Although recognised and remembered as a radical political and feminist poet, Diane di Prima (1934-2020) always questioned what was happening and chose what to engage with. Having read and reviewed a recent complete edition of herRevolutionary LettersI wanted to find out more about the author, and this new book offered just the opportunity. On the very first page of this book, in an interview fromGrape, published by the Vancouver Community Press, we get this:

‘Grape: You mentioned earlier that you’ve stopped reading underground papers. Why is that?
Diane: Because I find that level of information just isn’t giving me anything I can work with at this point. It’s not interesting to me. All that’s happening on that level is a kind of sick “history repeats itself” piece of nonsense as far as I can see.’

Which seems, in part anyway, a rational response…

Olena Kalytiak Davis’ first book,And Her Soul out of Nothing, introduced a startling new poetic voice; her second,shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities,was even more exciting in the way it, well, shattered sonnets, without any nods to tradition or respect. Shakespeare got an invigorating kick up the backside, as did the sonnet form generally, and the (American) English language.

late summer odeincludes a section of sonnets, too, and for me is the best part of the book. There’s something about the restraint and shaping undertaken that contains Davis’ wilder inclinations and tendency to ramble, repeat and drift. I’d forgotten how disappointed I’d been by her last book,The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems, and have struggled to find a way in to this one, to find any sense of structure in many of the poems.

There are…

One thing many of us love about small-press poetry is that unlike most textual production, it’s not written under the weather eye of capitalist power or for material gain. The same generally goes for non- or pre-professional academic writing, so there’s at least one area of commonality for the dissertation-poem, an infrequent fusion whose Western origins nonetheless stretch back at least to Aratus and Nicander.

As a dissertation, this book excerpts in detail from a small number of classic studies: David Lockwood’sThe Blackcoated Worker(1958) on the culture and politics of clerks; Geoffrey Mortimer’sThe Blight of Respectability(1897) on respectability and villadom; MacKenzie and Silver’sAngels in Marble(1968) on working class conservatives; Ken Worpole’sDockers and Detectives(1983) on popular reading; and especially Richard Hoggart’sThe Uses of Literacy(1957) on the effects of manufactured mass culture.

What links them all is a loose thesis about the…