Diane di Prima, Pioneering Feminist Beat poet and activist, dies at 86

I am saddened to write that Diane di Prima, lifelong  feminist poet, activist and teacher who was one of the last surviving members of the Beats and one of the few women writers in the Beat movement, has died at age 86.

Di Prima's longtime partner Sheppard Powell told The Associated Press that di Prima had been in failing health and died Sunday in San Francisco General Hospital. She had Parkinson;s disease and the autoimmune disorder Sjogren's disorder.She had been writing poems almost to the end of her life, even as her arthritic hands forced her to dictate some to Powell.

 Di Prima was known for her epic 1978 multi-part poem “Loba,” referred to at times as a feminist counterpart to Allen Ginsberg's “Howl!” which was,dedicated to a wolf goddess – spending over 100 pages exploring what it’s like to be female, moving chronologically through the phases of womanhood, from youth through childbirth and motherhood.

  

“How was woman broken?

Falling out of attention.

Wiping gnarled fingers on a faded housedress.

Lying down in the puddle beside the broken jug.

Where was the slack, the loss

of early fierceness?

How did we come to be contained

in rooms?”

 She is also remembered  for the anthology “Pieces of a Song";  and for her controversial,  fictionalized and explicit “Memoirs of a Beatnik” inspired by her experiences with the Beats  and for the autobiography “Recollections of My Life as a Woman.” During the Band's farewell concert in 1976 at the Fillmore in San Francisco, the basis for Martin Scorsese's documentary “The Last Waltz,” she got on stage  and read a one line poem, "Get Yer Cut Throat Off My Knife," before going into "Revolutionary Letter #4":

Left to themselves people

grow their hair.

Left to themselves they

take off their shoes.

Left to themselves they make love

sleep easily

share blankets, dope & children

they are not lazy or afraid

they plant seeds, they smile, they

speak to one another. The word

coming into its own: touch of love;

on the brain, the ear.

 

Di Prima was  born August 6, 1934, in Brooklyn, New York, the only daughter and eldest child of Francis and Emma di Prima. Her maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, was an active anarchist, and associate of Carlo Tresca and Emma Goldman. She began writing at the age of seven, and committed herself to a life as a poet at the age of fourteen,  with enough literary talent and precocity to be corresponding with Ezra Pound in her late teens,and thereafter visited him regularly in a psychiatric hospital in Washington. . 

Di Prima attended Hunter College High School in New York City, where she began writing. In 1951, she went to Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, but dropped out two years later to join the bohemian community in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village,  then alive with jazz musicians, writers and counterculture artists. where she became a member of the Beat movement and developed friendships with John Ashberry, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Denise Levertov, and Frank O'Hara, among others.

She was set on learning from writers she respected – most of whom were men in an age when women were prevented from achieving true artistic freedom.

 

 “However great your visioning and your inspiration, you need the techniques of the craft,” she reflected in an interview in the 1980s. “They are passed on person to person, and back then the male naturally passed them on to the male. I think I was one of the first women to break through that.”

 

In the 1950s and ‘60s, she divided her time between New York and California, and became lovers with Amira Baraka, https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2014/01/amiri-bakara-leroi-jones-b71034.html who was calling himself LeRoi Jones at the time. In a 2017 interview with The Washington Post, she recalled that some of her fellow Beats were interested in her for reasons other than poetry.

 

"Jack (Kerouac) wanted me to hang out because everyone was gay and I was straight," she said. “He was probably hoping to get laid later.”

 

She and Jones helped found the New York Poets Theatre, a leading avant-garde venue in the early ’60s, and co-edited the literary newsletter The Floating Bear,  (1961-1969). In 1966 she moved to upstate New York where she participated in Timothy Leary’s psychedelic community at Millbrook.In 1964, di Prima, along with her first husband Alan Marlowe, founded the Poets Press, which published books by David Henderson, Clive Matson, Herbert Huncke, and Audre Lourde, who had gone to high school with di Prima, and for years taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in Boulder, Colorado. She also co-founded the New York Poets Theatre and founded Eidolon Editions and the Poets Institute. A follower of Buddhism, she also co-founded the San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts.

Di Prima’s poetry mixed stream-of-consciousness with attention to form and joined politics to spiritual practice. In an interview with Jacket magazine, di Prima spoke about her life as a writer, a mother, and an activist.

 

 “I wanted everything—very earnestly and totally—I wanted to have every experience I could have, I wanted everything that was possible to a person in a female body, and that meant that I wanted to be mother.… So my feeling was, ‘Well’—as I had many times had the feeling—‘Well, nobody’s done it quite this way before but fuck it, that’s what I’m doing, I’m going to risk it.’” 

 

 In San Francisco, she became a member of the Diggers, a  group of anti-capitalist activists and actors who collected food for the lost souls who wandered Haight-Ashbury.  Like many of her male peers, di Prima was a free thinker, a political activist and a target for government censorship. The FBI arrested her in 1961 on obscenity charges (They were later dismissed) and she would allege that was frequently harassed by law enforcement officers. She opposed the Vietnam War in the 1960s.When pressed on her political leanings, she allowed she was likely an anarchist, much like her grandmother.

Ginsberg openly praised this same radical bent in di Prima’s work: 

 

 “Diane di Prima, revolutionary activist of the 1960s Beat literary renaissance, heroic in life and poetics: a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated and twentieth-century radical, her writing, informed by Buddhist equanimity, is exemplary in imagist, political and mystical modes. … She broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity.”

 

She was together with Powell for more than 40 years and had learned enough before him to decide they were better off never marrying. She had been married twice, divorced twice and had five children with four different men, including Jones. She was a nonconformist down to her last name, spelling it "di Prima," in honor of her Italian ancestors, even as other family members capitalized the “D.” 

Di Prima's legacy is impressive, even though little known to thee general public, including many Beat devotees. She authored more than thirty collections of poetry, as well as plays, short stories, novels, nonfiction, and more. She received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. In 2009, she was named the poet laureate of San Francisco, and in 2006 received the  Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achieivement and community service.At the press conference where she was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco, she told thee crowd about a dream she'd had that showed her how all the work was ever witten was part of the same big piece that "cuts through time and cuts through space, and we have no idea what it is - it is wonderful and large." Her deepest service, she added, was to poetry and to humans. 

 

Her final collection of poems, “The Poetry Deal,” was published in 2014. As often was the case, City Lights was her publisher. Di Prima continued to write until weeks before her death, though her arthritis forced her to use a stylus on a cellphone to write. Sometimes, Powell said, she’d dictate her verse, often to him. She is survived by Powell, two brothers, five children, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

A truly remarkable poet and activist and pioneer who broke through boundaries of class and gender to publish her writing, Di Prima's messages about non-conformity and the importance of imagination are more important than ever, says her daughter. And her poetry has gained a new resonance as new resonance as a new generation of activists takes to the streets to protest racism, fascism and police brutality. Her  life and works should be explored and celebrated alongside those of her peers, and coveted for their unapologetic examination of what it was like to be a female in a frequently hostile and stifling environment. Forever a free spirit,  a life lived with revolutionary passion. Rest in Power Diane di Prima.