Dinners and Nightmares

by Diane di Prima

(1961)

   Diane di Prima published her prose-and-shortstory volume Dinners and Nightmares when she was 27 years old, three years after her first poetry collection, This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards, appeared. Brooklyn-born di Prima had left Swarthmore College for the excitement of New York’s Greenwich Village, and the exuberance of starting a life among fellow struggling poets, artists, and musicians flows from her eclectic mixture of journal, dreams, dialogues, and poems. Poet robert creeley, in his introduction to the 1974 edition of Dinners and Nightmares, cites both the “clarity” and the sense of an artist still sifting and searching: “Growing up in the fifties, you had to figure it out for yourself—which she did, and stayed open—as a woman, uninterested in any possibility of static investment or solution.”

   Di Prima can be both starkly descriptive and surprisingly witty and funny. The book’s first section, “What I Ate Where,” is an honest prose depiction of the daily and domestic struggles of the starving artist: All artistic context in di Prima’s life takes a backseat to food. She remembers specific shared and spartan meals, as well as rare incidences of indulgence. Typical is an entry from “fall—1956” in which she recalls “garbage soup which was everything cheap thrown in a pot.” At times the meals take place in a group “pad,” but there are also times when home was a key to someone else’s “pad” where she was allowed to “crash” if she needed. There are 13 “Nightmares” and five “Memories of Childhood,” all written in di Prima’s casual, colloquial, (and often unpunctuated) style. Friends, lovers, and family members make appearances in the former, which a critic applauded as an exercise in “existential sarcasm.” “Memories” is an allegory of a young boy who is terrified that only he can see a warrior who stands ready in his neighborhood to drop an atomic bomb. The series of “Conversations” reflects a life of worthy companionship in the bohemian community, but it also plumbs the difficulties of poverty and inequality. In “The Quarrel” she rails silently to a lazy boyfriend about housework: “I’ve got work to do too sometimes,” she thinks to herself, “I am sick . . . of doing dishes.

   . . . Just because I happen to be a chick.” The final section, “More or Less Love Poems,” contains warm lyrics to lovers (perhaps real, perhaps invented) and ends with a welcome song to a soon-to-be-born baby. It is a mark of the young di Prima’s confidence in her artistic identity that she tells her child: “Sweetheart / when you break thru / you’ll find / a poet here.” Di Prima would go on to publish many acclaimed works of poetry.

   Amy L. Friedman