Diane diPrima workshop, June 8-10, 1979, San Francisco Zen Center, journal

June 8-10, 1979, San Francisco Zen Center, Diane diPrima workshop journal notes.

Diane began the writing workshop with a visualization, she said to relax and let the imagery flow. We could either be in a prone position, or sit in a meditation triangle. We were asked to write down 30-second takes, haiku-like, and to use them but to rely upon all our senses. She asked us to try visualizations of our dreams.

She pulled out some tarot cards, and said that dreams of love and aggression, death and flying, and falling are your victories. Ask to see the spirit behind the mask. Bring back a dream song. Bring back a balance between the dream world and the real world. If you grow fatigued, retrace your steps before waking.

We played games of chance. She said to use pieces of articles, random cut-ups, she said to pick out phrases and re-combine them with new work. Or mix them up with old poems.

She also asked us to to word-gamble with dice. Take six books, then roll the dice for a stanza, roll for words, roll for images, roll for found sentences. We slammed down the liar’s cup and called it poetry.

She told us to collect objects that tell stories, we met in groups and wrote a composite poem from each of them.

She also suggested creating collective verse where we all share in the process.

She asked us, what am I? Each line is a separate take.

She reads from her own work and she reads from Frank O’Hara. I love Frank O’Hara’s poems.

We work towards disjointedness and let our fantasies play.

Using the Alastair Crowley tarot deck, I drew the universe and wrote about a dappled gray horse coming in from the sea. The horse was carrying armor of a human but it was empty inside and they were cobwebs across the eyeholes. The wind blew through the armor with a hollow lonely sound.

The horse said, My name is Equus. I told him he wasn’t my God, nor was he my myth. He said I am your God. I always have been since you were a child and you’ve ridden upon my back. I thought of the Welsh hobbyhorse with the horse’s skull, the ghost mare, the Mari Lwyd.

I unmasked the stallion. I peeled away his flesh to find his bloody face, and another layer. l breathed on it—it was the face of a white wooden horse beneath the third layer, the skull beneath the fourth layer was bleached white and in the eye sockets and the spaces between the nostrils was a scenic landscape of Drake’s Estero in Point Reyes. I wanted to ride the red mare.

I followed him down the pathway to the valley below, to the river, to the sea. I left my red mare behind on the hill underneath the pine tree and left the red amanita undisturbed.

When we reached the end of the rise that followed the pale strand, we took a canoe across to the other side. The horse had become a knight in armor who was prone, on his back, either dead, or gazing skyward. The shore and the hills became surreal as if I had become the landscape and I could taste the green, the blue, the shimmering sea.

6/8/1979

▼  June (most of the poems came from her workshop)