Struggle Itself

^{for Diane di Prima}

                          Just that piece
     of the poem you could hear

     the groundswell,
     and written in such a way, numbered

            left in-tact 
            on the back 
            of a flat-bed truck

                                           amplified
                                  taking up
                   space 
                   in offering out

                   strategy with every form
                                       of art 

                   stacking the trucks
                   and sending them out…

new music/new poetry

                    Survival—courting the elements
(Divination) to be reliably great, what is clearly my job
the impulsive unending twist
in hell, groundswells

            sounds of film spinning on an old reel
sweeping up,
                     glyph like tracks
                     on a white page (reproduced)

                     Phones held close
                                  against the light
                                  deranged pleas
                                  hopeful songs
                                  gospel noble truths

Poems that we hold
                               beyond our bodies, a joy
                               we can keep ringing at eternities fold
 melted in the hot brick

                                     or crucible
                                     as Audre Lorde would have it

   that longest arc in the edges
          before they join

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“This poem was born of the research I was doing for a lecture on Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters (Last Gasp, 2007). I used her lifelong friendships with Audre Lorde and Amiri Baraka as a kind of backdrop. The lecture took three months to write and the poem took thirty minutes. I wanted to test the agency of the poetic line against the same questions of friendship, but this time to be free from the expected syntax of a lecture. ‘What is clearly my job, the impulse unending twist’ is a line from Di Prima’s poem ‘Folly Beach.’”
—Cedar Sigo