Diane Di Prima was an anarchist feminist Beatnik poet, who died this past weekend at 86, in San Francisco.

I didn’t really follow her work or career. But I was an early long-distance fan of the Beats, and one of her poems, part of a series of “Revolutionary Letters,” caught my attention.  For my second book, Uncertain Resurrection, about the failure of Dr. King’s 1968 Poor Peoples Campaign,  I included it as an epigraph and opening lament. I can still feel its sting half a century later.

Here it is, along with an excerpt from her obituary in the Washington Post:

Revolutionary Letters #19

Diane DiPrima

if what you want is jobs
for everyone, you are still the enemy,
you have not thought thru, clearly
what it means

if what you want is housing,
industry
(G. E. on the Navaho
reservation)
a car for everyone, garage, refrigerator,
TV, more plumbing, scientific
freeways, you are still
the enemy, you have chosen
to sacrifice the planet for a few years of some
science fiction utopia, if what you want

still is, or can be, schools
where all our kids are pushed into one shape, are taught
it’s better to be “American” than black
or Indian, or Jap, or PR, where Dick
and Jane become and are the dream, do you
look like Dick’s father, don’t you think your kid
secretly wishes you did

if what you want
is clinics where the AMA
can feed you pills to keep you weak, or sterile,
shoot germs into your kids, while Merck & Co.
grows richer

if you want
free psychiatric help for everyone
so that the shrinks,
pimps for this decadence, can make
it flower for us, if you want

if you still want a piece
a small piece of suburbia, green lawn
laid down by the square foot
color TV, whose radiant energy
kills brain cells, whose subliminal ads
brainwash your children, have taken over
your dreams

degrees from universities which are nothing
more than slum landlords, festering sinks
of lies, so you too can go forth
and lie to others on some greeny campus

THEN YOU ARE STILL
THE ENEMY, you are selling
yourself short, remember
you can have what you ask for, ask for

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