Di Prima, Diane

DI PRIMA, DIANE (1934-2020). The foremost woman of the Beat poets and writers, Diane di Prima influenced radical readers for more than a half century. She was born in Brooklyn. Her father was an attorney, her mother a teacher. Her grandfather Domenico Mallozzi lived with the family and died when di Prima was eleven. An Italian-American immigrant, anarchist and tailor, a close friend to Carlo Tresca and a writer for Tresca’s newspaper Il Martello, Mallozzi exerted a great influence upon her. A soap box speaker in a nearby park, he also imbued her with memories of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Lawrence Strike, Emma Goldman and the assassination of Carlo Tresca. He also encouraged her to read Dante, Giordano Bruno and Machiavelli. Di Prima attended Hunter High School and Swarthmore College, where she had planned to major in physics. Deciding to become a writer instead, she dropped out and moved into an East Village flat. She worked as a file clerk in a Wall Street office, at an electronics lab at Columbia University, in bookstores, and posed nude for art students.

At nineteen, di Prima had corresponded with Kenneth Patchen and Ezra Pound. In 1956, already a bohemian in the Lower East Side, she met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, soon to be labeled the great Beat Generation writers. Her first daughter was born in 1957, and she began to work with mimeographs, including the typing, mimeoing, and collating scrips for plays by local playwrights. This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards, her first book, was published in 1958 by the Totem Press of Hettie and LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), which also published Ginsberg and Kerouac.

Active in the “Mimeograph Revolution” of self-publishing poets and determined to have her own offset press. Di Prima began publishing Floating Bear with Jones in 1961-1963. The Post Office seized issue #9, and the FBI charged the two with obscenity over a William Burroughs piece. In 1961, di Prima worked with the Living Theater to start the New York Poets theater. In 1962 a daughter was born to di Prima and Jones.

In 1964, di Prima founded Poets Press, publishing works by books by Audre Lord, David Henderson and Herbert Huncke among others. She abandoned New York for the Catskills in1966, and even spent some time at Millbrook, N.Y. in Timothy Leary’s commune. In desperate need of money and raising her children by herself, di Prima appealed to Maurice Girodias at Olympia Press in Paris, noted for publishing books with sexual content censored in the United States. Memoirs of a Beatnik (1968) was a sensation and sold well, in no small part because laws had been overturned for the US publication of Henry Miller’s book Tropic of Cancer (1961) Knowing that sex sells, Girondias had returned di Prima’s manuscript, demanding "more sex!” The result, as she often said later, had been filled out with fictive “recollections.”

Di Prima and a caravan of friends had left in 1967 for the West Coast in a VW bus, stopping to do readings in universities, galleries, and bars. Her most circulated work, Revolutionary Letters, was inspired by the political and cultural uprisings of the day, and she gave readings from it amidst political events of various kinds and at peace demonstrations with the Diggers. She sent excerpts to Liberation News Service, passing them in turn on to their more than 200 Underground newspaper subscribers and she also sent them to the New Left magazine Radical America. Revolutionary Letters went through repeated transformations from spoken word to mimeoed book to a book publication by City Lights in 1971, expanded later in a second edition. After the early 1970s, di Prima largely turned away from political issues, but continued to read her poetry at left cultural events including the San Francisco anarchist book festivals.

Di Prima’s staunchly independent voice rang out throughout her life, as she spoke, taught and wrote more than fifty books. Most were published by alternative presses until Recollections of My Life as a Woman (1993). Sheppard Powell was di Prima's longest relationship, an artist turned filmmaker who documented di Prima’s talks. Her “Memorial Day,” written in 2003, begins with the Preface: “Today is Memorial Day. Take time to remember those brave souls who gave their lives for freedom” and goes on,“Dear Abby, Remember Sacco & Vanzetti, Remember Haymarket, Remember John Brown, Remember the slave revolts, Remember Malcolm........”Alan Golding, professor of English at the University of Louisville, home to one of her archives, said of di Prima, “What I value about her presence in the poetry world is her energy, her activism, her commitment to a sort of democratic poetics, getting poetry out to a lot of people and a lot of different kinds of people."

Diane di Prima Archived Website. https://web.archive.org/web/20130307183607/http://dianediprima.com/

Diane di Prima Papers. Archives Catalog. University Libraries. University of Louisville. https://archivescatalog.library.louisville.edu/repositories/2/resources/517

Diane Di Prima Papers, 1955-2008. Collection Overview. Rare Book Literary and Historical Papers. University Libraries. University of North Carolina. https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/12002/