The Poetry Deal

Legendary feminist Beat poet di Prima (Pieces of a Song) delivers her first collection in more than two decades. 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 in a city where, “dig it, City Lights still here, like some old lighthouse/ though all the rest is gone.” Poems in her plainspoken, arrow-true style are bracketed by the acceptance address she delivered when named San Francisco poet laureate in 2009. “I would have to say thank you to all sentient beings,” di Prima declared, and through this volume, her heartrending love of the Earth, the mind, and art is on stunning display: “Poetry can bring joy, it can ease grief... Poetry is our heart’s cry and our heart’s ease.” She mixes observations on the state of the nation with history (“Remember Sacco & Vanzetti/ Remember Haymarket/ Remember John Brown/ Remember the slave revolts/ Remember Malcolm”) and personal narrative. 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. [em](Nov.) [/em]