pocket-sized, baby-o

student tights, photographed at sammy's

in honor of poem in you pocket day, i did three things (i've really tried this year to emulate my festive co-blogger, who observes so many holidays so very well):

1) read sections of christopher smart's enormous, rambling, mad, brilliant jubilate agno.

2) had my poetry students find and agree upon one small poem to distribute to the pockets of walden students.  they chose this blake poem.

3) printed out this diane di prima poem.  it is pocket-sized, with it's tiny lines and it's condensed emotion about the outsized mother love that even a crazy dame like d.d.p. is not immune to.  also found out that she's having health problems and actress/poet!!! (i didn't know tamblyn was a poet, did you?)  amber tamblyn's been holding a fundraiser for diane di prima, who has been touted as the "only feminist beat poet."  do we know if this is the truth, that di prima is the only feminist beat, my scholarly friends?

 anyway, here's the poem:

Song for Baby-O, Unborn

by
Diane di Prima
 

Sweetheart

when you break thru

you’ll find

a poet here

not quite what one would choose.

I won’t promise

you’ll never go hungry

or that you won’t be sad

on this gutted

breaking

globe

but I can show you

baby

enough to love

to break your heart

forever

 ---

the first stanza kills me!  the criteria for liking a poem shouldn't be that it says something that you would say, but that's how i feel about it anyway.

& here's something di prima wrote about motherhood (pardon the french), that also reflects my own feelings, at least in part, on the matter:

“I wanted everything—very earnestly and totally—I wanted to have every experience I could have, I wanted everything that was possible to a person in a female body, and that meant that I wanted to be mother.… So my feeling was, ‘Well’—as I had many times had the feeling—‘Well, nobody’s done it quite this way before but fuck it, that’s what I’m doing, I’m going to risk it.’”




 

inspiration: julie's devotion to festivity

legwear: no tights, just boots

looking forward: to cecily's violin recital, then a break from lessons. . .