In 2000, I was a freshman at the delightfully and wackily radical institution of Antioch College. We had no football team, but we had a women’s rugby team. We had no grades, but we had courses on “The History of Feminist Self-Publishing.” We had no fraternities or sororities — they were banned from campus by hippie law — but we had the campus legend of the “Secret Frat,” a group of shadowy, anonymous male students meeting in some secluded lair to be sexist and NOT EVEN FEEL BAD ABOUT IT, which we related to each other with much horror. The men in the Secret Frat could be anyone! They could be the men you knew! Did you date boys? You could be dating… A FRAT BOY! Such was the spine-tingling terror of the Secret Frat!
Of course, the world is a Secret Frat. I know that now. The reason I loved Antioch College — continue to love it, though it no longer exists, due to predictable yet dramatic hippie finance struggles — is that it was possible to preserve your innocence there. It was possible to believe you had entered a world where boys simply would not be allowed to meet behind your back and say stupid, misogynist shit about you; if they were going to do it, they had to do it in some dank basement or dark corner of the woods, to hide themselves from the forces of lady justice. It was sweet, really. To imagine that they needed a Secret Frat to say or do the stupid misogynist shit; to imagine that it wasn’t happening anyway, to you and to every girl, every time that you left the room.
Still, I had been on campus for less than two weeks when I met my first nemesis. He was a socialist, a DJ of annoying techno, and a dedicated practitioner of the art of misogyny. Let us call him “DJ Guevara Shirt,” for indeed, many of his t-shirts featured that man. DJ Guevara Shirt was in his twenties, and cheated on his girlfriend with a high school senior; DJ Guevara Shirt then pressured that girlfriend into having a threesome with the senior, in between bouts of shouting at her in public; when he heard that I was a feminist, DJ Guevara Shirt took me into an abandoned dorm room, with a large friend of his guarding the door like a bouncer, and explained to me that the great struggle of our time was one of class, and that focusing on women’s issues was selfish, divisive and destructive to the revolution. Which made sense: If you wanted a revolution in which you could verbally abuse your girlfriend and cheat on her with a teenager, it would indeed be destructive to have any feminists lurking around. When he heard I was a poet, though — for such, at the time, did I very insufferably call myself — he unaccountably did me a favor. He gave me his copy of Diane Di Prima’s Selected Poems.
“She was one of the Beats,” he said. “Sort of. But, you know, a woman.”
I have just realized that the stakes are myself
I have no other
ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life
— Diane Di Prima, “Revolutionary Letters”
“A great woman poet,” is what it says on the back of Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems by Diane Di Prima, and the guy saying it is Allen Ginsberg. If and when Di Prima is spoken of, most people speak about this; her association with the Beat poets, her time in Greenwich Village before the Village became a theme park, her acquaintance with Ginsberg and Snyder and Kerouac and all those other boys. It’s probably why DJ Guevara Shirt knew her, and gave her book away: She was a woman, and a writer, in one of the most famously misogynist scenes of the 20th Century.
Which, on one level, is inspiring. It’s as if all those wordless, exotic, eternally obliging girls in the Kerouac novels stepped out of the background and started talking. You can point to Diane Di Prima, if you want to prove something. You can say, see? There were women there, after all! Here’s the woman!
And yet, when you refer to “the Beats,” to whom are you typically referring? Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg. Corso and Snyder, maybe. You rarely refer to Diane Di Prima. Which is one of the key things about being a “great woman poet,” and not a “great poet,” about being the girl in the scene: We don’t talk about Diane Di Prima without mentioning the Beats. But we usually talk about the Beats without mentioning Di Prima.
There are specific structures in place to make sure this happens. In her memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Di Prima gives an example. She went to a party with some friends, she said, smoked a little pot, had some fun, and then left. She was a single mother with a small child, and she’d told her babysitter that she’d be home by 11:30. But it’s at this point that Kerouac makes his only memorable appearance in the book, and praise be to baby Jesus, it is exactly as awful as you’d expect: “Jack Kerouac raised himself up on one elbow on the linoleum and announced in a stentorian voice: ‘DI PRIMA, UNLESS YOU FORGET ABOUT YOUR BABYSITTER, YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO BE A WRITER.'”
See? No wonder there are so few “great women poets!” They can’t stay at the party and do speed and write “On the Road” for a month straight while their wives bring them soup and clean the house, because they’re always thinking about their babysitters! As opposed to, you know, marrying their babysitters. Which was the approach preferred by Jack Kerouac, and many other men at the time.
* * *
I won’t be “translated”
alone, or at least w/out female
buddies, I know some of the men will “buy” the ideal
but they don’t count
— Diane Di Prima, “For Bella Akhmadulima”
* * *
In 2007, nearly seven years after DJ Guevara Shirt tossed me his copy of Pieces of a Song, I found myself reading it in a Manhattan emergency room, waiting to get the Morning After Pill. I had taken to carrying the book around with me, along with Di Prima’s memoir; I thought it would help me to start writing again.
I’d fallen in love in college, as you do. The boy and I had stayed together for nearly six years. Around year four, I had stopped writing. I’d graduated college, gotten a degree in writing poetry, decided against grad school, and promptly settled down into a life of office temping and domesticity and waiting for a marriage proposal. When the boy and I split up, I found myself at a loss. For my entire adult life, I had been half of a couple. I’d had routines, long-standing compromises, a plan for the next several decades of my life. And that was all gone. I had to be someone else entirely. And I had no idea who she was.
What would I cook for myself, if I could choose? Because I had to choose. What would I do for fun? Left to my own devices, would I ever again watch the hit FOX procedural Bones? More important: What would I do with my life? For the past six years, my goal had been to get married before I turned thirty, so that we could get started on having kids. And that was, clearly, shot to shit. Now I had only five years to meet someone, get married, and have kids before the dreaded Spinster Deadline, and, you know, that was contingent on meeting someone I liked enough to marry, and, you know, I had never really dated around, I wanted to try that, maybe we should scrap that whole “marriage by 30” plan. So if I never got married, if I never had kids, what would make me happy? All I could remember was that, at one point, I had wanted to be a writer.
And here I was, waiting in an emergency room alone, and it really wasn’t fair. Was it? None of it was fair. It wasn’t fair that I’d had to wait for the proposal, that the one time I had tried to propose he told me it was “the guy’s job.” It wasn’t fair that I had waited so long, because everyone assured me “men are just that way,” they naturally feared anything that gave a woman more power or made her harder to get rid of. It wasn’t fair that I’d had to get tutorials on dressing up and wearing makeup and not scaring men off by having visible feelings, so that I could date; it wasn’t fair that I was going to pay $200 to make sure I didn’t get pregnant, and the guy who could have gotten me pregnant had paid for French toast and coffee.
It wasn’t fair that I was twenty-five years old and feeling like a failure. It wasn’t fair that I was twenty-five years old and thought my life would be over in five years. It wasn’t fair that I’d stopped writing. I’d had ambition; I’d been talented; I had stopped writing, because I was focusing on a relationship. And now the relationship was over. Because people can leave you, and writing won’t leave unless you make it, and nobody ever pointed that out to me; they were just happy I was turning out normal. Such a normal, marriage-focused, baby-focused, receptionist-desk-working type of girl. And now I had no boyfriend, and no plans for my life, and my job was answering a telephone, because I had stopped writing: This, above all things, was just not fair.
I know which site I am writing for, dear reader; I know that many of these problems are not your problems, and are in fact the result of my being a massively privileged straight lady. But I was sitting there, in a cold-ass emergency room, reading this woman Di Prima who actually got to be a writer, even back when sexism was way more overt, in the goddamned 1950s she got to do it and in 2007 I was being encouraged to get married by 30 and perfect my filing skills, and I’m telling you: It wasn’t fair. I had just started to notice how unfair it was. I had just started to think of it in gendered, and not purely personal, terms. I had just started to believe that it was essential to start writing again – not poems, I had lost any skill I’d ever had with poems, but something else. Essays, maybe. I had just started. I was sitting there in the hospital, waiting to be born.
* * *
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT
Diane Di Prima, “Rant”
* * *
At every deciding moment in my adult life – every moment when I had to take a step, from being something to being something else (child to woman, wife to writer) – I’ve read Diane Di Prima. And it only makes sense that I would. Deciding moments and reckless decisions are, in large part, what her work is about.
When I first read Di Prima, I was reading as someone learning the craft of poetry: I noticed the spareness of her language, how it can give way to longer conversational lines or condense itself into brief, fractured images. I noticed her tendency to lush language and to repetition. I noted that her use of contemporary slang sometimes dated the poems (“dig it;” NO THANK YOU, I was born in 1982), and reminded myself to avoid it.
But I focused on the language because I was a teenager; I hadn’t lived much yet, had nothing to compare to the life in the poems. Now, what strikes me is how the language changes, how the slang adjusts with the time, the fact that she dedicated one series of poems to Bob Dylan and a later one to Audre Lorde. What strikes me is that, though she worked with Beats and is described, if at all, as “a Beat” (sort of; but, you know, a woman), she only really wrote as Beat poetry at the very beginning of her very long career.
Yes, she wrote Beat poetry. She also wrote hippie poems – some wildly aggravating! Yes, you had long hair and smoked grass on blankets with your bare feet! – and feminist poems, poems about the Civil Rights movement and the gay rights movement, Buddhist poems, when that was happening, and some very New Age poems about “magick” with a K, as we move forward into the eighties and the nineties. There is a chronology of her life in the back of Pieces of a Song, and though there are some bizarre lines in there – “1966: Moved to Kerhonkson, New York, and later to Timothy Leary’s experimental community;” “1978: Moved back to San Francisco and studied psychic reading” – what stands out is the adventurousness of it all. This woman found the riskiest, weirdest thing to be, at any particular moment, and then she became it.
And it wasn’t easy. Her memoir fills in the blanks of the chronology: Ditching college. Being desperately poor on Avenue A in the ’50s, pulling part-time shifts in a bookstore so she would have time to write. Having sex with a friend so that she could get pregnant, and raising that baby with her girlfriend. Falling in love with the very married poet LeRoi Jones, before he was Amiri Baraka – she refuses to call him anything but “Roi” – and carrying on a years-long affair. Being pressured by Jones to have an illegal abortion; doing it, despite watching a friend nearly die from the procedure; being excluded from an anthology of “new poets” specifically because of their affair. His poems made it in, of course. He was a very important new voice. And also, a man.
The woman has courage. Choosing to write, she said, “was choosing as completely as possible the life of the renunciant.” In 1994, she still apparently had trouble paying her rent. And that’s just how it goes. The key word here is “choosing.” You are not deprived; you have renounced. You have chosen something for your life. And you did not choose the “tons and tons of money” option. So, good luck.
But to do it as a woman, to do it as a woman in one of the most notoriously misogynist scenes of the 20th century, to do it as a bisexual woman, as a single mother, as a radical anarchist activist who never answered the door because it was either her landlord or the FBI: I don’t think many people have the backbone to make that choice. It cost her. If she had followed her original path – college, a modest and prudent attempt at writing, early poems praised by Ezra Pound – there is a very strong possibility she would be more well-known today.
Or, there is the option that no-one would read her. That she would never have lived enough to write the poems we have; that she would have been boring. A well-mannered lady poet, making well-mannered lady choices and well-mannered lady compromises, settling back into obscurity and into a very luxurious armchair, confident that she could always pay the rent on time.
* * *
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
There is no way you can avoid taking sides
There is no way that you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher
you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
– Diane Di Prima, “Rant”
* * *
“THE REQUIREMENTS OF OUR LIFE IS THE FORM OF OUR ART,” is one of Di Prima’s statements on how art works. She said that she intended it especially for women. And it’s true: It is, or they are. The requirements of being a woman inform every line of Di Prima; so do the requirements of poverty, of rebellion, of standing on the outside of the culture. But the requirements can be beautiful, in their way. For example, the requirements can include courage. And vision. And hope. Which all became requirements when I read Diane Di Prima in an emergency room on a cold, lonely December morning in Manhattan.
I am not a poet. I run a website. My writing sounds nothing like hers. But notice how I can refer to “my writing.” Because I write now. I am, in fact, a writer. All I had to do was decide I was going to write something. You don’t have to be a poet to have a poetics, like the lady says, and you don’t have to be a poet to appreciate this idea: The boldness of making your own world. Deciding what your world should look like and then just making it look that way. Taking risks – bullheaded, obvious, deadly or ruinous risks – as often as you have to, to make it happen. All of your friends, the very talented ones who just never get around to painting anything any more, the very smart ones who are going to start writing one day when they have more time, the people who know who they want to be and what they want to do but just haven’t done it yet, the people who’ve never stopped to wonder who they want to be, never realized it was a choice: Make them read Diane Di Prima. Especially if they’re girls.
“There is no part of yourself you can separate out / saying this is memory, this is sensation / this is my work, this is how I / make a living,” Di Prima warns us. “There is nothing to integrate, you are a presence.” She is. I am. And you are.
——
you can catch sady doyle on the reg at tiger beatdown
So I got really excited because I’m searching for colleges and Antioch sounded like a great haven of liberal homogayness, only to find out three sentences later that Antioch is no longer in existence. That’s life.
In other news: Di Prima’s poetry melts in my mouth. Fondue in literary form. Why are all my metaphors food related? Must go contemplate this.
me too!!!
Do not despair…Antioch is due to re-open in the fall of 2011. It has been saved–and maybe even improved–by dedicated alumni, faculty, staff, and the citizens of Yellow Springs, Ohio. The first entering class will be limited to 25 students, all of whom will receive fellowships to cover their tuition, room and board, and fees for their entire sojourn at the college.
There’s an article in a recent issue of the Yellow Springs News explaining what is being planned to revive the college.
Google the “Yellow Springs News”…or google “Antioch College” and you should find lots of info.
—————————
From the Print
Antioch admits first students
* By Diane Chiddister
* Published: March 3, 2011
* No Comments
James Russell first heard of Antioch College several years ago when, as a young man living in Texas, he read Colleges That Change Lives, in which author and education writer Loren Pope wrote of Antioch, “There is no college or university that makes a more profound difference in a young person’s life, or that creates more effective adults.”
Though Russell was unable at the time to attend Antioch, he still fantasized doing so, and kept close tabs on Antioch news.
So it was “devastating” when the college was closed and his hopes of someday being an Antiochian were dashed, Russell wrote in an e-mail this week. At that point, he moved to Yellow Springs to become a part of the Nonstop community, then later moved back to Texas, where he’s currently a freelance blogger and writer who works as an intern for the progressive news site Truthout. He plans soon to move to Chicago, where he will serve as communications co-ordinator for the peace group Voices for Creative Nonviolence.
And next year, Russell’s dream will become reality. He recently learned that he is one of the first students accepted into the revived Antioch College.
“I want to go to Antioch to support and sustain an institution that gave me so much through the past few years. I want to go to Antioch, too, to finally realize my only dream of the past few years, to be an Antiochian,” he wrote. “I want to go to Antioch, then, for what the college represents: not just the vital three C’s, that is co-op, classroom and community, but also the kind of person it creates.”
Russell is among the first four young people — two from Texas and two from Ohio — to be accepted by the college during its early admissions process, according to Special Assistant to the President for Enrollment Kristen Pett in a recent interview. The college received 17 early admissions applications, and accepted four, or 22 percent, Pett said. The college recently notified those chosen of their admission.
While not identifying the new students by name, Pett stated that the initial group is “strong, intellectually inquisitive and from a range of educational backgrounds.” They are also diverse in race, gender and background, she said.
Antioch plans to have 25 students in its first class next fall, college leaders have stated. The remaining 21 students will be selected during the regular admissions process, which has a March 1 deadline for applications. During March, Pett, President Mark Roosevelt and other members of the admissions staff will make final decisions, and prospective students will be notified by April 1. Students then have until May 1 to let the college know of their decision.
“Applications are coming in at a steady pace,” Pett said recently. She declined to give the exact numbers of applicants, as the process is ongoing. However, she said she feels excited by the quality of student that the new college is attracting. Applications are coming in from “all over,” she said, with about 20 percent of applicants from out of state, including especially strong representation from New York and California.
“We continue to attract some of the most talented and community-minded [high school] graduates,” Pett said.
The college’s initial 25 students will be attending college tuition-free during their four years, partly because these students will be taking a risk by attending a college that is so far not accredited. (Gaining accreditation is a multi-year process, with the catch-22 that before becoming accredited the college must first graduate a class of students, who will receive retroactive credits if the college becomes accredited.) Antioch College is making progress in moving forward in that process, accreditation consultant Len Clark stated at a recent college board pro tem meeting.
In recent weeks, Antioch leaders announced the establishment of Horace Mann Fellowships, which all members of the first class will receive. The fellowships will include additional opportunities for the first group of students, including mentoring by college alumni and the opportunity for grant money to cover college room and board costs, according to Pett.
In general, according to Communications Director Gariot Louima, it’s an exciting time to be at the college.
“We’ve been working toward something for many months,” he said. “Now it seems tangible.”
Antioch alumni volunteers are also working to help ready the campus for its first class next fall, according to Volunteer Coordinator Julian Sharp this week.
“Volunteers are playing a key role in a variety of ways in readying the campus for students,” he said.
A core group of both local and out-of-town alumni, who call themselves VAMP, or Volunteers for Antioch Maintenance Projects, have committed one week a month for work projects, beginning in January with creating a workshop in the former Maples building. This month they have been working in the McGregor building on campus, which will serve as the main academic building next fall, Sharp said, housing classes and academic offices. The first group of students will live in the Birch dormitory on Corry Street.
All six Antioch College tenure-track faculty positions have been advertised, according to Louima, who said the college has received about 200 applications for its position in philosophy, and a lower number for the other positions, which include literature, art (sculpture and drawing), anthropology, chemistry and Spanish. The college also recently began advertising for the new position of dean of community life. Advertisements have been placed in standard venues for higher education positions, including the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education Web sites.
No finalists for the tenure-track positions have been chosen yet, according to Louima, who said that finalists will be interviewed on campus through March and April.
See also: Hampshire (been there, done that), Evergreen State, Marlboro, or the book/website Colleges That Change Lives for more ideas!
I enjoyed reading this very much ; definitely need to revisit Diane Di Prima.
I got into the Beats from reading Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart, and by over-identifying with Sumire—who was reading Jack Kerouac in the novel—I decided to read what she was reading and came to like Kerouac myself…sort of. What I really like about him is explained in this part of Aurelie Sheehan’s “Jack Kerouac is Pregnant”:
“I wanted to live in a garret and write a novel on one long continuous roll of paper. I wanted a coterie of brilliant, alcoholic friends. I wanted to walk down the street and feel arrogant, and when I wasn’t feeling arrogant, I wanted to feel hugely alone, a kind of vast, unending pain that I could challenge with sentences that went on too long.
“‘I don’t want to give you the wrong impression,’ I wanted to try out on one of the unsuspecting multitude, light a cigarette, and look the other way. What then? Kerouac would hear the wind of possibility in his head like a cyclone and be blown over by the immensity of the present tense.”
Not liking the Beats, but liking the Beats, if that makes sense.
awesome.
So like, it’s pretty badass to get some Sady Doyle in my Autostraddle. I will definitely be checking out Di Prima.
So cool to see Sady Doyle here, I love tigerbeatdown. I hadn’t heard of Di Prima before, but she sounds pretty bad ass.
this is really wonderful and i am happy that it exists in this space and proud also. thank you.
Wait, does Sady publishing here mean she has any attraction to ladypeople? If so, sign me up.
Wow, so, I have discovered the perils of getting drunk and reading a byline and nothing else of an article. And I veered straight into the territory that Kate Beaton complains about here: http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2010/10/quote-of-the-day-kate-beaton-on-sexist-compliments/ I am actually deeply sorry and also embarrassed.
the collision of Diane Di Prima, Sady, and Autostraddle has just left me unable to move. I never need to use the rest of the internet again.
diane di prima to me is the embodiment of when us women need someone there to be talking to us, to be looking out for us with no bullshit. Even though the incessant focus on her ladyness annoys the hell out of me, I also need that from her. It is annoying.
Before I ever read her myself, I was pouring my heart out to my best friend in the car about how fucked up my love life had become, simultaneously guilty and relieved and full of missing, and she gave me the best advice I’d ever gotten about love, the only advice that has gotten me through everything, and the advice that has kept me from ever judging other people. It was a Di Prima quote that roughly said: “There is no right or wrong in love. A woman must survive.”
And the way my best friend said it, you knew she had read Di Prima a thousand times and trusted her as a guide in the way you don’t trust just anyone with a typewriter and a publisher.
This was a great post to read on a Friday night alone in the rain. Thank you.
thank you for this.
This is beautiful
I really needed to read this, thank you. I’ll pick up a book of hers the next chance I get.
Fabulous! Greetings from Yellow Springs!
“Deciding what your world should look like and then just making it look that way.”
That sentence is perhaps my entire everything.
thank you for the introduction to ms. di prima. i’ve never really gotten into the beat poets, but the selections from her poems that you’ve shared are wonderful.
we wanted to bold so many things in this piece. i have other feelings to share but for now i just want to say that i read this three times and really liked it so much
this is inspiring, thank you.
This is really great. The whole Pure Poetry series (and other books you all recommend on here) has ensured that I will have enough reading to keep me busy for a long while.
This was inspiring and appreciated. Thank you.
Sady. This may be my favourite thing you have ever written. Ohh.
On another note, Sady fucking Doyle is on Autostraddle. Holy fuck, it’s lesbian feminist Christmas.
we’re even considering letting it go for 12 days
—
i was going to comment — even though it is unrelated to cassandra’s comment, it seems more efficient to comment here and not waste paper, that i think there is something specifically generational about this story that i relate to in the same way i relate to emily gould sometimes, cuz i got born in 81.
anyhow enough about me. i like a lot of parts of this
there was a poem in this post that reminded me of kathy acker
i’m going to get a book
There was a moment a few months ago where I discovered Diane Di Prima is a bookshop and I had to decide between buying her book and eating that week.
I think now I would choose to buy her book. Your article has made me want to be that person, you know?
Pingback: Sady Doyle on Diane Di Prima, Who You Have Stupidly Probably Not Heard Of / Carolyn Yates
so, um, I LOVE THIS.
wow, really thoughtful, insightful, great piece, sady. so amazing to see your writing here. i hope you contribute more!
Sady Doyle writing about Diane Di Prima: is this real life or fantasy?! For real though, I think I had a dream about this once…
Also, I am loving the pure poetry feature here on AS.
in which riese and i convey our feelings re: this post, via chat, which is sometimes the only way we can —
riese: also trying to comment on sady doyle’s thing
i finally understand why people are intimidated to comment on my stuff when they really like it
it’s hard for me to figure out what to say when all i want to say is OMG YOU’RE SO GOOD
laneia: yeah fuckkk
i have tried to comment on sady since it went up and i keep being super fucking hyperbolic and feelingsy
i want to comment on how raw and honest and yesyesyes her personal story was
but um
“your story is so honest and raw sady doyle!”
duh
riese: also she was born in 82
laneia: omg
riese: i feel like we are all related in a lot of our feelings
also w/emily gould, etc
due to being raised in that specific time
b/c of my theory about how
i think our generation specifically — ppl born in 80, 81, 82 — aged with technology
laneia: wait, but did you have any idea that she was, at one time, so marriage-focused?
b/c i fucking did not
and was like OMFG YOU’RE LIKE ME / US HOLY SHIT
riese: i did not, but it did not surprise me because duh:
me
you
emily
laneia: right
riese: like we were 13 when the internet was 13
we were 14 when the internet was 14
like we got things exactly at the age when we could handle it
it was a weird convergence of technological evolution with our own personal evolutions, etc
laneia: yes it is. i can’t imagine growing up with the resources people have now
i mean, i think i would’ve kicked so much ass so much sooner
riese: yeah
for sure
ok i feel like this makes sense.
OMG AWESOME POST! I was in a band this past spring called “The di Prima Project” in Charleston with two other awesome ladies! It was so awesome. If anyone wants tracks, I can email them to you. Sadly band is no longer together but Diane di Prima still haunts me.
This post really spoke to me. I also consider myself to be a writer who has not written anything new in years. I have my fair share of excuses and my own sad truth is that I have put it off so many times in order to focus on my relationship. However I have been distracted by my female partner, rather than a man. Other distractions include working to start a family and to pay the bills…it’s just never the right time. I too was once wrapped up in a the idea that life had to be completed and checked off on a time schedule. As if it were a to do list that I kept in my back pocket. Also born in ’82, I think we are right in between generations of the conformity and liberal ways of doing things. Im also a gemini and so this may contribute to my split ways of thinking! But for the record I speak for myself on this matter…just a loud thought!
I’m not really into poetry in itself. I prefer to use poetry as a tool in other forms of writng but I’ll be sure to look into Ms. Di Prima’s work for the sake of keeping an open mind.
Thankyou for sharing your personal challenges and opening my mind a bit further. This is truly appreciated.
That is a good information. Thankyou for sharing!