The Anti-establishment Of Diane Di Prima's Poems

Diane di Prima is one of the most important and representative writers of the Beat Generation.In life as well as in her works,she poses a rebellious,revolutionary and subversive stance.The poet questions materialism,negates consumerism,and revolts against homogenization;she interrogates gender bias,corrects cultural norms,and takes active leading roles in sexual revolution;she discards binary mindsets,denounces rational thinking and mechanical consciousness,and seeks spiritual emancipation.This anti-establishment is also deeply rooted in her poetic practices.The poet deploys a poetics of spontaneity,improvisation and open form to defy against the “over-crafted” literary traditions,break though rigid and strict poetic rules,and attack rationalism and elitism.Di Prima's poetics emphasizes stimulating body sensations,direct and intuitive treatment of things,spontaneously expressing true feelings;treats poetry as an open process;believes in the interactive and interconnected relationship among sentient and non-sentient beings.It is technically characterized by enjambment,fast-paced and unrhymed verses,resistance to standardized capitalization and punctuation,first-person narration and use of hipster slang.Through these innovative poetic practices,di Prima skillfully exposes the non-conformist Beat spirituality,anti-patriarchal female subjectivity,and non-dual Zen Buddhism in her poems.Di Prima witnessed,participated and bridged the happenings of the Beat movement in the East and West Coast.The poet makes a profound examination and exposition of the non-conformist Beat philosophy in her spontaneous poetic practices as she depicts the Beats as discontent beat-down outcasts,revolutionary beatific-utopia pursuers,and vigorous mutual-help comrades.The poet honestly and truthfully records the Beats' interrogation of the postwar prosperity and rigidity through physical experimentation with sex,drug,and violence.She further expounds and depicts the beatific utopia behind the destructive behaviors of the marginalized outsiders.However,the Beats' romantic ideal remains in development and never actualized.What the Beats really gained is the comradeship and friendship between each other.They formed mutual help communities in New York and San Francisco to shield from and defy against the social and literary conventions.Though the Beats revolt against mainstream values,many male Beats' attitudes towards women prove to be biased and prejudiced.Many of the male Beat writers neglect and negate female in their daily lives,and depict women as either “pure angels” or “evil monsters”.Di Prima subverts her counterparts' sexist presentation and reconstructs female subjectivity.She revises conventional female images in traditional stories,creates unique female mythologies,and integrates them with her personal experiences.She traces women's self-discovery process from cool erotica girlies to violent wolf goddess,and finally to dynamic mother artists in her poems.Women first try to gain autonomy by leaving their fathers' houses,going on the road with their boyfriends,and indulging themselves in sexual relationships.However,they remain as silent girlies,chicks,breadwinners and wife-slaves to their male counterparts while observing the “Beat code of cool”.To revolt and subvert the hierarchy and patriarchy,the poet evokes and revises ancient goddesses' mythologies to liberate the feminine power and confidence in women.With the awareness of their potentialities and possibilities,women bravely become masters of their own mind and body,audaciously pursue a career as artists,and courageously choose to be single mothers.As the requirements of a woman's life are the form of her art,di Prima's poems are usually improvised to meet different demands.They are often sketches,modules,and pieces of her domestic life which are distinct from male Beats' anti-domestic position.In the process of discovering a “new vision” and “sublime reality”,the Beats gradually recognize that their crazy behaviors of reckless sex,drugs,and violence serve only as a temporary marriage between their discontent selves and utopia of freedom.To gain real freedom of mind and individuality,they need to break through the prison of western binary thoughts.Fortunately,they find a new way of thinking in eastern Buddhism.Deeply inspired by Zen ideas of “enlightenment,emptiness,interdependence,and compassion”,di Prima experiences a state of wakefulness and enlightenment through activating her sensory organs and opening doors of perceptions.Through clear and intuitive seeing,hearing and touching the world,the poet understands the true nature of everything is impermanent and empty,discards binary thinking,becomes inclusive to different ideas and influences,and creates a syncretic world with full possibilities.In this all-encompassing world,the poet expresses her concern over the harmony between human and nature,the balance between development and ecology,and the interdependence between sentient and non-sentient beings.Understanding the inter-relatedness among everything,di Prima feels empathy with others' sufferings and pains,and advocates to be kind,friendly and compassionate to all livings.Zen's directness,non-dual mindset and integration with nature cooperates well with di Prima's open form poetics which emphasizes body physicality,energy transfer and exchange among the poet,the poem and the reader in the composition field,and the interaction between human and nature.Even though there has been a certain amount of academic research on di Prima and her works,much attention is paid on one single work,namely,Loba.There is an apparent lack of study on the connections and changes in her poems.This dissertation selects representative poems from the early,middle and later periods of her literary creations,regarding her writings as an open,connected and organic whole,hoping to discover the developments of her thoughts and to understand the changes of the Beat Generation from a woman's eyes.Analyzing both the contents and form of di Prima's poems from perspectives of Beat Generation as a counter-culture movement,feminism,Zen Buddhism,and poetics of spontaneity,improvisation and open form,this research offers a grand and comprehensive landscape of di Prima's heroic life and poetics.This study finds that di Prima candidly records the rebellious acts of the Beats and fully exposes their non-conformist spirituality.However,di Prima is not in line with the male Beats' misogynist stance.She places women at the center in her creation,interrogates patriarchal values,and reconstructs female subjectivity.With the elapse of time,di Prima and other Beats gradually realize that their early radical actions can not really lead them to the true and eternal peace of mind.Fortunately,they attain a new consciousness and freedom of mind after gaining a new way and different perspective of seeing the world in Buddhism.With the illumination of Zen non-duality,di Prima moves away from her youthful radical ideals and reaches a clear and free state of home-coming.It comes to the conclusion that di Prima's identities as a Beat,a female,a lay Buddhist,and a poet converge not only at the anti-establishment stance but also meet at the point of valuing the connections and interdependence among all beings.Living in an ever-deepening,interconnected,and co-related global age,a network of fellowship and comradeship and a new consciousness of mutual relativity and connectivity is urgently needed to help human out of the trap of distrust and violence.Di Prima's poems evoke readers to understand the common fate for mankind,realize the dependent co-origination and causation among everything,be compassionate and friendly to all beings,and build a human community with a shared future.