Continuing the Revolution through Letters
Developing a tribute poem’s concept
When we first conceptualized More Revolutionary Letter: a Tribute to Diane di Prima, what grasped me most was the open and endless potential within our project. Just as di Prima worked on the project throughout her life, we too could continue to add and expand upon revolutionary letters.
In writing my poem for our collective chapbook, I wanted it to immediately reflect this continued legacy. In form, I knew that I would write within a similar style: a one stanza letter, no longer than a page. While this provided me with a structure, what I was more concerned with was the content itself–how does one continue in tribute to a collection of radical poetry that has had such a profound impact?
The answer lie in origins. I returned to di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, sinking into her vivid descriptions of how to live in and sustain a revolution, listening for the internal cues that would tug me deeper into the writing.
Many of the letters called to me, but specifically Revolutionary Letter #12 resonated, so much so that I reread it four or more times. It begins:
the vortex of creation is the vortex of destruction
the vortex of artistic creation is the vortex of self destruction
the vortex of political creation is the vortex of flesh destruction
The precise pairing gave me pause to ruminate on their associations. The vortex the spinning, cycling revolution in its purest form. An ethereal whirlpool of opposites mingling where each is one in the same.
I became particularly fixated on marriage between creation and destruction, and wild ideas of de-creation for re-creation began to swirl through my mind. How does one evoke a revolution without some undoing? Unimagining through reimagining? The two are cosmically linked.
So I focused on this idea of returning to a blank slate state, to return to one’s original, essential self before self. To unknow, unlearn, unthink so that one might reknew a vision of the world. Unknowing and reknewing a part of the same vortex.
out of the dark a revolution, a turning, a light
conceived through acts of decreation–i am unthinking myself, undoing myself
through my body’s fine inculcated fabrics
i am only flesh and vacant, reconstructing
“ultimate truth” world notions disintegrate
into nothingness; in the eye of the void
i see the shimmering light of a soulbreeching a placid wave of breath
floating atop the aftershock of thoughts
unthought; we are not that style,
that food, that waste, that version
of convenient sustainability,
that year’s model; we are not
that rhetoric, that law, that historywe are turning, turning, turning
the pages of history
and scribing its unwritten verses
in a language we must learn
The world feels like an obvious known; we take for granted all we have been told as an ultimate truth, but most things in the world, especially ideas, are human-made. If the system, one constructed by human-kind, is no longer working for us, if it is no longer sustaining our natural planet, then we must turn a new page, rotate our perspectives, forge new ideas, actions, realities that reflect the inherit goodness of humanity.
Di Prima gives us this hope in Revolutionary Letter #41:
Revolution: a turning, as the earth
turns, among planets, as the sun
turns round some (darker) star, the galaxy
describes a yin-yang spiral in the aether, we turn
from dark to light, turn
faces of pain & fear, the dawn
awash among them
Throughout her letters, especially the more lyric which seem to capture my attention, she grips at something essential. There is movement and churning, interplay of opposites pushing for light amid the dark. Fluidity gives way to the natural cycling of motion; the dark giving way to the light, which was always present and waiting.
A new future is there too, present and waiting, on the other side of the revolution.
This entry reflects on my piece featured in Wisdom Body Collective’s first publication More Revolutionary Letters: a Tribute to Diane di Prima. To find out more, visit our website and our other Medium posts discussing the process of its creation.
To order your copy of More Revolutionary Letters visit our Kickstarter page.
