Diane di Prima

Diane di Prima, photo by Gloria Graham during the video taping of Add-Verse, 2004

Diane Di Prima^{[clarification needed]} (born August 6, 1934) is an American poet.

Biography

Early life

Di Prima was born in Brooklyn. She attended Hunter College High School and Swarthmore College before dropping out to be a poet in Manhattan. 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."^[1] Di Prima began writing as a child and by the age of 19 was corresponding with Ezra Pound and Kenneth Patchen. Her first book of poetry, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward was published in 1958 by Hettie and LeRoi Jones' Totem Press.

Involvement with the Beats

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. She edited The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and was co-founder of the New York Poets Theatre and founder of the Poets Press. In 1966, she spent some time at Millbrook with Timothy Leary's psychedelic community and printed the first two editions of "Psychodelic 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 Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and others. In 2001, she published Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years.

Career

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.^[2] 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, was published in 1990 and a memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, in 2001. She is also a prose writer, memoirist, playwright, social justice activist and teacher. Di Prima has authored nearly four 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. ^[3]

Personal life

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

Bibliography

• This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, Totem Press, New York, 1958
• Dinners and Nightmares (short stories), Corinth Books, 1961 (reissued Last Gasp, 1998)
• Seven Love Poems from the Middle Latin (translations), The Poets Press, 1965
• Poems for Freddie, 1966
• War Poems (editor), Poets Press, New York, 1968
• Memoirs of a Beatnik, Olympia Press, 1969 (reissued with new afterword, Last Gasp, 1988)
• The Book of Hours, 1970
• Selected Poems: 1956-1975, North Atlantic Books, Plainfield, 1975
• Loba, Part II, Eidolon Editions, Point Reyes, 1976
• Selected Poems: 1956-1976, North Atlantic Books, 1977
• Loba, Parts 1-8, 1978
• Revolutionary Letters, City Lights, 1971
• Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems, City Lights, 1990
• Recollections of My Life as a Woman The New York Years, Viking Press, NY, 2001

Notes

1. ^ Biography of Diane di Prima.
2. ^ http://triptych.brynmawr.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=%2FSC_Ephemera&CISOPTR=1585
3. ^ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/cityinsider/detail?blogid=55&entry_id=56101

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. ISBN 0910938547} (library binding)
• di Prima, Diane . Recollections Of My Life As A Woman. Viking USA. (2001) ISBN 0-670-85166-3

External links

• Diane di Prima Official Website
• Works by or about Diane di Prima in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Di Prima Papers at University of Louisville
• Diane Di Prima Papers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Interview with Diana Di Prima on Modern Paganism from RE/Search
• "Add-Verse" a poetry-photo-video project di Prima participated in
• 1992 Interview with di Prima

Persondata
Name	Di Prima, Diane
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Date of birth	August 6, 1934
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Date of death
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