The poet laureate of San Francisco began first in New York, but for many years I believed she began as daughter of the land and the West. Her prose has the affect of women I have grown up with: women who shill pennies into irrigation ditches, women who braid the ends of canyon ragweed for a lanyard, women who sit on the hood of someone else’s car wiping salt from their eyes, drinking a coke, women who mediate impermanence through a sweet absurdity, making everything a sign of light.
In her 300-page epic Loba, di Prima writes, “She strides in blue jeans to the corner bar, she dances/w/ the old women, the men/light up, they order wine,/sawdust is flying under her feet/her sneakers, thudding soft/her wispy hair falls sometimes/into her face/were it not for the ring of fur/around her ankles/just over her bobby socks. there’s no-one/wd ever guess her name..,” alluding to a wolf goddess who has jaywalked her way to a land carved out of garnet. She must learn the term jaywalk and what it connotes, how one dodges a specific type of traffic for decades or more, climbing stairwells and rafters in pursuit of community or belonging. In her diaries she remarks none of her interest in lore, alchemy, the metaphysical could have manifested out West without careful instruction and nurturing out East, namely through the influence of her friends, lovers, day jobs, projects that materialized by sheer luck amid self-effacing youth and material instability. I imagine her at Larry Wallrich’s Phoenix Bookshop in the Village, chanteuse of the till, counting bills and foghorns, underlining the sonority of words under Ursa Major’s frozen stars. If di Prima’s early work is proof of prayer as close study and reverie, her later work is proof of grist grown to manifesto. “I would sit indeed in the bay window I had requested of the gods, turning out pages of reminiscences,” she writes as a single mother of two, newly acquainted with California. “The war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed in it…w/out imagination there is no memory / w/o imagination there is no sensation / w/o imagination there is no will/desire/ history is a living weapon in yr hand/ the ground of imagination is fearlessness.” This is who I come to know first, this version of di Prima. I find Revolutionary Letters while working at a bookshop also in the Village. Later I wait at the train platform and write the date on the inside flap. My friend walks up and says, “Oh! She’s from Colorado. You’ll love her.” Di Prima is west east north and south, as all seers are enshrined.
—Katie Calderon