(Diane Di Prima and LeRoi Jones)

Though I got the feeling not all of my classmates liked her, Diane Di Prima’s style really clicked with me. It’s a stream of conscious that I find easy to follow along with. I especially was initially interested in learning about her and the other women Beat writers because I’ve never heard of them and I don’t think a majority of people have, which is a shame.

Even outside of her work Di Prima was an interesting person. She printed a lot of the Beat’s stuff right out of her own house, decided to have a baby while not being married and didn’t care to be, and was firm about her own parenting style, where she would not lose her identity in being a mother and continue to be a poet. The latter especially must have been difficult to do considering the time period. Di Prima wrote about struggling between societal expectations and being true to herself because of this. She had to be a good hostess and do all the cooking and cleaning up, because she did care on some level about what people thought of her. I think most people feel that way, but many don’t want to admit it.

“What I Ate Where” was my favorite piece. The way it was framed intrigued me, showing different points of her life through food. All the little vignettes showed where she was in her life at that particular time-whether it be surrounded by friends and prosperous, or in poverty and reduced to eating “menstrual pudding.” The food corresponds with the mood Di Prima sets.

“Menstrual pudding” in particular made me laugh. Other people were shocked by it, but I thought it was Di Prima trying to be humorous about her situation. The food she can afford to eat is bland at best, disgusting at worst. Why not have fun and name it something that might give others pause? While I love potatoes and tomato sauce, I’m not sure how much I’d like them together and would hate to have to eat them every day.

Di Prima, to me, is the Beat writer that really showcases the full range of emotions that life has to offer. With Kerouac everything is one extreme or the other-either the most spectacular event ever or the most tragic event in history. Even Burroughs stuck to mainly one mood where everything was gloomy and a variation of a negative emotion (even his happier segments have elements of darkness in them).

However Di Prima writes her memories as they happened and is sensible about her experiences. Sometimes she has bad days where she doesn’t have any money or an Old Family Friend harshly judges her decisions about what she does with her life. At other points she’s happy where she can afford to eat decent food, is surrounded by friends, or just chilling out eating Oreos with her neighbors (though she complains that they make you fat). There’s a spectrum of emotions.