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Revolutionary Letters: 50th Anniversary Edition : Pocket Poets Series No. 27 by Diane di Prima (2021, Hardcover)
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Language: English. Number of Pages Publication Date: 2021-10-05. Publisher: City Lights Books.
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About this product
Product Identifiers
PublisherCity Lights
ISBN-100872868796
ISBN-139780872868793
eBay Product ID (ePID)11050068508
Product Key Features
Edition50
Book TitleRevolutionary Letters: 50th Anniversary Edition : Pocket Poets Series No. 27
Number of Pages244 Pages
LanguageEnglish
Publication Year2021
TopicWomen Authors, Subjects & Themes / Inspirational & Religious, American / General
GenrePoetry
AuthorDiane Di Prima
Book SeriesCity Lights Pocket Poets Ser.
FormatHardcover
Dimensions
Item Height0.8 in
Item Weight9.5 Oz
Item Length6.2 in
Item Width4.8 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceTrade
LCCN2021-008208
ReviewsAdvance praise for Revolutionary Letters: 50th Anniversary Edition: "With this new and expanded edition we are offered a window onto a master poet redefining revolution over her lifetime (through a prism). Di Prima continues to interrogate the ways in which we have been taught to live, love, eat, write, fight and take control. In her classic poem 'Rant' (Revolutionary Letter #75) she describes this mindset as 'a multidimensional chess / which is divination / & strategy'. This time reading through I was reminded of Baraka's Wise, Why's, Y's and Ginsberg's The Fall of America. How can we make the most of this book and its wisdom? It's not enough to simply read it or even to write our own Revolutionary Letters. These poems are not realized until we are called upon to act."--Cedar Sigo "How do 'we' keep fighting? There is no one way, but sometimes you think about lines in Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters. Di Prima's 'letters' feel like they were written to the all of you that always is somewhere coming together. They remind you that you are a part of something, that as sure as you have enemies who want things like jobs, you have friends who want everything. The new letters in this expanded edition continue di Prima's tradition of telling you things you need to know--like 'you have only / so much / ammunition' & how a poem can matter as 'the memory / of the poem / tak[es] root in / thousands / of minds.' & here you thought this classic couldn't get any better."--Wendy Trevino "Revolutionary Letters are action philosophy on the road to soul-building, to our realized mammal-hood, and to our humanity ... di Prima's imagination and inspiration cause these poems to become more brilliant with the passage of time, and with the growing number of more recent Letters water-falling over the lip of what we think is possible"--Michael McClure "[To read] di Prima's Revolutionary Letters--begun in 1968 in a spirit of utopian hope and ecological terror--is to enter the intimate moral consciousness of a writer who acted where many simply just thought. 'These are transitional years and the dues / will be heavy,' she writes in 'Revolutionary Letter 10.' 'The continent is a seed.' All this before Monsanto existed. By letter 102, her tone has changed, her technology updated: 'Soon the only ones / who'll know how to find us / will be Google / & those small surveillance drones.'"--John Freeman, Advance praise for Revolutionary Letters: 50th Anniversary Edition: "The bourgeois poet says poetry makes nothing happen, but what's astonishing about Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters is how these poems are adamantly useful. A manual of insurgent instruction, these poems tell you how to mitigate tear gas and sleep deprivation, eat a healthy diet, and overthrow the state. Less interested in displaying lyric interiority than inculcating a radical ideology, di Prima's letters are explosive and nourishing--and that most paradoxical thing, a classic text from an antisystemic tradition. Not simply a relic from a New Left past, this book is ever more urgent in our moment, as a resurgent left faces down the apocalypse. Revolutionary Letters is a time machine towards a better future."--Ken Chen "With this new and expanded edition we are offered a window onto a master poet redefining revolution over her lifetime (through a prism). Di Prima continues to interrogate the ways in which we have been taught to live, love, eat, write, fight and take control. In her classic poem 'Rant' (Revolutionary Letter #75) she describes this mindset as 'a multidimensional chess / which is divination / & strategy'. This time reading through I was reminded of Baraka's Wise, Why's, Y's and Ginsberg's The Fall of America. How can we make the most of this book and its wisdom? It's not enough to simply read it or even to write our own Revolutionary Letters. These poems are not realized until we are called upon to act."--Cedar Sigo "How do 'we' keep fighting? There is no one way, but sometimes you think about lines in Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters. Di Prima's 'letters' feel like they were written to the all of you that always is somewhere coming together. They remind you that you are a part of something, that as sure as you have enemies who want things like jobs, you have friends who want everything. The new letters in this expanded edition continue di Prima's tradition of telling you things you need to know--like 'you have only / so much / ammunition' & how a poem can matter as 'the memory / of the poem / tak[es] root in / thousands / of minds.' & here you thought this classic couldn't get any better."--Wendy Trevino "Revolutionary Letters is a practical guide to visionary living, a necessary handbook for all who fight for the end of prisons, borders, and environmental degradation. Its poems mourn, conspire, and command, by turns sensuous, brisk, and searing. Di Prima challenges us endlessly to be equal to our own bodies, to the body of the earth: 'sense and sex are boundless, & the call / is to be boundless with them.' I turn to this book when I am depleted by the news, because di Prima's voice is heartening, an offering of strength."--Sophia Dahlin "[To read] di Prima's Revolutionary Letters--begun in 1968 in a spirit of utopian hope and ecological terror--is to enter the intimate moral consciousness of a writer who acted where many simply just thought. 'These are transitional years and the dues / will be heavy,' she writes in 'Revolutionary Letter 10.' 'The continent is a seed.' All this before Monsanto existed. By letter 102, her tone has changed, her technology updated: 'Soon the only ones / who'll know how to find us / will be Google / & those small surveillance drones.'"--John Freeman, Advance praise for Revolutionary Letters: 50th Anniversary Edition: "The bourgeois poet says poetry makes nothing happen, but what's astonishing about Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters is how these poems are adamantly useful. A manual of insurgent instruction, these poems tell you how to mitigate tear gas and sleep deprivation, eat a healthy diet, and overthrow the state. Less interested in displaying lyric interiority than inculcating a radical ideology, di Prima's letters are explosive and nourishing--and that most paradoxical thing, a classic text from an antisystemic tradition. Not simply a relic from a New Left past, this book is ever more urgent in our moment, as a resurgent left faces down the apocalypse. Revolutionary Letters is a time machine towards a better future."--Ken Chen "With this new and expanded edition we are offered a window onto a master poet redefining revolution over her lifetime (through a prism). Di Prima continues to interrogate the ways in which we have been taught to live, love, eat, write, fight and take control. In her classic poem 'Rant' (Revolutionary Letter #75) she describes this mindset as 'a multidimensional chess / which is divination / & strategy'. This time reading through I was reminded of Baraka's Wise, Why's, Y's and Ginsberg's The Fall of America. How can we make the most of this book and its wisdom? It's not enough to simply read it or even to write our own Revolutionary Letters. These poems are not realized until we are called upon to act."--Cedar Sigo "How do 'we' keep fighting? There is no one way, but sometimes you think about lines in Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters. Di Prima's 'letters' feel like they were written to the all of you that always is somewhere coming together. They remind you that you are a part of something, that as sure as you have enemies who want things like jobs, you have friends who want everything. The new letters in this expanded edition continue di Prima's tradition of telling you things you need to know--like 'you have only / so much / ammunition' & how a poem can matter as 'the memory / of the poem / tak[es] root in / thousands / of minds.' & here you thought this classic couldn't get any better."--Wendy Trevino "[To read] di Prima's Revolutionary Letters--begun in 1968 in a spirit of utopian hope and ecological terror--is to enter the intimate moral consciousness of a writer who acted where many simply just thought. 'These are transitional years and the dues / will be heavy,' she writes in 'Revolutionary Letter 10.' 'The continent is a seed.' All this before Monsanto existed. By letter 102, her tone has changed, her technology updated: 'Soon the only ones / who'll know how to find us / will be Google / & those small surveillance drones.'"--John Freeman, Advance praise for Revolutionary Letters: 50th Anniversary Edition: "When I was a much younger and more optimistic writer, I found myself believing that the writing of a poem, alone, could change the circumstances of an immensely flawed world, no matter what the poem was (or wasn't) asking, no matter what it was (or wasn't) doing. A part of my re-education was finding the poetry of Diane di Prima, specifically these Revolutionary Letters. Poems that are indictments, of not only the speaker, but also the reader. Poems that allow for rage and dissatisfaction to be channeled outward into something beyond the page. There is a generosity and affection in these poems that I find myself returning to, always, when I'm at my most cynical and feeling lost for any understanding of what a better world might look like. When I need to be grounded and re-centered in my understanding of community care as a living, breathing, full-time mission. And, quite simply, when I need to be reminded of how language can begin on the page, and echo far beyond."--Hanif Abdurraqib "The bourgeois poet says poetry makes nothing happen, but what's astonishing about Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters is how these poems are adamantly useful. A manual of insurgent instruction, these poems tell you how to mitigate tear gas and sleep deprivation, eat a healthy diet, and overthrow the state. Less interested in displaying lyric interiority than inculcating a radical ideology, di Prima's letters are explosive and nourishing--and that most paradoxical thing, a classic text from an antisystemic tradition. Not simply a relic from a New Left past, this book is ever more urgent in our moment, as a resurgent left faces down the apocalypse. Revolutionary Letters is a time machine towards a better future."--Ken Chen "With this new and expanded edition we are offered a window onto a master poet redefining revolution over her lifetime (through a prism). Di Prima continues to interrogate the ways in which we have been taught to live, love, eat, write, fight and take control. In her classic poem 'Rant' (Revolutionary Letter #75) she describes this mindset as 'a multidimensional chess / which is divination / & strategy'. This time reading through I was reminded of Baraka's Wise, Why's, Y's and Ginsberg's The Fall of America. How can we make the most of this book and its wisdom? It's not enough to simply read it or even to write our own Revolutionary Letters. These poems are not realized until we are called upon to act."--Cedar Sigo "How do 'we' keep fighting? There is no one way, but sometimes you think about lines in Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters. Di Prima's 'letters' feel like they were written to the all of you that always is somewhere coming together. They remind you that you are a part of something, that as sure as you have enemies who want things like jobs, you have friends who want everything. The new letters in this expanded edition continue di Prima's tradition of telling you things you need to know--like 'you have only / so much / ammunition' & how a poem can matter as 'the memory / of the poem / tak[es] root in / thousands / of minds.' & here you thought this classic couldn't get any better."--Wendy Trevino "Revolutionary Letters is a practical guide to visionary living, a necessary handbook for all who fight for the end of prisons, borders, and environmental degradation. Its poems mourn, conspire, and command, by turns sensuous, brisk, and searing. Di Prima challenges us endlessly to be equal to our own bodies, to the body of the earth: 'sense and sex are boundless, & the call / is to be boundless with them.' I turn to this book when I am depleted by the news, because di Prima's voice is heartening, an offering of strength."--Sophia Dahlin, Advance praise for Revolutionary Letters: 50th Anniversary Edition: "When I was a much younger and more optimistic writer, I found myself believing that the writing of a poem, alone, could change the circumstances of an immensely flawed world, no matter what the poem was (or wasn't) asking, no matter what it was (or wasn't) doing. A part of my re-education was finding the poetry of Diane di Prima, specifically these Revolutionary Letters. Poems that are indictments, of not only the speaker, but also the reader. Poems that allow for rage and dissatisfaction to be channeled outward into something beyond the page. There is a generosity and affection in these poems that I find myself returning to, always, when I'm at my most cynical and feeling lost for any understanding of what a better world might look like. When I need to be grounded and re-centered in my understanding of community care as a living, breathing, full-time mission. And, quite simply, when I need to be reminded of how language can begin on the page, and echo far beyond."--Hanif Abdurraqib "The bourgeois poet says poetry makes nothing happen, but what's astonishing about Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters is how these poems are adamantly useful. A manual of insurgent instruction, these poems tell you how to mitigate tear gas and sleep deprivation, eat a healthy diet, and overthrow the state. Less interested in displaying lyric interiority than inculcating a radical ideology, di Prima's letters are explosive and nourishing--and that most paradoxical thing, a classic text from an antisystemic tradition. Not simply a relic from a New Left past, this book is ever more urgent in our moment, as a resurgent left faces down the apocalypse. Revolutionary Letters is a time machine towards a better future."--Ken Chen "With this new and expanded edition we are offered a window onto a master poet redefining revolution over her lifetime (through a prism). Di Prima continues to interrogate the ways in which we have been taught to live, love, eat, write, fight and take control. In her classic poem 'Rant' ('Revolutionary Letter #75') she describes this mindset as 'a multidimensional chess / which is divination / & strategy'. This time reading through I was reminded of Baraka's Wise, Why's, Y's and Ginsberg's The Fall of America. How can we make the most of this book and its wisdom? It's not enough to simply read it or even to write our own Revolutionary Letters. These poems are not realized until we are called upon to act."--Cedar Sigo "How do 'we' keep fighting? There is no one way, but sometimes you think about lines in Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters. Di Prima's 'letters' feel like they were written to the all of you that always is somewhere coming together. They remind you that you are a part of something, that as sure as you have enemies who want things like jobs, you have friends who want everything. The new letters in this expanded edition continue di Prima's tradition of telling you things you need to know--like 'you have only / so much / ammunition' & how a poem can matter as 'the memory / of the poem / tak[es] root in / thousands / of minds.' & here you thought this classic couldn't get any better."--Wendy Trevino "Revolutionary Letters is a practical guide to visionary living, a necessary handbook for all who fight for the end of prisons, borders, and environmental degradation. Its poems mourn, conspire, and command, by turns sensuous, brisk, and searing. Di Prima challenges us endlessly to be equal to our own bodies, to the body of the earth: 'sense and sex are boundless, & the call / is to be boundless with them.' I turn to this book when I am depleted by the news, because di Prima's voice is heartening, an offering of strength."--Sophia Dahlin
Series Volume Number27
SynopsisExpanded 50th anniversary edition of the City Lights classic, featuring fifteen new poems. Simultaneously released with Diane di Prima's Spring and Autumn Annals on the one-year anniversary of her passing. By turns a handbook of countercultural living, a manual for street protest, and a feminist broadside against the repressive state apparatus, Revolutionary Letters is a modern classic, as relevant today as it was fifty years ago. In 1968, visionary poet Diane di Prima moved from Beat New York to hippie San Francisco to begin these "letters," poems filled with a blend of utopian imagination, radical politics, and ecological awareness. Immersed in alternative histories and mystical traditions, the poems were catapulted into the world through underground newspapers and free pamphlets, circulating far and wide. In 1971, Lawrence Ferlinghetti published the first of four ever-expanding book versions in the Pocket Poets Series. In her last years, di Prima oversaw the final iteration of this lifelong project, adding poems written between 2007 and her death in 2020. This 50th Anniversary edition marks the long-awaited return of Revolutionary Lettersto City Lights. Praise for Revolutionary Letters, 50th Anniversary Edition: "There is a generosity and affection in Revolutionary Letters that I find myself returning to, always, when I'm at my most cynical and feeling lost for any understanding of what a better world might look like. When I need to be grounded and re-centered in my understanding of community care as a living, breathing, full-time mission. And, quite simply, when I need to be reminded of how language can begin on the page, and echo far beyond."--Hanif Abdurraqib "What's astonishing about Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters is how these poems are adamantly useful. A manual of insurgent instruction, these poems tell you how to mitigate tear gas and sleep deprivation, eat a healthy diet, and overthrow the state. This book is ever more urgent in our moment, as a resurgent left faces down the apocalypse. Revolutionary Letters is a time machine towards a better future."--Ken Chen "With this new and expanded edition we are offered a window onto a master poet redefining revolution over her lifetime. Di Prima continues to interrogate the ways in which we have been taught to live, love, eat, write, fight and take control. How can we make the most of this book and its wisdom? It's not enough to simply read it or even to write our own Revolutionary Letters. These poems are not realized until we are called upon to act."--Cedar Sigo "How do 'we' keep fighting? There is no one way, but sometimes you think about lines in Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters. Di Prima's 'letters' feel like they were written to the all of you that always is somewhere coming together. And here you thought this classic couldn't get any better."--Wendy Trevino, Expanded 50th anniversary edition of the City Lights classic of eco-feminist-Zen Beat poetry, featuring fifteen new poems. Simultaneously released with Diane di Prima's Spring and Autumn Annals on the one-year anniversary of her passing. By turns a handbook of countercultural living, a manual for street protest, and a feminist broadside against the repressive state apparatus, Revolutionary Letters is a modern classic, as relevant today as it was at its inception, 50 years ago. During the tumult of 1968, Beat poet Diane di Prima began writing her "letters," poems filled with a potent blend of utopian anarchism and Zen-tinged ecological awareness that were circulated via underground newspapers and stapled pamphlets. In 1971, Lawrence Ferlinghetti published the first collection of these poems in his iconic Pocket Poets Series, and di Prima would go on to publish four subsequent editions, expanding the collection each time. During the last years of her life, di Prima got to work on the final iteration of this lifelong project, collecting all of her previously published "letters" and adding the new work, poems written from 2007 up to the time of her death in October 2020. Published in a board-bound edition that proudly features the original edition's cover art by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Praise for Revolutionary Letters, 50th Anniversary Edition: "There is a generosity and affection in Revolutionary Letters that I find myself returning to, always, when I'm at my most cynical and feeling lost for any understanding of what a better world might look like. When I need to be grounded and re-centered in my understanding of community care as a living, breathing, full-time mission. And, quite simply, when I need to be reminded of how language can begin on the page, and echo far beyond."--Hanif Abdurraqib "What's astonishing about Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters is how these poems are adamantly useful. A manual of insurgent instruction, these poems tell you how to mitigate tear gas and sleep deprivation, eat a healthy diet, and overthrow the state. This book is ever more urgent in our moment, as a resurgent left faces down the apocalypse. Revolutionary Letters is a time machine towards a better future."--Ken Chen "With this new and expanded edition we are offered a window onto a master poet redefining revolution over her lifetime. Di Prima continues to interrogate the ways in which we have been taught to live, love, eat, write, fight and take control. How can we make the most of this book and its wisdom? It's not enough to simply read it or even to write our own Revolutionary Letters. These poems are not realized until we are called upon to act."--Cedar Sigo "How do 'we' keep fighting? There is no one way, but sometimes you think about lines in Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters. Di Prima's 'letters' feel like they were written to the all of you that always is somewhere coming together. And here you thought this classic couldn't get any better."--Wendy Trevino, Expanded 50th anniversary edition of the City Lights classic, featuring fifteen new poems. Simultaneously released with Diane di Prima's Spring and Autumn Annals on the one-year anniversary of her passing. By turns a handbook of countercultural living, a manual for street protest, and a feminist broadside against the repressive state apparatus, Revolutionary Letters is a modern classic, as relevant today as it was fifty years ago. In 1968, visionary poet Diane di Prima moved from Beat New York to hippie San Francisco to begin these "letters," poems filled with a blend of utopian imagination, radical politics, and ecological awareness. Immersed in alternative histories and mystical traditions, the poems were catapulted into the world through underground newspapers and free pamphlets, circulating far and wide. In 1971, Lawrence Ferlinghetti published the first of four ever-expanding book versions in the Pocket Poets Series. In her last years, di Prima oversaw the final iteration of this lifelong project, adding poems written between 2007 and her death in 2020. This 50th Anniversary edition marks the long-awaited return of Revolutionary Letters to City Lights. Praise for Revolutionary Letters, 50th Anniversary Edition: "There is a generosity and affection in Revolutionary Letters that I find myself returning to, always, when I'm at my most cynical and feeling lost for any understanding of what a better world might look like. When I need to be grounded and re-centered in my understanding of community care as a living, breathing, full-time mission. And, quite simply, when I need to be reminded of how language can begin on the page, and echo far beyond."--Hanif Abdurraqib "What's astonishing about Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters is how these poems are adamantly useful. A manual of insurgent instruction, these poems tell you how to mitigate tear gas and sleep deprivation, eat a healthy diet, and overthrow the state. This book is ever more urgent in our moment, as a resurgent left faces down the apocalypse. Revolutionary Letters is a time machine towards a better future."--Ken Chen "With this new and expanded edition we are offered a window onto a master poet redefining revolution over her lifetime. Di Prima continues to interrogate the ways in which we have been taught to live, love, eat, write, fight and take control. How can we make the most of this book and its wisdom? It's not enough to simply read it or even to write our own Revolutionary Letters . These poems are not realized until we are called upon to act."--Cedar Sigo "How do 'we' keep fighting? There is no one way, but sometimes you think about lines in Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters . Di Prima's 'letters' feel like they were written to the all of you that always is somewhere coming together. And here you thought this classic couldn't get any better."--Wendy Trevino, Expanded 50th anniversary edition of the City Lights classic of eco-feminist-Zen Beat poetry, featuring fifteen new poems. Simultaneously released with Diane di Prima's Spring and Autumn Annals on the one-year anniversary of her passing.
LC Classification NumberPS3507.I68R4 2021
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