A Memento for Diane
by David Cope
Diane
the first, the eldest, the mother, Diana di
primavera, Compassionate Hitchhiker, Feminist Oracle, Gaian
Seer, Huntress in Wolf Skins, Flag Bearer at the Barricades, Friend &
Nurturing Confidante, advocate for talented youth, poet of the long song and
the quick lyric—in the many years I’ve known Diane, she has challenged me,
taught me the patience that comes with experience, sent me her own work and the
work of her students, faced down the challenges of each age as it comes and
goes, and been unfailingly honest. I
have been most fortunate to have her friendship, her model of persistence, her
vision which, like Duncan’s, sees things sideways, from the angle most have not
explored.
As
a youthful student poet at the University of Michigan in the heyday of 60s and
70s radical politics and action, I was most moved by Allen Ginsberg’s Planet News and Diane’s Revolutionary Letters during those
darkest of my hours. Allen reminded me
to keep that Blakean glad day boy humor, to be honest
in my sexuality, to confront injustice and to think on a higher and grander
scale than I might have otherwise.
Diane’s book challenged me directly:
we all thought of ourselves as revolutionaries—the bigheaded mass
meetings of the International Socialists, Students for a Democratic Society,
and the pronouncements of the Black and White Panthers were ringing in all our
ears even as we struggled with police brutality on our streets and on the
burning streets of Detroit, friends being butchered in Vietnam or searching for
a place in a closed-off society that seemed bent on strangling its own
young. Diane spoke with that haunted,
sometimes enraged voice that cut through the madness—pointing out that the “stakes
are myself,” asking questions—“what do you want / your kids to learn,” or “are
you prepared / to hide . . . someone in your home indefinitely?” The echoes were powerful, voicing the
tortured dreams we were all living through:
if the power of the word
is anything,
fields burning
your cities in ruins, smouldering, pillaged by children
your cars broken down, at a
standstill, choking the roads
your citizens standing
beside them, bewildered, or choosing
a packload
of objects (what they can carry away), if the
power of the word lives,
eagle-eyed lines of electric, of
telephone, towers
of radio transmission,
toppled and rankling in the
fields, setting the hay ablaze
your newspapers useless,
your populace illiterate
wiping their asses with them,
IF THE WORD HAS POWER,
YOU SHALL NOT
STAND
AMERICA, the wilderness
is spreading from the parks
you have fenced it into . .
.
At the time, I saw her
voicing my own alienation from a nation whose hallmark was hubris, whose elders
equated the meanings of our lives with power and “a packload
of objects.” Older now, the lines bring
me closer to the problem of technology’s horned symmetries, single vision gone
viral, of the gradual and progressive breakdown of our own sense of community,
of brotherhood and sisterhood, but they also evoke the notion of a spreading
wilderness, of the possibility of saving an earth ravaged almost beyond
recognition. She contained, at
once, the pessimistic strain borne of
ecological disasters, lying politicians, a MAD defense industry and endless
wars—and the pristine hope-fulness that refused to
die.
As
a revolutionist
(or perhaps evolutionist), I was also troubled by the dual voice of the
letters, which at once envisioned the
old dream of love in vita nuova, unbound by violence
and hierarchies of the fallen heart, and yet a vision which also talked of
using “molotov cocktails, flame throwers bombs,” with
references to target practice and guns as perhaps necessary evils in the
passage out of an Amerika worshipping at the altars of
Moloch and Mammon. Perhaps her book
reflected the conundrum of the entire movement, no more so than after the
Altamont concert, the deaths of Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, the murdered
students at Kent and Jackson State, the Symbionese
Liberation Army’s death by fire, and even in its twisted way, the cruel dream
that became the Manson family. Still,
the letters did foresee a way that would put us all in touch with the earth
itself, to live in a way in keeping with natural rhythms and with a light
touch, and that is what has stayed with me and, I think, with her in her later
incarnations.
The
1970s was a period of finding our way out of the aggression that infected us
all, and when at last Allen invited me to come out to Naropa
and meet my peers, to read my work and teach the poetry of Charles Reznikoff, Marsden Hartley, and William Carlos Williams, my
great surprise was in having Diane as a next door neighbor. Allen had talked my poems up to his students
and to my own contemporaries, so naturally they were curious when I showed
up—funny in retrospect, because I was certainly the quintessential “hick from
the sticks” awaiting his baptism of poetic fire when I arrived. I figured that the best way to meet everybody
was to throw a party, and on the second night of my time there, I opened the
townhouse where I was staying, only to be deluged with poets, students,
hangers-on, madcap wild dogs and transients.
Poets roared their poems, the folk groped each other in great good
humor, the drinking and weed went on to the wee hours, and we sang out the
starry night. I slept little, but waking
in the mountain sunrise, I sat outside my apartment and shared tea with Bob
Rosenthal, reminiscing about the night before.
Diane’s door opened and she came out to join us—I was quite embarrassed,
realizing we must have kept her up all night, and I apologized. She waved me off, saying she’d known a
lifetime of these things, and one just accepts it. During the course of that week, she and
Sheppard presented a model of quietly elegant neighborliness, a shared love
which I found inspiring.
That
was her first lesson of patience and of taking things as they were; I could not
see then that a friendship had been formed, yet in years to come she would send
me not only the manuscripts of her own
poems, but those of her students. She
has graced the pages of my own annual journal, Big Scream, every few years sending another batch of her shorter
works. Diane also joined Carl Rakosi, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Gary Snyder, Anne Waldman and many others in contributing to my collection of
elegies for Allen, Sunflowers &
Locomotives: Songs for Allen, her
work at once deeply affective—revelatory, ironic, subtly comic, and grieving:
No one to ask me about
my sex life, my kids’, my
grandkids’ sex lives!
No more that warm, deep,
beautiful voice coming between
us poets and our
troubles—real or mind-created!
No rich, funny gossip,
latest literary news from around the
world, grandfatherly
unlooked-for and unused poetry advice.
No warrior of outspoken
directness, unabashed songs of the
most detailed embarassing and personal
moments of
our lives.
This
and her later lyrical pieces took me through her growth, her enormous heart, as
in prayer asking “To be worthy of the love as given. RISE / to the occasion. Wing-tipped.
To / be present at the present love; present / occasion for remembrance;
remain / presently engrossed. To remain
/ worthy of this present (gift): / present love.” In her poem “For Jackson Allen,” she accepts
a bracelet from him, and despite his succumbing to the epidemic, “yr blonde
hair long gone, yr head /bald from chemo,” she recalls
that he “grinned past all regret / for yr former beauty / stood still / beaming
at the camera.” She has spoken of her
beloved Sheppard Powell as the only man she had ever had as a “partner or equal
peer,” and her paean to him is a memento of standing in for a dear friend so
that the spirit of love may continue healing others; it is both a salute to his
spirit and a fierce assertion that those who are ill “are worth all care / all
tenderness / they are the gold of the gold / so precious.” That fierceness is evident, too, in the
strident yet quiet voice that is the “Awkward Song on the Eve of War”:
It is the story we have
all been telling
The story of the journey
and return
It is all about Light
And we never stop
telling it.
I cannot uproot this
Tree from the back of my head
I cannot tear this Song
out of my heart
I cannot allow the two
to war in my cells.
In “Memorial Day, 2003,”
she completes the circle I first saw in her Revolutionary
Letters, returning as a daughter of Memory; her poems create that space
wherein the spirit may rise, breathing out a motif, a stairway toward
awareness, a shared life and a gesture, always compassion, always fierce,
always a way through, persistent, opening her own path when none exists,
opening for others:
Remember to take yr life
back into yr hands
It’s Memorial Day,
remember
what you love
& do it—don’t wait.
Remember life hangs by a
thread—
anybody’s life
& then remember the
poets:
Shelley
& Bob Kaufman.
Remember Van Gogh &
Pollock
Remember Amelia Earhart
Remember it’s not a safe
time & all the more reason
To do whole-heartedly
what you have to do
Remember the women &
men of Wounded Knee,
Kent State, remember
where you stand:
in the midst of Empire,
& the Huns
are coming.
Note: “A Memento for Diane” appeared in Big Bridge14. 2010 Features. Ed. Michael
Rothenberg. http://www.bigbridge.org/BB14/features.htm