and  twentieth-century radical, her  writing, informed by Buddhist  equanimity, is exemplary in imagist, political and mystical  modes. A great woman poet in the second half of American century, she broke barriers of race-class  identity, delivered a major body of  verse brilliant in its particularity.”

But it is her own writing where she comes out and shines.

Diane's was a life well-lived.  Palms together to Diane.

Nikko Odiseos, Shambhala Publications

I Fail as a Dharma Teacher

I don’t imagine I’ll manage to express Sunyata
in a way that all my students will know & love
or present the 4 Noble Truths so they look delicious
& tempting as Easter candy. My skillful means
is more like a two by four banging on the head
of a reluctant diver
I then go in and save—
what pyrotechnics!

Alas this life I can’t be kind and persuasive
slip the Twelve-part Chain off hundreds of shackled
housewives
present the Eight-fold Path like the ultimate roadmap
at all the gas stations in samsara

But, oh, my lamas, I want to
how I want to!
Just to see your old eyes shine in this Kaliyuga
stars going out around us like birthday candles
your Empty Clear Luminous and Unobstructed
Rainbow Bodies
swimming in and through us like transparent fish.

—One of the eighteen poems in The Beat Book

A Short Profile of Diane di Prima

from The Beat Book: Writings from the Beat Generation.

Diane di Prima was born in 1934 and grew up in New York City. She dropped out of Swarthmore College to become a writer and lived in Greenwich Village, holding down a variety of jobs, consorting with artists, musicians, and poets. LeRoi Jones and his wife, Hettie, published di Prima’s first book in 1958. She was active in the Poets’ Theatre in New York and in the late sixties moved to San Francisco, where she raised five children, living in various communal situations, writing, and pursuing studies in politics, music, mythology, and religion. She also spent time in Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic community in Millbrook, New York. In 1962 she encountered the Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi: ‘‘I sat because he sat. To know his mind. It was the first time in my twenty-eight years that I had encountered another human being and felt trust. It blew my tough, sophisticated young-artist’s mind.’’ After Suzuki Roshi’s death, di Prima was accepted as a student by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in 1983. Di Prima was a founding faculty member of the Poetics Program at New College in San Francisco, along with Robert Duncan, and was one of the early founding ‘‘mothers’’ of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award in poetry from the National Poetry Association in 1993. Di Prima’s books include the incendiary Revolutionary Letters, several volumes of memoirs, such as Recollections of My Life as a Woman, and many collections of poetry, including Loba.

The Beat Book

$26.95 - Paperback

By: Anne Waldman

From Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry

"I cannot really pin down the influence of Buddhism in my work or my life-I have written very few explicitly "Buddhist poems." What I feel is that Buddhism has permeated my way of seeing the world and of being in it. For me, the basic dharmic teachings are simply axiomatic: emptiness, interdependence. They describe the actual structure of the world. Put another way, the dharma is the warp of the world on which the colors are woven.

But more than that: whether we are aware of it or not, something of Buddhism pervades American consciousness. When Bodhidharma came from India to China with the Buddhism that was to become Ch'an and later Zen, his answer to the Chinese emperor's request for "the holy teachings" was "VASTNESS, NO HOLINESS!"

This seems to me to be at the very core of who we are, what we are doing in the world at this time, as a nation and as a species, as we move out of time into space. It's a big risk and, as the dharma reminds us, there are no answers-but consciousness is shapely, and we do know more than we know."

From Heroine's Journey

Many women poets express their erotic nature in its many facets, both sensual and spiritual. In “Ave” Diane Di Prima writes of her union with the divine feminine.

. . . you are the hills, the shape and color of mesa
you are the tent, the lodge of skins, the hogan
the buffalo robes, the quilt, the knitted afghan
you are the cauldron and the evening star
you rise over the sea, you ride the dark
I move within you, light the evening fire
I dip my hand in you and eat your flesh
you are my mirror image and my sister
you disappear like smoke on mist hills
you lead me thru dream forest on horseback
large gypsy mother, I lean my head on your back

I am you
and I must become you
I have seen you
and I must become you
I am always you
I must become you . . .

The Heroine's Journey

$18.95 - Paperback

By: Maureen Murdock

Diane di Prima in Recalling Chögyam Trunga

Diane di Prima, a key presence in the early years and development of the Jack Kerouac School, had became closer to Trungpa Rinpoche after the death of her own teacher, Suzuki Roshi, and worked on her ngöndro (preliminary practice involving one hundred thousand prostrations, mantras, and mandala offerings) under the auspices and guidance of the Vajradhatu mandala. “Trajectory,” a poem from those early years, carries a sense of poignant irony that suffering is the greatest blessing:

So this
1970 must be
an excellent time
when even the telephone poles scream in agony. . . .

Recalling Chogyam Trungpa

$24.95 - Paperback

By: Fabrice Midal & Chogyam Trungpa

From Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness and Open Your Heart

Creativity and Imagination

the inner tide—
what moon does it follow?
I wait for a poem

—Diane di Prima

"The realm of creativity is interior, and is a mysterious interior journey. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton said, “our real journey in life is interior. . . .” To enter the realm of the interior, the moonlit night of dreams, of the Muse goddess, of howling she-wolves, we must leave behind boundaries, rules, and fixations and embrace the realm of intuition and imagination. Over her lifetime, the Beat poet Diane di Prima continues to rant, “the only war that matters is the war against the imagination.” To protect and revere the imagination, we need to step beyond hope and fear and enter unknown territory. In Tibetan Buddhism this unknown is a bardo, or gap, the word often used for the place between death and rebirth—yet it is also a place of in-between states of our so-called awake life: a place of pregnant uncertainty and opening into creative space. Though mostly known for writing longer series of poems, di Prima has embraced haiku, and says about it: “Most recently it’s been all about spaciousness, vastness in the fewest possible strokes. Images. Letting the breath open the sky.” And always, leaving the space for the moon to illuminate and move the tides."

Haiku Mind

$14.95 - Paperback

By: Patricia Donegan