Episode 170 - Better to lose and win (Diane di Prima's 'Revolutionary Letters')

PoemTalk at the Writers House

In this episode, the group discusses three poems from Diane di Prima's 'Revolutionary Letters' project: #16 (“We are eating up the planet”), #19 (“If what you want is jobs”), and #27 (“How much can we afford to lose before we win”). The project’s goals and modes of address shifted over time. Any single letter-poem, read separately from the others, might seem definitive — tonally evincing ideological as well as poetic choices having been made with apparent finality. Our decision to read and listen to three poems, forming a small sampler of the Letters, helped us understand and, through this hour-long chat, to convey the project’s quality as overall a series of variations; each thus is an instance of ways of thinking about poems’ social efficacy.