di Prima and /

When I'm reading di Prima's poems, the way she uses slashes really jumps out at me. A lot of the time she just uses them for contractions, like w/out, which gives he poems an instruction-manual sense of straightforwardness and urgency. Other times she, uses it as a conjunction whose literal meaning isn't as clear. In "Revolutionary Letter # 75," for example, it seems at first to stand in for "and," like when she writes "every man / every woman carries the firmament inside." Later in the poem, we read "and no one can fight it but you / & no one can fight it for you." The forward slash is followed immediately by an ampersand, so it can be assumed that "and" is not the intended meaning. Similarly, "or" does not fit syntactically. "And" and "or" are the conjunctions most commonly replaced by a forward slash, so the reader has to wonder if the symbol represents a transition that cannot be adequately expressed by an english word. Personally, the slash reminds me of a line break in a transcription of a poem, which is funny because it occurs in a poem itself. The extra space on either side of the slash, a feature that is absent whenever di Prima uses "w/out," contributes to this effect.

In #75, the slash surrounded by space occurs mostly between man and woman. To me, this creates the impression of a widening gulf between genders, which seems almost out of place in a poem whose content does not seem particularly gendered, especially compared to some of her other work. It seems as if the words on the page play down the difference between genders at the same time that the typography reinforces it.

-John Griffoul