Di Prima and the Beats

The first time through Diane Di prima’s works was a bit jarring to say the least. While certain stylistic choices such as the non-capitalization was easy to spot as important but some of the subject matter eluded me. The process of going over each section that we did in class really helped to explain more of the motives behind her work.

Di Prima’s resistance to social and gender standards comes through her seemingly purposeful shirking of traditional grammatical structure. It also comes through her subject matter. In the first piece, Di Prima discusses the potato and red sauce mush that they called menstrual pudding. This vivid imagery connected with the female body is jarring to the audience as well as shocking, just as Di Prima wanted.

But I argue that her writing does reveal her insecurities and her resistance to normal societal ways but does not establish her as a wholly radical individual. The image that arose from her writings was of a girl resisting her parent’s preconceived notions, not the norms of the world. Di Prima depicts herself in a more traditional role. She is frequently described as being in the kitchen when anything major happens, like family holidays or the cleaning of their new place. On page 28 of Di Prima’s “What I Ate Where” the first line of the piece is “the rats had already been several weeks in my kitchen.” She makes a point to designate the kitchen as her own.

For me Di Prima is a symbol of the Beats more akin to Jack Kerouac than Allen Ginsberg. The desire to reject social customs is there but there are still traces of normalcy within their lives. Kerouac could not totally give himself over to being a hobo and Di Prima could not give herself wholly over to being a radical female figure.

Another way that I connected Di Prima with Kerouac was her persistence on the subject of having a child. But even when she gave birth, the child did not become the center of her life. That statement could be seen in a negative life but only if Di Prima was a neglectful mother. I have not researched her mothering ways to any extent but from her writings her parenting skills did not seem to suffer due to still trying to maintain a somewhat normal life. Just as Kerouac wished for a family while longing for the rode, Di Prima wants the love of her little family and a life that is her own as well.

Whether she was forced in some way, by society or the people around her, to stay in a somewhat more traditional role or the chose to maintain some sense of social norms of the time, I do not know. Maybe my view of her as a Beat figure is skewed by the dominantly male Beat voice we have read so far in class.

The presence of the Beat culture for me was more apparent in Di Prima’s “Conversations.” With her confusing dialogue, reminiscent of Burroughs, and the seemingly fluid nature to the peace, reminding me of Kerouac’s non-structured structure, Di Prima shows her Beat side and the more masculine side to her writing.