REVOLUTIONARY LETTERS by Diane di PrimaMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A slim book of poetry should take a relatively short period of time to read, right?
Well, not always. Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters is a wonderfully slim volume of poems that, like a pan of rich fudge or fine music, should be savored, one at a time.
It took me months to finish this book. Why so long, especially when I had it next to my seat at the dining room table (where I do much of my reading)? I'd pick it up when I only had several minutes to read, but wanted something relatively intense; these poems/letters were that. They are short, with only a few more than one or two pages long, but definitely full of nuances, intensity, and much to think about. The fact that most of the poems' sentence structure was a little disjointed made it so that a poem might have to be read two or three times for the reader to really begin to fully understand the poem. This might be a problem with a less gifted writer; in di Prima's hands, this is very do-able.
Diane di Prima spent the latter part of the 1950s and early '60s in Manhattan where she was involved in the Beat movement; from 1974 to 1997, she taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, along side Allen Ginsburg, William S. Burroughs, and others.
Revolutionary Letters is a book to be read, savored, and reread again.
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