Diane di Prima

Diane di Prima in 2004. Photo by Gloria Graham. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Diane di Prima (born August 6, 1934) is an American poet.

Life

Youth

Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her official online biography notes that she is "a second generation American of Italian descent" and that "Her maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, was an active anarchist, and associate of Carlo Tresca and Emma Goldman."

Di Prima began writing as a child, and by the age of 19 was corresponding with Ezra Pound and Kenneth Patchen. She attended Hunter College High School and Swarthmore College before dropping out to be a poet in Manhattan.

Career

Di Prima spent the late 1950s and early 1960s in Manhattan, where she participated in the emerging Beat movement. She spent some time in California at Stinson Beach and Topanga Canyon, returned to New York City and eventually moved to San Francisco permanently. Di Prima was a bridge figure between the Beat movement and the later hippies, as well as between East Coast and West Coast artists.

Her debut collection of poetry, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward was published in 1958 by Hettie and LeRoi Jones' Totem Press. She edited The Floating Bear with LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and was co-founder of the New York Poets Theatre and founder of the Poets Press.

In the late 1960s, she moved permanently to California, where she has lived ever since. Here, Di Prima became involved with the Diggers and studied Buddhism, Sanskrit, Gnosticism and alchemy. In 1966 she signed a vow of tax resistance to protest the war in Vietnam.

n 1966, she spent some time at Millbrook with Timothy Leary's psychedelic community and printed the 1st 2 editions of Psychedelic Prayers by Leary in Spring 1966. In 1969, she wrote a fictionalized, erotic account detailing her experience in the Beat movement titled Memoirs of a Beatnik.

From 1974 to 1997, Di Prima taught Poetry at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, sharing the program with fellow Beats Allen Ginsberg (Co-founder of the program), William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and others.

She also published her major work, the long poem Loba, in 1978, with an enlarged edition in 1998. Her selected poems, Pieces of a Song, were published in 1990. In 2001, she published a prose memoir Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York years.

Di Prima has authored nearly 4 dozen books, with her work translated into more than 20 languages. In 2009, Di Prima was named the Poet Laureate of San Francisco. A movement is currently underway to have a street in the city named in her honor.

Di Prima is the mother of 5 children, Jeanne Di Prima, Dominique Di Prima, Alex Marlowe, Tara Marlowe, and Rudi Di Prima.

Publications

Poetry

• This Kind of Bird Flies Backward. New York: Totem Press, 1958; New York: Paperback Gallery, 1963.
• Poet's Vaudeville. New York: Freed Folly Press, 1964.
• Hotel Albert: Poems. New York: Poets Press, 1968.
• Earthsong: Poems, 1957-1959. New York: Poets Press, 1969.
• The Book of Hours. San Francisco: Brownstone Press, 1970.
• I Am No Good at Pleading. San Francisco, CA: Tenth Muse, 1971.
• Freddie Poems. Point Reyes, CA: Eidolon Editions, 1974.
• Loba as Eve. New York: Phoenix Book Shop, 1975.
• Selected Poems, 1956-1975. Plainfield, VT: North Atlantic Books, 1975.
  • revised as Selected Poems: 1956-1976. Plainfield, VT: North Atlantic Books, 1977.
• Loba, Part II. Point Reyes, CA: Eidolon Editions, 1976.
• Loba, Parts I-VIII. Berkeley, CA: Wingbow Press, 1978.
• Pieces of a Song: Selected poems. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1990.
• Seminary Poems. Point Reyes Station, CA: Floating Island, 1991.
• Loba. New York: Penguin, 1998.
• Towers Down: Notes toward a poem of revolution. San Francisco: Eidolon Editions, 2002.

Plays

• ZipCode: The collected plays of Diane di Prima. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1992.

Novel

• Memoirs of a Beatnik. New York: Olympia Press, 1969.

Short fiction

• Various Fables from Various Places. New York: Putnam, 1960.
• Dinners and Nightmares. New York: Corinth Books, 1961; San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp, 1998.

Non-fiction

• Revolutionary Letters, etc. San Francisco: City Lights, 1971.
• Recollections of My Life as a Woman The New York years. New York: Viking Press, 2001.

Translated

• Seven Love Poems from the Middle Latin. New York: Poets Press, 1965

Edited

• War Poems. New York: Poets Press, 1968.

Journals

• Kerhonkson Journal, 1966. Berkeley, CA: Oyez, 1971.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Diane Di Prima - Revolutionary Letters, 1969

5 Poems by Diane Di Prima

See also

• The Beat poets
• List of U.S. poets

References

• Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk)
• di Prima, Diane, and Jones, LeRoi [Imanu Amiri Baraka], eds. The Floating Bear, a newsletter: Numbers 1-37, 1961-1969. Introduction and notes adapted from interviews with Diane di Prima. La Jolla, California: Laurence McGilvery, 1973.
• di Prima, Diane . Recollections Of My Life As A Woman. Viking USA. (2001) ISBN 0-670-85166-3

External links

Poems

• "Song for Spring Equinox," Paris Review
• Diane di Prima at the Beat Page.
• Diane di Prima b. 1934 at the Poetry Foundation

Audio / video

• Diane di Prima at YouTube
• Diane di Prima at Vimeo

Books

• Diane di Prima at Amazon.com
• Works by or about Diane di Prima in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

About

• Diane di Prima in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Diane di Prima at the American Museum of Beat Art
• Diane di Prima Official Website.
• Interview with Diana Di Prima on Modern Paganism from RE/Search
• 1992 Interview with di Prima

Etc.

• Di Prima Papers at University of Louisville
• Diane Di Prima Papers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• "Add-Verse" a poetry-photo-video project di Prima participated in