Diane DiPrima's "Rant"/and a Riposte called "Cant"

I've been thinking about the imagination lately. Apparently, the C.I.A./M.I. guys told the yokel M.P.s at Abu Ghraib to "use your imagination." That terrifies me, to think that the imagination can be harnessed as a force for absolute evil. In this poem, "Rant," DiPrima evokes William Blake's notion that all war is a failure of the imagination. Is imagination a "daimon," a power without necessarily being good or bad? Or is the imagination always a creative force, the opposite of war's decreations?

"Rant" by Diane DiPrima

You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology
a cosmogony
laid out, before all eyes

there is no part of yourself you can separate out
saying, this is memory, this is sensation
this is the work I care about, this is how I***
make a living

it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole
you do not "make" it so
there is nothing to integrate, you are a presence
you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from***
hangs from the heaven you create

every man / every woman carries a firmament inside
& the stars in it are not the stars in the sky

w/out imagination there is no memory
w/out imagination there is no sensation
w/out imagination there is no will, desire

history is a living weapon in yr hand
& you have imagined it, it is thus that you
"find out for yourself"
history is the dream of what can be, it is
the relation between things in a continuum

of imagination
what you find out for yourself is what you select
out of an infinite sea of possibility
no one can inhabit yr world

yet it is not lonely,
the ground of imagination is fearlessness
discourse is video tape of a movie of a shadow play
but the puppets are in yr hand
your counters in a multidimensional chess
which is divination
& strategy

the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it.

the ultimate famine is the starvation
of the imagination

it is death to be sure, but the undead
seek to inhabit someone else's world

the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism
the ultimate claustrophobia is "it all adds up"
nothing adds up & nothing stands in for***
anything else

THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT

There is no way out of a spiritual battle
There is no way you can avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher

you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics: you step into the world
like a suit of readymade clothes

or you etch in light
your firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves

A woman's life / a man's life is an allegory

Dig it

There is no way out of the spiritual battle
the war is the war against the imagination
you can't sign up as a conscientious objector

the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance
it is a war for this world, to keep it
a vale of soul-making

the taste in all our mouths is the taste of power
and it is bitter as death

bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself

the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you

The imagination is not only holy, it is precise
it is not only fierce, it is practical
men die everyday for the lack of it,
it is vast & elegant

intellectus means "light of the mind"
it is not discourse it is not even language
the inner sun

the polis is constellated around the sun
the fire is central

And what follows is a screed some crazy guy online named Dan Schneider who appears to love William F. Buckley, Jr., and his revision of the poem:

So, we see more needless repetition, your elided to yr without reason, poor line breaks, use of Latinisms to show off her smarts, etc. & so on, clichés aplenty, a dearth of music of any sort- this is really just a prose screed broken wantonly in to lines. Even worse is the capitalized section of this ‘Rant’- the idea & line are good & interesting- used once, in a sly way, at the end of a well-structured poem. But, beating you to death with the idea robs its power, &- as nothing comes of the idea- the reader is left hanging. Also DDP’s line ‘men die everyday for the lack of it’ is an unacknowledged crib & knock off of William Carlos Williams’ better line, ‘yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.’ from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, mainly because WCW’s line sticks out as a philosophic gem in a non-philosophic poem.

So, to improve the poem let’s 1st change 1 letter in the title- R to C, ‘Rant’ to ‘Cant’- which is a jargon, or the repetition of banalities- from which the poem- much trimmed- could play off of:

Cant

there is no part of yourself you can separate out

it is whole, it is a whole, it always was a presence
& you have imagined it, out of an infinite fearlessness

the war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed in it. the ultimate claustrophobia

is the syllogism in the consciousness of making

you etch in light your firmament
the shape of the poem, an allegory

you can't sign up as a conscientious objector

intellectus means "light of the mind"
it is not discourse it is not even language
constellated around the sun that is central


12 lines & the poem- while not really good- is worlds better than what preceded it. It is now an internal monologue of struggle with the self- not a new topic but the phrasing is what is key. This rewrite is wholly shrunken, save for a that I added to the last line. This version is passably interesting. But, DDP has only 5-10 poems in her career that are as good as this rewrite. She is a testament to the power of cronyism & the grant-giving gravy train. Ain’t art wonderful?