Episode 170 - Better to lose and win (Diane di Prima's 'Revolutionary Letters')
PoemTalk at the Writers House
English - March 14, 2022 15:00 - 55 minutes - 76.2 MB - ★★★★★ - 11 ratingsBooks Arts writers write writing poetry university pennsylvania philadelphia literary literature readings Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
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.