San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets

Diane di Prima (1999)

© Sheppard Powell

July 21, 1999: Marina, Jim, and I meet up at the BART station close to Diane’s apartment in San Francisco. Her partner, Sheppard Powell, opens the door for us, and we walk up to the second floor into a book-filled living room. The usual awkwardness about where to plug in the tape recorder and set up the microphone. Diane asks if we want tea or coffee, and once everyone is settled, the interview commences.—DM

Diana di Prima (DD)

David Meltzer (DM)

Marina Lazzara (ML)

DM Your grandfather introduced you to Dante. Was that your earliest encounter with poetry?

DD Yeah, I was about four or so. He took out this old paperback … one of those European ones … and told me that this book had traveled around the world. I thought, oh, that’s why it looks so beat up. I pictured housewives in the Bronx reaching from one window to another like they would pass food and, instead, passing the same book all the way around the world.

DM Around the clotheslines.

DD Around the clotheslines, right. Dante on the clothesline! Yeah, that was the first poetry. We also listened to a lot of opera together. He was forbidden opera because it was bad for his heart. He had heart trouble and he’d get so worked up about the opera.

DM You say you’d made a lifetime commitment to poetry at the age of fourteen. What happened to lead up to that?

DD In order to stay sane, I found the public library, or my father actually showed me how to walk to the library. Girls weren’t allowed out much. I was allowed to go to the library. And I read my way…. I found that if you were caught in the adult section, they told you that you couldn’t be there. But if you got the books to the counter, they checked them out for you. Everything was a double message. So I was reading my way through philosophy. I had written answers to Plato in all the margins of the Jowett translation, when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen. I fell in love with Schopenhauer. I was sure Schopenhauer would have been happier if I would have been with him. Meanwhile, I was also reading novels. [laughter]

ML Was that your first crush?

DD One of my very first crushes, yes. I had a pretty big thing for Spinoza, too. Anyway, somewhere in that reading there was a Somerset Maugham novel—maybe it was The Razor’s Edge—where he quotes Keats: Beauty is truth, truth beauty. So I went looking with my little library skills for this person named Keats, and I found the poetry section. Whereupon I began to read nothing but poetry. I couldn’t understand why anybody would bother with philosophy because clearly any point you had to reach consistently couldn’t be completely right. Any logic couldn’t be completely right, and poetry could hold all the contradictions.

So then a lot of poetry … the people who were my people at that point were Romantics, Shelley and Keats mostly. And reading all of Keats’s letters, which I was doing when I was age thirteen or fourteen. And finally one day it hit me that this wasn’t just out there, it wasn’t just heroes, other people, it was me. I could do this. I could do this. I cried a lot when I realized that. I was very sad because with it came the understanding that I was going to have to give up a lot of things regular people have. I wasn’t going to be able to snuggle into regular human life. I don’t know how I knew all that, but I did. And that’s when I made my commitment to poetry. I was sitting in my backyard, and it hit me. Like that. If that’s the case, then I better start writing every day. So I bought a new notebook, and every day I wrote something. By then I was in high school.

DM In high school was there encouragement for this?

DD Yes. I was in Hunter High School, which in those days was for women only. And you got in by exam, so there were the brightest women from all kinds of backgrounds. And in my age group, in my class, there were about eight of us who wanted to write. By the time we were sophomores or thereabouts, we would get together in the morning and go to one of the home rooms a little early and read what we’d written the day before. A few of the teachers were very encouraging—very interesting women teachers dedicated to teaching women.

I graduated in ’51. One summer I went to summer school because people had these crazy notions back then that it’s better to do everything faster.… I skipped a grade in grammar school, which made life miserable in grammar school—all the kids hated me. At summer school, there was an off-the-wall teacher, a crazy man in a beret named Anton Serota who I let read one of my poems, and he had me read it out loud to the class, and he was very encouraging. And also very helpful about the way you write when you’re young, with so many abstractions. This part works because I can make pictures in my mind; this part doesn’t work. It was just one summer, but it was a really helpful and close friendship. Those things happen. Then I went to Swarthmore College and got the opposite of encouragement.

I wanted to major in Greek and Latin. I’d gotten a city prize for Latin translation. I was in the top two percentile in math and physics. There was a lot of propaganda that the U.S. needed scientists. So their little claws were out there: come and be a scientist. I majored in physics at Swarthmore. However, they weren’t equipped. They were teaching nineteenth-century physics; nobody was teaching relativity. So it was very boring and didn’t work, and I dropped out of school when I was a little more than eighteen.

DM What were your feelings as a young person growing up in the Second World War and then in the aftermath of the war with the unveiling of the atomic bomb and the Holocaust. How did that affect you—or did it?

DD While we were growing up, there was no war news in the house. Before the war started, half of my family went back to Italy. My father’s father’s brother and his half of the family went back, but my paternal grandfather stayed. We all went down to the boat, and half of them sailed off. We never traced that part of the family again. Rudi, my oldest son, recently tried. There was this feeling of enormous Greek tragedy going on. And it would be an understatement to say that my mother and father were very controlling. We never saw a paper, we never heard the news, we never read a comic, and we never went to the movies except for about four Disney films until I was in high school. As far as the war went, it was blocked out except for the nuns having us pray for all the children—on both sides—at school.

I write about a lot of this in Recollections of My Life as a Woman. I remember the day the war was over and everyone was waiting with their boxes of confetti to throw them out the window, and all that … there was a feeling of horror for me in that. My neighborhood was very primitive, and everybody had something like doll’s heads on sticks with slanted eyes painted on them. They were running up and down the street like that. In my neighborhood, they burned politicians in effigy from lampposts when they lost elections.

The bomb fell on my eleventh birthday. August 6. And that was a moment that I talk about in the book. My father came home. We were waiting for him for the birthday party, and he threw down the paper and said, Well, we lost. He said, Whatever we do now, we’ve lost. I remember that. Consciousness flooded in with the dropping of that bomb. Consciousness of the war. But then it was only two weeks more and the war was over. But I don’t remember the slow unveiling, as you put it, of the information about the concentration camps.

DM We used to go to newsreels a lot. Everyone in the neighborhood was also a newspaper junkie. We’d sit on the stoops talking politics.

DD Yeah, I remember the stoops.… But, no, the discourse didn’t happen around the kids. It’s nuts. I was eleven, and two years later I’m in high school and there’s a whole world of God-knows-what kind of conflicts going on that you had not heard a word about. I’m sure they talked about the war in Italian, but I was only interested in whatever intrigue might affect me and my brothers in terms of who was mad at who, and what was going to make another blow-up happen in the family. So the war was a metaphor for the other war.

DM So you leave Swarthmore at eighteen? How did this come down in terms of your relationship to your family?

DD It was very traumatic for them.

DM Did you go back home?

DD Yeah, I was home for the Christmas holidays when I decided that I wasn’t going to go back to school. I had a group of friends at Swarthmore, and everybody I was close to was dropping out. It was just too straight and precious and protected—class-conscious and definitely not my class, not my kind of place. Two of my friends, women who were lovers, asked me to join them in renting an apartment in New York. I said yes. It turned out that one of their mothers threatened them both with the police because between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one your parents could bust you for being homosexual … your parents could call the police. You had no rights then. One of them decided to do what her mother wanted and went on to some school in Connecticut, so it was left to me to get an apartment alone. Really no regrets. I mean there was nothing happening for me at Swarthmore.

DM What was it to be alone for the first time?

DD It was great. I wasn’t terribly alone, because of lovers and friends, but having your own say over your own place was heaven. I got a place on Fifth Street between Avenue Β and Avenue C. In those days women weren’t doing that. It was 1953. Forty-five dollars a month. A nice-size room and a little room, a kitchen, and bathroom. I was the only woman living alone in that block that I know of. People thought I was a whore.

DM When did you seek out a literary community?

DD Well, there was already the people from Hunter and a couple of friends from Swarthmore. I used to go hang out in the first coffee shop that opened that for us—the Rienzi. I used to hang out there some, and I hung out in Washington Square Park. I wasn’t so much looking for poets or writers as looking for artists of any sort. Writers talk too much. I liked creativity that was more intuitive, so I hung with painters. Took dance classes. Did that for a while. Actually, ever since my parents first let me out of the house. Not having been able to play actively as a kid made my first dance classes a matter of reclaiming the body. I became friends with dancers and painters and met people from the Arts Students League and Ballet Theater and the New Dance Group, and took classes all over the place. At the New School of Social Research. I took some classes at Brooklyn College at night and some at Hunter and some at Columbia.

DM What kind of classes were you taking?

DD I was still very interested in math. I loved math. Pure math. I took integral calculus in Brooklyn and theory of equations at Columbia. And took Greek at Hunter, classical Greek, and just whatever I wanted, rather than going for a degree. At the New School it was really more like theater because they typecast their professors. The Russian literature professor was a guy with a shock of gray hair and he suffered a lot in the classroom. The existentialist professor had a very thin profile and blond hair and a French accent, and he’d show us his profile. But it was fun. For me, it was learning about other literatures and all that. Everywhere I went I met people—and people talked to each other in those days. I have a daughter who moved to New York recently, and it seems like people don’t know how to meet each other anymore. Back then you would sit on a park bench, and someone would sit down next to you, and you started a conversation. And then you went somewhere and drank coffee and continued. It wasn’t necessarily about picking people up. It was more like: who are you and what’s going on?

DM How’d you make a living?

DD The first year I worked downtown on Wall Street doing an office job. I didn’t need to work that much, but I was helping one of my gay women friends with some of my money. The next thing was a parttime job at Columbia at the electronics lab. I got security clearance! That gave me access to free classes at Columbia. And then one day I was in Washington Square, and the painter Nicolai Cikovsky came up to me, one of the Eastern Europeans who migrated just before the war, and asked me if I would model for him. I said sure. His studio was right off the park there, and other painters came to visit. Those guys passed their models from hand to hand. That led to years and years of just modeling for painters for a living. (There’s one of Raphael Soyer’s paintings over there on the wall.) We were making $3.50 an hour in 1953.… That would be like $50 an hour now. All under the table, all in cash. We worked two-hour shifts. I wound up working twenty hours a month. The rest of my time was for writing and studying and filling in holes in my education. I went to movies at the Museum of Modern Art almost every day.

DM Did you ever go to the Thalia?

DD Went to the Thalia a ton. I used to bring my lunch and see the same movie over and over, and if I didn’t want to see the second feature, I’d go sit in the lobby and read during that one. DM You hadn’t been allowed to go to movies as a kid and started going to movies at eighteen. Do you remember what that opened up?

DD It’s hard to express it, but a whole sense of manipulation of light and time, like the heart of magic, the heart of art. The first film I saw—besides Walt Disney and one Shirley Temple film—the first film I consciously saw was Cocteau’s Blood of the Poet when I was fifteen in a little theater on Irving Place, when I was going to summer school. From then on, it was all the Cocteau movies…. The Museum of Modern Art would show series. They’d show everything that Von Stroheim ever directed, for instance. You got a total education without anybody blathering at you, lecturing. Everything by Carl Dreyer. All the movies Garbo was ever in. One thing after the other. You got a pass. It was $3 a year if you were an art student. And Raphael Soyer always signed that I was an art student. You could go to the museum every day for a year. I was busy trying to fill in the holes in my information as an artist.

DM Can you describe your writings at that time?

DD Some of the stuff that’s in Dinners and Nightmares was written around then. I was very interested in making it as sparse as possible—I was influenced by Hemingway, among others. Also by the Matisse line drawings that came out in a Dover paperback around that time. I noticed that there was not only dimensionality but color … a hint of color to the eye from those black-and-white line drawings. I wanted to know how much information you could give with how few words, just like the lines in a Matisse drawing. And so I would cut and cut and cut. The first book has some of that stuff—This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards—and the More or Less Love Poems that are in Dinners and Nightmares. I was reading a lot. When I left Swarthmore I charged a lot of books the day I was leaving. One was The Cantos.

DM To the library?

DD No, I charged them in the bookstore at Swarthmore and paid the bill off about thirty years later. I got Auden and cummings and those people you would expect. But I got The Cantos and Personae, too.

DM Was Pound informing at that point?

DD The most. I read and did what he tells you to do in ABC of Reading. I was doing a little Homeric Greek. I had some wonderful books of the troubadours with glossaries in the back and that kind of stuff. I didn’t really meet the poets or start meeting the literary community until ’56. So there’s three years that were more dancers and painters and Actors Studio people. My friend Bret Rohmer was a painter. Bret had been a child actor. He was friends with all those Actors Studio guys—Bill Gunn, Marty Landau—so they would come over. Allen Ginsberg came through town in ’56, early ’57, maybe.

DM What was the impact of Allen?

DD Well, I had been writing all this slang from ’53 on. I loved the street language. My friends who I lived with and other serious artists were saying, no, you can’t do that. Nobody’s going understand it in ten years. People were pretty down on me in my group. We were all nineteen years old. There was an argument about whether or not you could use the vernacular. But my friend Joan O’Malley said no. At one point, somebody got upset. We had a whole wall collaged full of photos of the artists and actors we loved. We all started tearing down all the photographs, yelling that we weren’t worthy of these people if we had these terrible ideas about art. So in a way it was like oil on troubled waters to see Howl published. It legitimized things that were already happening in my work.

Within a year after Allen came through, people started looking me up. People started showing up at my house, and that would be anywhere from people of my age like LeRoi Jones to Edward Dahlberg and Kenneth Rexroth. Dahlberg and Rexroth acted like lecherous old guys. In the world I was in, all of that seemed quite natural. I didn’t wonder what piece of the woodwork they had come out from or why they had looked me up.

DM Besides being lecherous, did you learn anything from Rexroth?

DD I love Rexroth. I love Rexroth. He was valiant and wonderful and helped me many times, especially in terms of my political writing or information that I had or thought I had or wanted to find out about in history. He sat in on a workshop once of mine that was called History as Paranoia. Everything I said, he would answer from the back of the room, And furthermore, did you know that … and he’d add six more things. He was quite wonderful. It’s just that I don’t think guys of that generation had ever encountered a girl who was writing but wasn’t particularly on the make. I slept around a lot, but I wasn’t on the make when I met a guy who was a writer. So it took them a little while to adjust. They did good. [laughter]

DM OK. Let’s see … what about the Beat movement?

DD Yeah, what is that thing rumored to be the Beat movement?

DM Help me. I’m having a crisis here. You’re known as an important writer of the Beat movement. Do you want to tell me what it is or was?

DD I and people I knew were disgusted with the whole thing of a label, and the label came late, and the label brought all those little girls from Jersey with their eyeliner and their black tights, and you had to take care of them because they were going to bed with the wrong people, and they were going to get hurt. Do you remember those girls from Jersey?

DM I remember the girls who came to North Beach from the suburbs.

DD Same thing. When did you move out here?

DM Let me see … maybe ’60, ’61.

DD Those girls were showing up by about ’57 or ’58.

I have no idea about the Beat movement. To this day, I find it very difficult, as I’m sure you do, or anyone does, that people assume that whatever we were doing then we are doing now. What I’m doing now is what I’m doing now, and if you want to read Loba as a Beat poem, more power to you, but it doesn’t make sense to read it that way.

DM To what do you attribute this great renewed fascination by primarily young males toward what they imagine was the Beat? It seems to be almost exclusively a male fantasy.

DD This is such a repressive age we’re in right now. It’s really disgusting right now. So the idea of a time when it was OK to blah, blah, blah.

DM For guys.

DD For guys. Not just for guys. It was OK for me. Look at how awful it is right now for everybody. I mean, it is fucking difficult. Drugs have been given a bad name. Traveling freely on the road would be a form of insanity. Money is so tight, nobody works twenty hours a month and studies their art. You know Edward Dorn’s phrase, crazy with permission, from Gran Appacheria? There was some kind of wild permission that we took. It certainly hadn’t been handed to us. McCarthy didn’t hand it to us, nor did our parents. But the biological facts of life weren’t against it. We weren’t going to die if we slept around. Which you might now.

Robert Duncan used to say all the time that when something is leaving the planet it enters the realm of the imagination. When Dante wrote about the Church, the Church was failing—and so it could enter the realm of the imagination. Maybe that’s part of it now. Real life, as we lived it, is fading, so there’s this terrific Beat fantasy. ML Spoken word poetry might be inspired by the Beats, don’t you think?

DD Not to me. My experience of the whole thing was not an experience of the public arena much. I would read if people asked, and friends were doing it, at some of those places along the Lower East Side, but the heart of it for me was making my first book and editing The Floating Bear. It was always the word on paper and getting it out, much more than it was performance per se. Performance was the theater. We had the theater….

DM The New York Poet’s Theatre? Could you tell us a little bit about how that originated and what it did?

DD Yeah, at that point I was married to a guy who was a performer, Alan Marlowe.

DM That’s a great actor’s name.

DD Yeah, but his name was Meyorwitz, but he didn’t even find that out until later. We did one-act plays by poets, with sets by painters. People who weren’t directors directed—choreographers and dancers or whatever. George Herms did the set for McClure’s The Blossom, or Billy the Kid. Alex Katz did a set for a James Schuyler play. Peter Agostini sculpted the hanged man for Three Travelers Watch Sunrise by Wallace Stevens. We had some beautiful, beautiful things. It ran for about a four-month season each year over a period of four or five years.

DM Where was the theater located?

DD Different places, different years. We would rent different spaces. The plays would run on the weekends, and during the week there’d be contemporary music night, a dance night, an experimental film night, something else. Different people would run those. And then on Sunday afternoons, before the evening play, we would have poetry readings right in the set of the play. We did a whole series where we invited poets to come and read their favorite poems by others. Red Grooms made a set for Kenneth Koch. It was exciting and beautiful. That was the performance thing. By the time the coffee shop thing got big, it was it was a little too raucous for me. There’s a part of me that prefers being able to read poetry in a more subtle and quiet way. I never was really into the performance part of all that, although I read with musicians a few times. I worked with the Chicago Art Ensemble at the University of Chicago, for example.

DM When did you have your first child?

DD In ’57.

DM Were there difficulties?

DD Yeah, there were a lot of difficulties. I had decided I wanted a kid, right? I decided I didn’t want to live with a man. My family experience of growing up made me think that living with men wasn’t a nice idea. I had lots of lovers, and I asked people if they wanted to father a kid, and everybody thought I was insane, and finally I didn’t ask—I just got pregnant and had Jeanne. That part was not a problem. The problem was, for example, I didn’t dare let people at the hospital know that I wasn’t married, because they were looking hard for white babies to put up for adoption. They had babies of every other color under the sun, but if you were a single parent with a white child the pressure put on you to give up that baby before you left the hospital was enormous. So I made up a husband for the birth certificate. A lot of problems like that.

Of course, my family, my poor family, was completely freaked out already about this. It wasn’t hard for me in the sense of daily life because I just worked at home. I had bought a mimeograph machine, and I made a home business. I did the scripts for the off-off Broadway theaters. I would do them at the house, and people would come and pick them up. That was fine. I tried getting not welfare but child care so that Jeanne could be somewhere when I did this work, and the only way you were allowed Social Service child care was to be on welfare, and if you were on welfare, you had to turn in the name of a father. None of which was of any interest to me. So Jeanne just stayed home and played. I worked at the Phoenix Bookstore when she was two, and she’d come in the stroller and play in the back. I did that for about two years.

DM You had more children and sometimes had more than one to deal with.

DD Having one, you take her everywhere, do everything together. She used to sleep backstage when I was at the Living Theater, when I worked there with Jimmy Waring. Having two meant you had to arrange things. But it was so difficult anyway between me and Roi after I had Dominique. I left for the West Coast with Alan Marlowe, who was breaking up his affair with Fred Herko. Alan had money coming in from TV residuals. For some reason, and I’m not sure what his reason was, he wanted to marry me. I knew that he was a man I’d never fall in love with, so he seemed like a good person to marry. I had two kids with him, Alex and Tara, over six years. But most of the time, we weren’t even sexually involved. It was an open marriage, and he was mostly with guys. We ran the theater and we ran the press. I really wasn’t alone with more than one child that much. Although the men weren’t much use in terms of taking care of the house or taking care of kids or making money. Once the residuals stopped, Alan had no idea what else to do. He could raise money for the theater for a season, but he had no idea about day-to-day things like rent.

DM I’m interested in The Floating Bear project—it had a lasting impact in the strange history of poet-produced bulletins. It came out in mimeograph form and was an incredible repository of poetry and poetry news, reflecting a coast-to-coast poetic network. I wonder if we could talk about the whole process of co-editing with LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka. How were the editorial meetings?

DD Roi and I had gotten together as lovers about a year before we got together as editors. A.B. Spellman and I were going to do a magazine called The Horse at the Window. We had this whole stack of interesting manuscripts, and A.B., the first time he had to reject something, decided he couldn’t be an editor because he couldn’t reject anybody. So we had this whole stack of manuscripts, which I think he then gave to Roi, and then Roi approached me about the idea of a newsletter. At first, it was an every-two-week thing. Later, it got to be once a month, and very much later it got very big and came out only a few times a year. But when Roi and I did it the first year or so it was every two weeks.

We started out with the addresses in our two phone books. One hundred seventeen people got the first issue. It was always free. It always broke even. People would send contributions and things. Painters gave us money. Painters had lots of money in those days. In terms of the editorial meetings, there were a lot of ways that Roi and I saw eye to eye about literary stuff, and a lot of ways we didn’t at all. There was a lot of hard-edge macho stuff that he loved a lot more than I, like early Dorn, and there was a kind of mystical work, like Robert Duncan’s stuff and other work, that I liked more than he. But we just put both in. That gave the Bear its odd flavor. It was an amalgam of the two kinds of taste. We basically trusted each other’s point of view or taste. I did the typing, everybody did the proofreading, and we would have collating parties. Roi did most of the correspondence and staying in touch with the writers.

After I married Alan, Roi resigned. For personal reasons, he said. I kept going with the Bear ’til ’69. I had some guest editors. John Wieners edited one issue.

DM You say in ’65 you went up to Millbrook, Timothy Leary’s psychedelic community. Could you describe what that was like?

DD I visited it in ’65; I lived there in ’67. It was wonderful, amazingly wonderful. Tim had this idea that he wanted to gather a lot of very creative people in one place and give them all the acid they could possibly take and make sure they had no worries or responsibilities and see what happened.

I and my kids and Alan Marlowe had kind of a house. It was the upper floor of this place that was built like a Swiss chalet. The lower floor was a bowling alley, and the upper floor was meant to be a huge billiard room, and that’s where we lived.

Tim’s plan was that we were not supposed to want for anything, we weren’t supposed to worry about anything. If there was anything we needed … I mean, if I had the vague idea or mentioned to someone that I might like to try watercolor painting, an elaborate watercolor paint set would show up on my desk by the next day. It was very unnerving, because I was used to struggling. Very hard to get used to not struggling. The place was set up with the basic rule, which I broke all the time, that you were supposed to trip once every five days. Nobody was supposed to go more than five days without tripping. Now this gets very boring after a while.

DM And exhausting.

DD And exhausting. So I would take my LSD and say thank you very much and stash it. It wasn’t hard to act as if you were tripping. Nobody knew the difference. That was the main rule, but since everybody was tripping every five days, nothing ever was the same in the community two days in a row. We’d figure out how we were doing the meals. We’d figure it out again different the next day. I did the cooking there for the first month or two. Which was nice because I couldn’t give up on taking care of business. Tim’s group on the top floor ate meat and wanted lots of alcohol. Then an ashram moved in while I was there, and they wanted lots of milk and white bread and sugar, and then there were the macrobiotics. Jean McCreedy’s children were crying because there was no Campbell’s soup for them. You learned a lot. You also had incredible space.

There was a place called the Meditation House. I’m sure people have written about this. It was a one-room house, with windows all around. The sun came up on one side of the room and went down on the other side. We took turns being the spiritual watch for the place. You were there, doing solitary tripping for twenty-four hours, and the guard was changed in the evenings. We all came and meditated with the person who had been tripping, and then the next person moved in and took her post as watcher. Usually you were on watch for twenty-four hours, but once I did it for three or five days just before I left Millbrook. It was like indigenous American religion just beginning to grow. The nights as the trip came on … it was incredibly lovely and very deep. With the support of the whole place, unspoken around you, with ten square miles of property between you and whatever was trying to stop this whole thing from happening. There was a leather-bound blank book in the Meditation House. Everybody either left a drawing or a message or something from each trip. I wrote Rant from a Cool Place while I was there tripping. Later, I published it in Revolutionary Letters.

DM I’m interested in your long-term involvement with the hermetic and, then later, with Buddhism.

DD There was an involvement with the hermetic at Hunter. This often happens with adolescents, both girls and boys, if you let it. I and my writer friends, including Audre Lorde, would work with things like ESP and trance and trying to have séances. And then Buddhism. I read a lot of Eastern stuff from around 1960. Zimmer, Philosophies of India. I met Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in ’62 when I was out on this coast with Alan Marlowe. Suzuki Roshi married us.

DM I remember.

DD I don’t remember who was there. There were only twelve or so of us. Marilyn Rose was there, Kirby Doyle was there, you were there, Dee Dee Doyle was there. And a whole lot of Suzuki’s wife’s friends. Because it’s so auspicious to have the place full for a wedding, they invited all these Japanese ladies.

I started sitting then. When I met Suzuki it felt like the first time in my life I had met somebody I could really trust. That was an interesting thing for a Brooklyn girl. And so I took home a cushion, got some basic instruction, and wrote Dick Baker once or twice a year to say this is what’s happening. He would tell Roshi, and sometimes I’d get a message back. Whenever I was on the road and I was here, I would hitch to the Zen center and sit in the morning with them. Zen practice began in ’62. I had been playing with stuff before that. I had been playing with The Six Yogas of Naropa from Garma C.C. Chang’s book and stuff like that.

New Year’s Eve ’63 was when I took my first acid. What happened to me on that first acid trip was that a whole lot of stuff I’d been reading about became clear as day. About time and about emptiness—I could just see it. So that put things in a different light, as it were. Probably this is where the mysticism starts to come back into the poetry in a much more clear way. Although in ’59 there was a peyote trip, and that’s when the poems broke open to long lines like those in The New Handbook of Heaven. That book started after the peyote trip in ’59 in my apartment on the Lower East Side. Jimmy also helped as a teacher of mine—James Waring. He said to follow precisely wherever the poem went—the graph of the moving mind (that’s Philip Whalen’s phrase), rather than this thing that I was doing earlier of cut, cut, cut, and make it sparse. I think I was doing that to learn certain techniques. This wasn’t about technique now, it was about really following and being obedient to consciousness, as Robert Duncan liked to put it. That started in 1959.

DM You’ve been involved with Buddhism as well studying the Western hermetic tradition for twenty-five, thirty years.

DD Oh, easily. Easily. If you don’t count the séances. It’s about thirty-three years of Western studies. I would say around ’66 I started really studying the Tarot.

DM Because of your earlier background in physics and math, did the alchemical material make more immediate sense?

DD Could be. And my anarchist grandfather used to run a pharmacy, even though he didn’t a have a license—his son-in-law had the license. I remember hanging out with all those glass bottles of herbs and powders and scales. Grinding things for him. I started to work with the cards when I lived in New Mexico in ’66. I’d just hang out with a card—I was using the Waite deck then—and fall asleep nearly every afternoon. And I’d have a dream about that card. It seemed very simple. It wasn’t like I was trying. Within the next few years I got hold of the tool of the Tree of Life, as it’s used in Western magic, then everything fell into place. That was ’71.

DM Do you mean a combination of the various symbolic systems?

DD The using of the Tree as a way to synchronize the systems.

DM And is that compatible with Buddhism?

DD You know, in Vajrayana Buddhism there are two truths. There’s absolute truth and relative truth. Absolute truth is emptiness, but it’s luminous, creative, constantly moving and changing. But it’s empty. Or we call it mind. Big Mind. It’s the same thing. Relative truth is kundzop, which means costume. It’s all the costumes of the empty, and they’re seen as inseparable from the absolute. Throughout the world there are techniques of working with and sometimes, yes, even manipulating relative truth, as in Western magic. I have a Buddhist shrine room and also a Western magical shrine, which is a landing place (and launching pad) for all the elemental forces. But it’s not a place where I meditate, in the Buddhist sense.

I had this same question for Suzuki Roshi one of the last times I saw him. I said exasperatedly, I’m a poet. I want images, and here Zen is supposed to be empty! He said, Two sides of the same coin. He was telling me the same thing that I learned again in Vajrayana. He said: You have image, you write. But when you do zazen it should be like going to sleep in your mother’s arms.

DM When did you first meet Robert Duncan?

DD I met him at Michael McClure’s in 1961. Michael invited Robert to meet me. Invited him over for breakfast. Robert was clearly not very interested in meeting me. And at one point, I was barely awake, I went over to the window and started brushing my hair, which was very, very long and very, very red. All of a sudden Robert looked up and said: You have the most beautiful hair I’ve ever seen! Will you come to lunch?

DM Could you tell me what you learned from him as a mentor?

DD It sounds odd, but I think Robert was probably one of the closest, most intimate lovers I ever had, even though we never had a physical relationship. I learned a lot of different kinds of things from him. One of the things I learned—in a way no teacher of Buddhism ever showed me—was how precious my life was. How precious the whole ambience of the time. A real sense of appreciating every minute. He used to come and do Christmas with us and eat hash brownies and talk. All Christmas morning. He would come up and stay with us in Marshall on Tomales Bay, and there was something about that—more than all the exchanges which were about hermeticism and one thing or another. Something about this ineffable quality of the time and the energy that was there—I can’t describe it. He trapped me into a whole field of study. Remember that first year of the New College poetics program that we did? I was supposed to be chairwoman that year and tell everybody what they should teach—not that anybody ever managed to tell anybody what to do in that program. I said: Robert, I think you should do a course that covers nonorthodox threads of thought in the West, maybe from the caves to the present. Give us some sense of continuity, how it all relates to one another, Gnosticism and the heresies and this and that. He said, I think you’re supposed to teach that, dear. I said, Robert, I don’t know anything about it. He said, Well, that’s why we teach, isn’t it? Of course, after I taught it for two years, everybody was on my neck. You have to stop teaching that.

DM What was the New College of California poetics program all about in those days?

DD It was whatever Robert thought it was. He felt that it was time to make a model, as he probably said a million times to all of us, of what a curriculum in poetics—as opposed to one in writing poetry—would be and