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AL FILREIS:

I'm Al Filreis and this is Poem Talk at the Writers House where I have the pleasure of convening three friends in the world of poetry and poetics to collaborate on a close, but not too close reading of some poems. We'll talk, maybe even disagree a bit, and perhaps open up the verse to a few new possibilities. And, we hope, gain for some poems that interest us some new readers and listeners. And I say listeners because Poem Talk poems are available in recordings made by the poets themselves as part of our PennSound Archive, writing.upenn.edu/pennsound. Today I'm joined here in Philadelphia at the Kelly Writers House in our Arts Cafe by Lee Ann Brown, poet, editor, teacher, stirrer-up of poetry, community happenings and maker of multimedia poetry events, founder back in 1989 of the great Tender Buttons Press which has been dedicated to publishing experimental poetry by women and other gender expansive beings, whose own books include 'In the Laurels, Caught,' 'Other Archer,' 'Polyverse' and 'The Sleep That Changed Everything' and other books, and who divides her time between New York City and Marshall, North Carolina. And by Laynie Browne whose most recent publications include an anthology 'A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on the Poet's Novel,' (Nightboat), an illustrated talk called 'The Poet's Novel as a Form of Defiance,' (Kin Press), and who has forthcoming collections of poetry, collection plural - Laynie, you are so productive – 'Translation of the Lilies Back Into Lists,' (Wave Books), and 'Apprentice to a Breathing Hand,' (Omnidawn), and who here at Penn, I'm pleased to say, coordinates our massive open online course ModPo and teaches creative writing. And by a dear friend of the program, we used to say, Kristen Gallagher, dear friend of the Writers House as well, writer of weird essay fictions employing methodologies spanning memoir, journalism, archival interpretation, eco horror and phenomenology, whose books include '85% True/Minor Ecologies,' (Skeleton Man 2017), 'Grand Central,' (Troll Thread 2016) and 'We Are Here,' (Truck Books 2011), whose recent unpublished nonfiction was a finalist for the 2020 Essay Press creative nonfiction contest, and who (IMITATES TRUMPET FANFARE) has recently been awarded an artist grant from the official, super official, New York State Council on the Arts. Kristen, not only is it great to see you, but to be here just after this celebratory thing happened to you. Why the heck did New York State decide to do something as radical as whatever you proposed? 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER: 

I have no idea. It may be because the grant was written really well, by me, and it's a collaboration with my long-time friend and filmmaker Tara Merenda Nelson, who does experimental film. I'm the writer on the project, and we're mining a really large under-cared for lantern slide collection. 

AL FILREIS:

Wow. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER: 

And trying to kind of research, find out as much as we can about these very old lantern slides and where they're from. And I'm writing things kind of looking at like the material conditions of the lantern slides and also the images in them. And then like riffing a little bit about our contemporary world alongside. 

AL FILREIS:

Wow, that is very cool. And does the project have a title? Yet?

KRISTEN GALLAGHER: 

Right now it's called An Exercise with Objects.

AL FILREIS:

OK. So for those listening to this years from now, they're likely to be able to find it that way, or they can use their favorite search engine and type in "Kristen Gallagher lantern slides". 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER: 

I think it'll work. Yeah. 

AL FILREIS:

Probably find it. OK. Laynie Browne, great to see you as always.

LAYNIE BROWNE: 

Happy to be here. 

AL FILREIS:

So glad you're-- and really, you are the co-curator of this particular Poem Talk, and I wanted to acknowledge that from the start. 

LAYNIE BROWNE: 

Thank you. 

AL FILREIS:

And Lee Ann Brown. Hello. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

Hi, Al. How are you doing? 

AL FILREIS:

How are you? 

LEE ANN BROWN:

I'm good. 

AL FILREIS:

It's always good to see--

LEE ANN BROWN:

Happy to be here. 

AL FILREIS:

This is a good threesome to be hanging around with for Poem Talk. I'm really excited. Today, we four have gathered here to talk about three of the poems in Diane di Prima's legendary book, 'Revolutionary Letters'. We'll be discussing poems numbered 16, aka, we are eating up the planet, 19, if what you want is jobs, and 27, how much can we afford to lose before we win? di Prima began writing these poem letters in 1968, and they were published by City Lights in 1971, and the 50th anniversary edition was put out by City Lights in 2021. And our recordings of di Prima performing these three poems come from various sources and are available at the di Prima PennSound page. Number 16 is a recording that was made in 1969 before the publication of the book. So that's cool. Number 19 is an undated recording, but I've been able to have a sense that it's 1982 or thereabouts, and number 27 was performed at Naropa in 1978. So here now is Diane di Prima, performing three of her revolutionary letters.

DIANE DI PRIMA:
Revolutionary letter number 16. "we are eating up the planet, the New York Times / takes a forest, every Sunday, Los Angeles / draws its water from the Sacramento Valley / the rivers of British Columbia are ours / on lease for 99 years // every large factory is an infringement / of our god-given right to light and air / to clean and flowing rivers stocked with fish / to the very possibility of life / for our children's children, we will have to / look carefully, i.e., do we really want / need / electricity and at what cost in natural resource / human resource / do we need cars, when petroleum / pumped from the earth poisons the land around / for 100 years, pumped from the car / poisons the hard-pressed cities, or try this / statistic, the USA / has 5% of the world's people uses over / 50% of the world's goods, our garbage / holds matter for survival for uncounted / 'underdeveloped' nations"

"if what you want is jobs / for everyone, you are still the enemy, / you have not thought thru, clearly / what that means // if what you want is housing, / industry (G.E. on the Navajo reservation) / a car for everyone, garage, refrigerator, / TV, more plumbing, scientific / freeways, you are still / the enemy, you have chosen / to sacrifice the planet for a few years of some / science fiction Utopia, if what you want // still is, or can be, schools / where all our kids are pushed into one shape, are taught / it's better to be 'American' than black / or Indian, or Jap, or Puerto Rican, where Dick / and Jane become and are the dream, do you / look like Dick's father, don't you think your kid / secretly wishes you did // if what you want / is clinics where the AMA / can feed you pills to keep you weak, or sterile / shoot germs into your kid, while Mercke & Co / grows richer / if you want / free psychiatric help for everyone / so that the shrinks / pimps for this decadence, can make / it flower for us, if you still want a piece / a small piece of suburbia, green lawn / laid down by the square foot / color TV, whose radiant energy / kills brain cells, whose subliminal ads / brainwash your children, have taken over / your dreams // degrees from universities which are nothing / more than slum landlords, festering sinks / of lies, so you too can go forth / and lie to others on some greenie campus // THEN YOU ARE STILL / THE ENEMY, you are selling/ yourself short, remember / you can have what you ask for, ask for / everything"

"How much / can we afford to lose, before we win, can we / cut hair, give up drugs, take / job, join Minute'Men, marry, wear their clothes, / play bingo, what / can we stomach, how soon / does it leave its mark, can we / living straight in a straight part of town still see / our people, can we live / if we don't see our people? 'It is better / to lose & win, than win & be / defeated' sd Gertrude Stein, which wd you / choose?"

(APPLAUSE)

AL FILREIS:
That last recording was before a large audience and, one gets the sense, outdoors. So one has a feeling of not just a reading but a rally of some kind. So that leads me to my first question for Kristen, to start. Can a poem advocate a political stance and be political in the sense of the aspiration of changing things that are wrong? Clearly di Prima thinks yes. How do you feel about that, looking way back at this moment from our time? 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER: 

Yeah, great. I guess I think a poem can do whatever anyone wants it to on some level, right? I tend to gravitate towards poems that maybe act a little bit less as like messaging devices and a little bit more at things that offer like kind of a real sense of an outside, something that really shakes people's perception or sensual experience up so that they really feel like the place they're in or the world they're living in, or the things they've assumed are not all there is, right? That there's some kind of outside. So if I were to express any kind of critique of the writing here, I might say that it's like heavy on messaging, but I don't really actually have a problem with that. I think it's great, and I spent the last few days talking to lots of people about Diane di Prima and the issues that are raised in these poems like generate great conversations, right? So I think as a device for that, they're fantastic. Yeah. 

AL FILREIS:

Laynie, your thought on this? 

LAYNIE BROWNE: 

Well, she was very intentional in this particular series of poems that she wrote throughout her life to want to be legible very quickly in the public space. And not all of her writing is like that, but these letters are like that. And so I think it's great that she figured out how to do that. In other words, there's many audiences, and one audience is a rally in a public space. And she could do that. I don't know that every poet feels called to do that or does it well, but she does and did and did it throughout her whole life while writing in other modes simultaneously. 

AL FILREIS:

She, soon after moving to San Francisco in 1968, in part to work with The Diggers, which is an activist performance troupe that distributed free food around the Bay Area, she thought of these letters, Lee Ann, as part of that activist performance. And that context is very important when reading the poem. They were made to be recited or spoken loudly on the steps of San Francisco City Hall, for instance, copies handed out to passing officials as a kind of urgent performance. So you have to have that context, really, to understand the polemical qualities of the thing. So where would you take that? You're a poet who also loves to think about performing in the different zones and spaces with different audiences. What's your thought about her sense of her audience? 

LEE ANN BROWN:

Well, the first thing comes to mind is that, as I recall, is dedicated to her Italian anarchist uncle, the whole project, that she grew up with. 

AL FILREIS:

I think the grandfather. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

Grandfather, thank you.

AL FILREIS:

Mallozzi, Domenico Mallozzi was a very famous Italian anarchist. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

Yeah, and I see them as sort of mixture of manifestos and speeches, but also in the context of being a letter poem, epistolatory poem which is very rich history. And what Bernadette Mayer said the other day is like, if you say the letter is a poem, it's a poem. If you say it's a poem, it's a poem. So I feel like it's very much dealing with this great form of the letter poem. It's addressed to people. It's addressed to people in order to revolutionize them. And it also reminds me formally of an improvisational poem. It's sonically dense, and it's sometimes they're sonnet like length, but they go on longer if they need to. But they remind me of Kerouac's 'Mexico City Blues,' and the form of those were dictated by the notebook in his pocket. And it was like the certain size. And I always think that the way the City Lights book is always, they're sort of uniform size. 

AL FILREIS:

Made for City Lights. I love that. I love the connection to Kerouac who was not going to be didactic and polemical, at least in this sense. Let's have a round robin or lightning round where all of us toss onto the table topics. What are some of the messages? Clearly, climate crisis, you know, and you read this from 1969 and you think, we're still dealing with this in exactly the same way. So that's one. Kristen, you got one? 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER: 

Yeah. Well, I mean, in keeping with what I was saying before, I think a lot of this is stuff that we now, I think, as lefties recognize as stuff that's really happening. So it's unfortunately, maybe not even news to us, but the things that still feel challenging or kind of point really shake you up and make you think outside of where you are right now. Do we really want need electricity? I like that, this is my favorite line in the first one 'cause it sort of puts you outside of your habitual thinking. 

AL FILREIS:

And I think particularly electricity on reservations, which has an effect on the community. OK, Laynie, we have climate crisis and electrification, kind of forced electrification. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER: 

Or like changing the way that we live, dramatically, living without the comforts we're accustomed to.

LAYNIE BROWNE:

Yeah, which leads to consumerism as a kind of unsustainable way to proceed. 

AL FILREIS:

OK. Lee Ann?

LEE ANN BROWN:

I would say conformity that goes with both of these other points. But just, you know, the sort of liberal pearl clutching, you know, of trends of like you're not going far enough. If you want jobs for everyone, you're the enemy. I mean, it's very radical. It's like you've got to rethink your whole position. 

AL FILREIS:

That's another one. I would add socialization through education. The Dick and Jane. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

The Green. 

AL FILREIS:

Kristen, add another one. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER: 

Yeah. Top-down medical establishment. 

AL FILREIS:

And psychiatry. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER: 

Psychiatry, vaccinations. 

AL FILREIS:

She's a leftist, anti-psychiatric person. And also, the vaccination thing gave me a little bit of the heebie jeebies.

KRISTEN GALLAGHER: 

That's right.

AL FILREIS:

So we got to deal with that. OK, Laynie, your turn. 

LAYNIE BROWNE:

Economic inequity.

AL FILREIS:

OK. Lee Ann?

LEE ANN BROWN:

White picket fence-ism, against that. 

AL FILREIS:

Television that radiates bad energy.

LEE ANN BROWN:

Oh yeah. And affects your dreams. 

AL FILREIS:

Subliminal ads. These are three revolutionary letters, and they're probably 20 topics, right? So, Laynie what do we do with that? That's… everything is here. You think of short poems as maybe taking one topic at a time. This is a whole platform. 

LAYNIE BROWNE:

Right. I mean, I feel like it's deliberately radical and so much as a wake-up call. So, address all of it. Address any of it. See how all the pieces are interlocking. I feel like she's asking for us to rethink our thinking. In other words, instead of thinking about one problem that's affecting me and my neighborhood, we have to think about broader and not just a city or a state or a country, we have to think globally. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER: 

Yeah, it's a systemic sort of cybernetic feedback loop. Everything it touches on everything else. So you can't really address one thing at a time. It's a house of cards.

LAYNIE BROWNE:

Mm-hm.

AL FILREIS:

Let's turn to number 19. This is the one for The Poor People's Campaign, and it's structured differently from the others. It's structured in an if/then thing. There's a lot of ifs. So liberal, hopeful, progressive, hope-iness. If you want this and if you want that, and nothing wrong with jobs at the beginning, if you want housing, nothing wrong with that. But then she lures you into realizing what the consequences of all those wants are. Then we start over if you want, if what you want and then, all caps then. That's different from the others. Does anybody wanna deal with that? 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER: 

I mean, I think to speak to Lee Ann's point, I think earlier that, you know, the context she's writing in, she's writing to people who are maybe the downtown scene, the hippy movement on the West Coast, you know, people who are already kind of loosely identifying with the left. But she's pushing them further left, right? I think she's trying to call them out on their comfort, call them out on their like easy, maybe liberalism is what we would call it today, pushing people even further, right? Like, you want free school. I wanna abolish state-sanctioned ideological education, right? Stuff like that. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

And she's saying, she's making a call for you're selling yourself short, there's more. Ask for everything. That's the great part of the poem is that, you know, let's ask for more than these things, this housing and refrigerators, like "Sadie, Sadie, married lady, meet a mortgagee," you know, like you don't want that. 

AL FILREIS:

Yeah.

KRISTEN GALLAGHER: 

Yeah. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

Collectivity.

KRISTEN GALLAGHER: 

There's something about, like, liberalism that's like, let's take the world and not change it, but somehow make it better, right? And you can't do that, right? I think she's trying to say like, you want a better world, we're gonna have to actually get rid of all of these things. We're gonna have to imagine something radically different, right? All of these things can't come with us. 

AL FILREIS:

I promise that this next question that I'm dying to ask you leads back to poetry as a form. So the channelling of what she learned from grandfather Domenico Mallozzi, and through Mallozzi, who was a good friend of Carlo Tresca. So this is like Italian anarchism, like a classic lineage, that some new left people were interested in in the '60s. That's what's left of liberalism. In this poem, anarchism. This is exactly what you've been talking about. I'm just putting an ism to it. Anarchism was not simply to the left of liberalism, radicalizing in this classic '60s sense, but anarchism was, it's the whole grid that's the problem, right? It's GE on reservations. So in the '30s, the New Deal would buy the idea of engaging the private sector on a reservation so that we can get electricity to poor people who need it so they can have telephones and so forth. But the anarchist is that's a bad thing because it's connected to the corporate grid. And so that's what she's really doing. So she's sending these out. There was the Liberation News Service would carry these letters, distribute it to 200 independent radical newspapers around the country in the '60s, and there would always be a revolutionary letter in it. And so she was sneaking, I think, sneaking anarchism, old fashioned early 20th century anarchism into a lot of hippie and yippie stuff that was so much more collective and unconsciously buying into the grid. So can poetry be anarchic or anarchist? And is this it? And how does that make you feel as poets, the three of you? How does this get under your skin? This is just to take Laynie as an example, not-- a Laynie Browne poem isn't gonna look like this, but clearly, you have tremendous respect for it and it's important to you. Maybe we'll start with you.

LAYNIE BROWNE:
Well, I kind of want to go back to that end of the Letter 19 that we were just looking at, 'cause I feel like in a way, it's the most radical, the most challenging. I feel like it's a double punch because she is saying—

AL FILREIS:

Can you read those lines?

LAYNIE BROWNE:

Yeah, she's saying "then you are still the enemy". In other words, if you want all of these things and it's all caps, "THEN YOU ARE STILL THE ENEMY, you are selling / yourself short, remember / you can have what you ask for, ask for / everything". So saying you're the enemy is saying, OK, we're all complicit. Every single person who's hearing this, that it's in the air, you're part of the problem. But then it's turning radically around and saying… it's becoming spiritual, in my opinion. So it's ask for everything. 'Cause there's that mystical spiritual element coupled with this devotion to activism, which is powerful if we can hold it all in the same place. But the big question is what does she mean? In other words, what does the everything include? And from a utopian point of view, it might be different from each person, from an anarchist point of view. So then that creates this logistical question. It's like a koan or something. I can't... 

AL FILREIS:

Logistical and aesthetic and poetic. 

LAYNIE BROWNE:

Right. Which is, I find really interesting. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Yeah. I was gonna say, I see that as the most utopian moment in the poem, for sure, right, 'cause the rest of it is actually what we don't want. It's a lot of negation. But at the end, we are invited to ask for a whole new world, right? But yeah, it doesn't really offer like the full utopian vision. So we have to talk about what that would be and it would be different for different people. But it seems interesting like from what Al's saying about it being anarchism, that is really kind of about more like getting rid of all these like super structural things that we have and just living off the land in small communities, very DIY. It's not like, acid communism, like luxury communism à la Mark Fisher or something like that. It's a different kind of utopia. It's like a tribal, live on the land utopia, I think, is what it's… in the wake of all this negation, I feel like that utopia is something a little more back to the land. That's what I see going on. 

AL FILREIS:

And there's a break. I'm totally with you, and there's a break out of the rhetoric, the negative rhetoric of list, of particularities, which is the poetic register that we know and most of us like. The list turns out to be negative liberalism, and the thing that gets us toward the positive, then you are still the enemy is a-- did you say the word mystical? 

LAYNIE BROWNE: 

Mm-hm.

AL FILREIS:

Yeah. Is a mystical, whole loving, W-H-O-L-E, whole loving. It's always one big something, right? If we can get out of the mode of the details of the life that liberalism has led us to, even when we're criticising it, and poetically break into something, a much more visionary, large kind of rhetoric that is definitely not in fashion, wasn't then, isn't now, that's where this poem leads. And that's the poetic register that she's going toward, which is totally different. 

LAYNIE BROWNE:

I think that's right. And I think it's really challenging for the reader. I mean, if we take it seriously. It's really easy to just gloss over it and just say, oh, yeah, everything. But I mean, I think it's really an invocation and an instruction, like, what is everything? Imagine it, make it happen. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

And I think that's where the third one is important because it says, how long could we live these sort of more normalized lives without connection to our tribe and still maintain these dreams and this yearning for the utopia? Like it's integral to our daily life. We can't just have a little house in suburbia and do these things and have straight lives and still, and have everything. It's really pointing that out. 

AL FILREIS:

It is better to lose and win. Losing means letting, in the Kristen Gallagher sense, this is what you were talking about before, it's much better to get rid of stuff, including poetically. And that, of course, it turns out to be another anarchist from the early 20th century, Gertrude Stein.

(LAUGHTER)

LEE ANN BROWN:

The other thing I just keep thinking about is when I met her, that—

AL FILREIS:

You met Gertrude Stein? Fabulous. 

(LAUGHTER) 

LEE ANN BROWN:

No, no. Diane di Prima. One thing that I remember that I went to the New College of California to study with her and some other people, and she was nowhere to be found. She sort of dropped out that semester. She had this one class that was like ,that she was continuing. And I went in search of her and I couldn't, I never even found her that whole semester because she'd really dropped out. She was like, out of sight because... But she said and when I finally talked to her, she said she was astrally projecting and visiting her children. 

AL FILREIS:

She used the word astral?

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Nice. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

Yeah. She was visiting her children, her mother was dying or had died. So she was having a lot of space with her mother, thinking about her mother. And then she was keeping track of all her children who lived in different places by astrally projecting and visiting them. And I was just so impressed with that, you know, that she could do that. (LAUGHS) It's like a whole different reality of a way to be. 

AL FILREIS:

So you went to be a student or mentee. She was absent, but you did connect in the sense of her being absent, like she explained to you, why she was absent.

LEE ANN BROWN:

I finally found her. I got her to do a tarot reading and things like that. You know, it's a whole, lots of stories. But yeah, this whole thing of like drop out. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Yeah, right. That's the lesson, right? 

LEE ANN BROWN:

You don't have to be. Even if you're a professor at this school, you don't even have to be there. I was like, wow. (LAUGHS)

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

That's the utopian vision, right? Work without showing up to work. (LAUGHS)

AL FILREIS:

I noticed the-- one of the, when we compiled a list of issues and this is not-- yes, it's full of issues, but generally it's pivoting away from issues because issues you can win on the psychiatric domination of the psychiatric cadre of the state and lose on electrification. You know, just it's like whack a mole of political problems, and don't we feel that that's our political job these days is to whack away. Gosh, I forgot what I was gonna say. 

(LAUGHTER) 

Oh, that when we compiled the list, we forgot the university. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Right. 

AL FILREIS:

And this is--

LEE ANN BROWN:

Ironic that we're discussing it--

(CROSSTALK)

AL FILREIS:

The Arts Cafe. It kinda counts.

LAYNIE BROWNE:
You did mention education. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Yeah, education. 

AL FILREIS:

But when you talked about meeting her, like she dropped out of the program that you signed up for. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

It was a radical college--

AL FILREIS:

Which was already a radical college. 

(CROSSTALK)

LEE ANN BROWN:

Doesn't exist anymore. 

AL FILREIS:

And she wouldn't even do the radical college. She was outside the-- Yeah, so that's like the challenge, Laynie Browne, is like not even anything that's set up to pass along learning, she's not interested in. And this is Revolutionary Letters, 50th anniversary. It's kind of canonized in a bright red communistic (CHUCKLES), City Lights. But even so, you know, how do you prevent Revolutionary Letters from being canonized by us who long from our liberal left position, if I may generalize, towards something more fundamentally refusing?

LAYNIE BROWNE:

Considering education in all different kinds of environments is one thing that this text raises. And so I feel like it's very useful as an example to young anarchists, revolutionaries, or of any age, but particularly thinking of young people in education, to do it yourself. In other words, there is no one coming to save you. Each of us, each of us has to get out and do something. And so her ability to do this is inspiring by example. 

AL FILREIS:

Nice. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Yeah. I mean, I think that part of what this conversation, and coming out of these poems, what I think she's directing us towards is the kind of dropping out, right, which is, you know, something that I think the hippie movement obviously was big on, right? Tune in--

LEE ANN BROWN:
Tune in, turn on, drop out. Don't forget the other parts. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Thanks, I was not sure I could remember all the parts. Yeah. Dropping out. 

AL FILREIS:

There are only three of them.

(LAUGHTER) 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Yeah, right. I know. So dropping out, right. How important that is and I think that like to get outside truly of these systems, one does kind of have to drop out. I don't think you can do it from inside the system, like I just don't think you can like really a real radical dropping out. Like you can't post about it on Facebook. That's not it. 

AL FILREIS:

And you can't. We should spell that out. You can't because the platform itself is the thing that you need to oppose. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Yeah.

AL FILREIS:

So that is the classic dilemma of social reform. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Yeah. And the problem too, I think part of why the hippie movement didn't entirely work is 'cause dropping out even isn't enough, right? Like, because there's still the issue of like how you live and like, what do you build and like, what do you do with the fact that technology exists and isn't inherently bad, right? It's just being used for bad. So there's larger questions, which is what, like, I'm gonna say it again, Mark Fisher's acid communism is about, right? It's about like, how can we get like hard-line Marxist and hippie dropouts to, like, coagulate into something else, right, which hasn't happened yet. That's like a utopian vision that hasn't been achieved yet. 

AL FILREIS:

Yes. This was, in some, what the people of 1968 in several places, Paris in particular, but not only, had to deal with. There were at least two huge factions. And there was simply, there was, for lack of a better word, there was counter culturalism, and then there was revolutionary politics. And the two didn't mix very well. And everybody found out in '68 and again, '70 and '71. And speaking of that and wanting to get us back to the analogy between her conception of revolution and her conception of a poem, what a poem can do, she believed that revolution, and she said this, that revolution, like poetry, was a living entity. So I'm gonna say that again and get comments from all of you on this. Revolution is not something that happens. It is a thing that, at least anarchists believe, this is a thing that is always going to be in there. And poetry is the same way. That it is not a poem. It is like this project, as Laynie pointed out, yes, it was published, but for the rest of her career, she would write a revolutionary letter here and there. So revolution, like poetry, is a living entity. And my question to you is, can you talk about that analogy, huge analogy, and also whether it is instantiated in these poems that we've selected in any way? 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

I mean, I think it's something that doesn't end, right. It's not an end goal. You're not like there's a revolution and then everything's better, right? It requires like a constant grassroots, bottom-up democratization of processes, right? I'm thinking of like Allende's project in Chile is like to have, you know, there's still like systems that exist. There's still kind of a government, but there's everything is coming from like the people in small cadres and groups. And it's a constant process that constantly remakes itself. I don't know if these poems are like doing that. These poems seem like they're more interested in just trying to get all the crap out of the way of that, which is a necessary step. You can't like just leap into Allende. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

To continue to think about her rejection of closure in this form, about how is something comes up and she writes one like, you can just feel that bubbling up. And the other anecdotal thing I wanted to say was when I, you know, it's still the same question I always struggle with was like, how do I finish my book? And I was like, doing my first book. And I said, what if I write more poems like this one, these ones? And she said, oh, well, Robert Duncan did 'Structure of Rime' in the, you know, 16 and then 'Structure of Rime' 34 and he put them in all his books across his work. And that was very liberatory to me and it helped me have closure on my book and say, 'cause I knew that I had a chance to put more later. 

AL FILREIS:

You could do more later, right, exactly. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

Yeah, but it's interesting that she used Robert Duncan is the example and not say, well, in my Revolutionary Letters, I write more and more and more. Like, she's definitely a part of this. And I remember her talking about, you know, Wordsworth and things like she's very much a part of this wild poetic lineage. She's very invested in that utopian kind of boiling up of energy that's constantly transforming and 'Loba' being a long poem that transformed over time and grew, you know? 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Yeah, I like that too, 'cause I think you're pointing to like, just process, right? It's like there's no finishing, there's no perfection. Like the book isn't like absolutely pristinely finished. There's just this ongoing process. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

It doesn't mean that each line is not pristinely amazing. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Right, right, right.

LEE ANN BROWN:

Like jewels falling.

AL FILREIS:
This kind of poetry, Laynie Browne, thank you again for curating this session because it's the kind of poetry that Poem Talk is typically not very good at, in the sense that Poem Talk, 180 episodes of it, you know, often is about close reading by the line. It's not always, it's not really in a box, but a poem that works well in Poem Talk is going to be one that requires or calls out for some close reading. We could do that, but that would be somewhat to miss the point. And it seems to me that the close reading would be missing the forest for the trees, which is just what that list of things you shouldn't be doing poem does. Or to put it another way, it misses the fact that poetically, it is better to lose and win because the winning is that larger project level thing that Lee Ann was just talking about, the advice that she got, and thus it produces a poetry that is rougher at the level of the poem than at the level of the project. So I guess I'm saying thank you for drawing our attention to this. And I would invite you to say a little more about why you felt it was urgent or the right moment to get to get di Prima into the "canon," I'm putting the quotes around that, of Poem Talk episodes. 

LAYNIE BROWNE:

Well, I wanted to respond to your question about aliveness and poetry and revolution, because poetry, I think of poetry as a live transmission. It's not fixed. So it may be published on the page, but it lives in the interactions between people in a room, when it's spoken, when it's performed. And I feel like these poems are a great example of that because they're really written to be read in public and it might be different each iteration, right? So. 

AL FILREIS:
I have two more thought topics that I want us to get to and then we'll just do final thoughts. So we'll get a chance to bring up some issues that haven't come up. I'm gonna ask Zach to play for us Revolutionary Letter 16, the first of the three. I'm gonna ask us to listen. This is a 1969 recording which comes before the book was published. So anybody who knew Revolutionary Letters at that point would only know it from broadsides and radical newspapers and hearing it on the steps of San Francisco City Hall. So she's reading this poem, it sounds like, at a reading. But I would like to ask you, in a poetry reading sense, what is this voice like?

DIANE DI PRIMA:
Revolutionary letter number 16. "we are eating up the planet, the New York Times / takes a forest, every Sunday, Los Angeles / draws its water from the Sacramento Valley / the rivers of British Columbia are ours / on lease for 99 years // every large factory is an infringement / of our god-given right to light and air / to clean and flowing rivers stocked with fish / to the very possibility of life / for our children's children, we will have to / look carefully, i.e., do we really want / need / electricity and at what cost in natural resource / human resource / do we need cars, when petroleum / pumped from the earth poisons the land around / for 100 years, pumped from the car / poisons the hard-pressed cities, or try this / statistic, the USA / has 5% of the world's people uses over / 50% of the world's goods, our garbage / holds matter for survival for uncounted / 'underdeveloped' nations"

AL FILREIS:
What is that voice? 

LEE ANN BROWN:

That reminds me of Allen Ginsberg. 

AL FILREIS:
It does, in the upturn at the end of the line. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

Yeah.

AL FILREIS:
So it helps with the list-iness of it. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Feels incantatory. 

AL FILREIS:
Incantatory. 

LAYNIE BROWNE:

It feels determined, but also fluid and kind of not, it feels gentle, even though it's strong. 

AL FILREIS:
Yes, that's my feeling. Gentle. I mean, there's something either faux innocent or just truly innocent about this. Why can't we get this shit right? 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

It sounds really young. 

AL FILREIS:
Young. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Young. 

AL FILREIS:
It reminds me, it's a very different poet. It reminds me of the very early recordings of Lyn Hejinian reading 'My Life'. There's something San Franciscan about it, if I can put it that way. Definitely beat influenced. Later, the voice gets rougher. I don't know if she was a smoker, but we get a lower voice. I guess aging will do that. Any other thoughts about this? And so, tone. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

It has this mixture of the formal, like the how, kind of listing and just bringing it all on. And then it's got this, try this statistic. It gets very factual, but it's like she's speaking directly to the audience. I mean, she's like, try this on for size. Like if this wasn't enough, what about this? 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

That's a really good point, that try this moment is very like vernacular, like you're chatting with somebody or talking to someone. Check this out. 

AL FILREIS:
I think it's inviting, too, even though it's pretty adamant. You know, you wanna like this voice. I'd like to get to know that voice. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Yeah. Yeah, like the next poem is a little more aggressive, right, 19 where, you know, you are the enemy.

AL FILREIS:
And it sounds it too in the performance. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Yeah, right. And the performance is aggressive. This was definitely not aggressive. This is like a pensive, almost like you could be thinking to yourself, like lamenting. 

AL FILREIS:
Sad. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Yeah, sad, yeah. 

AL FILREIS:
Sad and hopeful. Alright. My last question is about going back to the psychiatrist. So I'm very interested in, of course, very-- we're all interested in conservative anti-psychiatry. There's plenty of that in the '50s and '60s and today. But this is left anti-psychiatry, which is actually more complicated and may be more powerful. So I'll read the passage and I'd like to invite each of you just to comment what you think is going on. So left anti-psychiatry in, certainly in the early '60s, was a real, it almost burgeoned into the leftist movements of the '60s because it became, it was a way of critiquing the '50s and its automatonization of people taking tranquilizers and stuff. And here it's much more connected to a conspiracy. And then we can get to the, possibly the anti-vaccination thing. So I'll read the lines about psychiatry. "If you want / free psychiatric help". So, so far, those of us at universities, particularly who have kids, yes. Right? Yes, 'cause it is really expensive. OK. "If you want / free psychiatric help for everyone / so that the shrinks / pimps for this decadence, can make / it flower for us". OK, so that's the passage. Can we comment on that?

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

I think the critique is really about like establishment medicine, I think. I think it's about like top-down, like statist kind of oriented things, right? Like a doctor as a mediator to your relationship to yourself, right? Whereas you could also have—

AL FILREIS:
Making a pretty serious charge there. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Yeah, but there's also a way that one can have psychoanalysis that is more democratized and more kind of shared, and where, you know, patients have more autonomy over their own experiences. There's all kinds of interventions that have been made into psychoanalysis and the study of psychology in this way, right? So I think it's like what you said, the left critique versus the right critique of psychiatry. It's important to see the difference between them. To me, it's about like a kind of top, a critique of a top-down oriented medicalization psychiatry. 

AL FILREIS:
Right. Forcing people who have a tendency for social reasons as well as familial and genetic reasons to stand outside central values, centrist values, instead of medicalizing them and giving them meds so they can come back, scamper into the center. They are allowed to stand apart. And we can call that mental ill health, or we can call that difference. That's what left anti-psychiatry is. And so she's really, I mean, pimping for the decadence, that's a very mighty charge. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

So the "it" is the decadence? "It flower for us," "can make it flower for us," the decadence? 

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. That's so weird, isn't it? 

LEE ANN BROWN:

But to me, it's like this entitlement. She's saying, like she said, oh, it's OK. You can want all these things. You can have these material things that the psychiatrist or psychologist are saying. 

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

You can have it all in a different kind of way. 

AL FILREIS:
Totally. I mean, my father has passed, so I would never invoke him when he's around. But he wouldn't mind, I mean, you know. So he was so sad. I mean, a wonderful, happy person. GI Bill, fought in World War II. He was never tranquilized, but he went to the suburbs. Not a mowing your lawn ever kind of person. And the loss that was involved in the capitulation to be satisfied with a small piece of suburbia. It didn't take, it wasn't a person experiencing mental ill health or who had flashbacks to dropping bombs on people from the air and had trouble with that, and then were made to adjust to suburbia of the '50s which made for the affluence which the '60s rejected, starting with this. That's the whole community being shown to have been duped. "Pimps for this decadence" is not too strong a charge. So OK, you ready to go to the vaccination thing? So, Kristen, give us a little of the background, or maybe close read the line.

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:
"If what you want / is clinics where the AMA / can feed you pills to keep you weak, or sterile / shoot germs into your kids, while Mercke & Co / grows richer". 

AL FILREIS:
Yeah. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Yeah. So yeah, I think people have, when revisiting this in the context of a pandemic where we have people refusing vaccinations, some people have said, like, is di Prima anti-vax? Is she an anti-vaxxer? And again, I would just say, like as someone who is fully vaccinated and boosted, please put that in the final edit. You know, I imagine that this is a critique again, of like a sort of state sanctioned, centralized, top-down medical establishment that is like completely bound up with the forces of capitalism, so that when you're mowing your lawn and getting your suburban house, all the stuff you're buying into is like interwoven with trusting doctors and trusting that the medicine you're being given is as pure as they say it is, that the FDA really works the way it says it does. The trust, right? I think she's really trying to break people's trust in those things. Unfortunately, we have a right-wing movement right now that's like doing its own version of not trusting in those things. And I think it's easy to get confused between the versions of that. Does that make sense? 

LAYNIE BROWNE:

I see it as like a thoughtless approach to any of the things, like, not to say that medicine is bad or school is bad, but I mean, like you said, it's so well, Kristen. But what's bad is to just blindly not investigate anything and accept it without thinking. But I also think that thinking will make me want to be vaccinated. That's why I'm vaccinated. I thought about it, right? So I feel like there's a danger of not thinking independently, and I feel like it's a really clear critique of pharmaceutical company greed, unsustainable prices of health care rising and so on. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Yeah. 

AL FILREIS:
Well, let us—

(LAUGHTER)

Wow. I didn't know we were gonna get there. Laynie, you really knew all this was going to come out. 

LAYNIE BROWNE:

Mm-hm. 

AL FILREIS:
Have we done final thoughts? I don't think we have.

(LAUGHTER)

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Maybe not. Those are the final thoughts. Dismal.

AL FILREIS:
OK. The best and longest Poem Talk in history. So I'm gonna ask for quick final thoughts, and then we're gonna do Gathering Paradise. So who's got a final thought? 

LAYNIE BROWNE:

I'm ready. I just wanted to read a few words from di Prima reading in 2008 talking about the origin of the Revolutionary Letters. And I found this transcribed in Cedar Sigo's terrific book in the Bagley Wright Lectures titled 'Guard The Mysteries'. What happened was somebody in New York hired a flatbed truck, Sam Abrams, a poet and a generator that would run an amplifier. And we went out, some folk singers, who were considered very radical guerrilla theater people who did street theatre, and poets. And we all went over to New York. This was those years of assassinations around '67, '68 or so, not the first wave, but the second wave of assassinations. And we would just perform places. And I realized the poems I had were too intellectual for that kind of performing. So I started to write some things that were something you could hear on one hearing on the street, something more like guerrilla theater, even though it was poetry. And that became the Revolutionary Letters. 

AL FILREIS:
Thank you for putting that into the record. Much appreciated. Lee Ann?

LEE ANN BROWN:

Yeah, I just would make a call for everybody to write their own revolutionary letters and try to be in the spirit of when things rise up, be passionate and write to everyone. 

AL FILREIS:
Thank you. Kristen?

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Yeah, I think this dovetails nicely with what Lee Ann just said. I feel like poetry, the poetry community that we all share and emerge from the particular lineage that we share needs to go back a little bit into more of a drop out mode, more of an extreme kind of connection to subculture. I think we've moved away from that since these poems were written. I think we need to get back to that. 

AL FILREIS:
My final thought is, usually I'm like a cheerleader, happy final thought, and usually an affirmation of our choices. I still am totally affirmative on our choice of talking about these Revolutionary Letters, and I'm glad that Poem Talk now includes them. There's a lot of misunderstanding from the 2020s back to… when was Occupy? 2011, I believe. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Mm-hm.

AL FILREIS:
So if you take 2021's reading of 2011, and then you have that Occupy, reread the '90s, the go-go '90s which came from a certain go-go '80s, it's so easy from these telescopic political perspectives to misread the '60s. It's very easy for us to see the politics of this and see it as cruel and wrong in its almost Zen-like demands. Revolutionary Letter 17, "even the poorest of us / will have to give up something / to live free". It's very easy to misread that as cruel and stupid. "Even the poorest of us / will have to give up something / to live free." That is meant in a Zen sort of way. There's, all of us participate in wanting too much or gathering too much around us, even those who are very limited in what they can do. I'm not defending that sentiment. I'm saying that that sentiment needs to be close read because it's driving toward a different kind of freedom that doesn't require wanting all of that, including maybe even electricity brought in by GE. This is very complicated stuff. Well, we like to end Poem Talk with a minute or two of Gathering Paradise, a chance for several of us to spread wide our narrow hands, our Dickinsonian hands, to gather a little something really poetically good to hail or commend someone or something going on in the poetry world or the art world or the music world or… and who wants to start? Kristen, you're looking away from me, so I'm gonna go with Lee Ann. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

One upcoming project that I'm collaborating with my partner, Tony Torn. We are producing Bernadette Mayer's poets play called 'Famous People' for the Boog Press Next Festival, and we're doing a video play by Bernadette Mayer of a poets play she wrote called 'Famous People,' with Charlotte Rampling and Stephen Hawkins and Jean-Luc Godard in it, and Agnès Varda.

AL FILREIS:
That's gathering paradise. That's like literal paradise. 

LEE ANN BROWN:

It is.

AL FILREIS:
Thank you so much. Laynie Browne, gather some paradise, please. 

LAYNIE BROWNE:

I love that. Well, not to be redundant, but I just wanna encourage everybody to check out this new edition of 'Revolutionary Letters' that came out in 2021 because there's 15 new revolutionary letters that had never been published before in this edition. And it also seems like a good idea to think about reading how she moved into more closer to the time that we're in now to kind of contextualize the project. 

AL FILREIS:
Fantastic. Thank you. Kristen Gallagher, gather some paradise. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

I always go blank at this. I have never once come here and had anything to say. 

AL FILREIS:
And why is that? Can we talk about that? 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

Yes. Help me. I don't know why that happens. 

AL FILREIS:
There's something…

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

I go blank. 

LAYNIE BROWNE:

'Cause you're under the radar. (LAUGHS)

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

I don't know what it is. What is it? Ask me about, like world communism. I can talk all night. 

AL FILREIS:
Yeah, maybe paradise is not your regular mode. 

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

(LAUGHS) I know. I'm too cynical. Yeah, the abolitionist movement. There you go. Join the abolitionist movement.

AL FILREIS:
Wow. OK.

KRISTEN GALLAGHER:

It's growing in popularity. More and more people are beginning to at least understand that the police are not priests. 

AL FILREIS:
And that's Gathering Paradise. Well, that's all the universities that are nothing but slum landlords we have time for on Poem Talk today. Poem Talk at the Writers House is a collaboration of the Center for Programs and Contemporary Writing and the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania and the Poetry Foundation, poetryfoundation.org. Thanks so much to my guests Kristen Gallagher, Lee Ann Brown and Laynie Browne, and to Poem Talk's director and engineer today, Zach Carduner and to Poem Talk's editor, the same amazing Zach Carduner. Thank you, Zach. And a shout out to Nathan and Elizabeth Leight for their very generous support of Poem Talk. This is Al Filreis and I hope you'll join us next month for another episode of Poem Talk