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
Copyright © 2020 by Cedar Sigo. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 30, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
“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