As an impulsive book-buyer, I’ve been growing my poetry collection recently. I never got it as a student, potentially because my high school teacher insisted that all poems had “homoerotic undertones” which my uncracked egg of a brain couldn’t quite fathom. But, I recently started to enjoy giving into the rhythm and emotional range of poetry.
One day at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, I picked up Diane di Prima’s “The Poetry Deal” published 3 years after her tenure as San Francisco’s poet laureate. Given the bookstore’s history in the Beat Movement, I took my usual approach to approaching a new genre: peruse the shelves for a female poet. When reading “The Poetry Deal,” I became so enthralled by the works from her Revolutionary Letters series that I bought the collection during my next visit.
The central question of whose interest science serves, posed by di Prima in “Revolutionary Letter #63”, resonated as an emergent theme in the few months I’ve worked on QSL. I thought I’d share the poem with you as well as reshare some relevant pieces to spark further thought on this theme.