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
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 Chögyam 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 Laureate in
2009.
