Times and Spaces Never Dreamed of in Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters

Abstract

Earlier in the poem she asserts the revolutionary “need to know laws of time & space / they never dream of ” (76) as alternative cosmologies that will “outflank” and “short circuit” repressive forces. Di Prima’s cosmology is constructed from the materiality of everyday life, including the temporary spaces of the body and the home; it is neither eternal nor outside the simultaneously entropic and fertile narratives of the material and natural world of living things and their spatial relationships. In di Prima’s world, the private locations, traditionally constructed as the preserve of the biological family, become increasingly public and reconstructed as “revolutionary spaces.” The poem’s ambitions are not, however, limited to the domestic. On a larger scale, Revolutionary Letters produces a sense of the American nation through the histories of land ownership and inhabitation. This narrative is further contextualized within a political world of revolution and activism, and the poem provides a counter history, as well as po-