A Rare Voice

Diane di Prima (1934-2020)

Poet, memoirist, and activist Diane di Prima, who was born in Brooklyn and launched her writing career in New York City’s Greenwich Village, died October 25^th in San Francisco where she had lived and worked for over fifty years. She was 86. The author of This Bird Flies Backward (her first book) and Memoirs of a Beatnik, she penned over 40 books of poetry and prose, including the best-selling Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years. One of the few women writers associated with the Beat Movement, she co-founded the New York Poets Theater and the newsletter The Floating Bear with playwright LeRoi Jones (Amira Baraka), was befriended by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights imprint. Although suffering from Parkinson’s and arthritis in her later years, she managed to write up until a few weeks before her death by using a cell phone or dictating her work, her long-time partner, Sheppard Powell, told the L.A. Times (10/28/20).    

I remember the first time I heard her read from her poetry. It was in the early 1970s at a small publishing venue, Panjandrum Press, a few blocks from where I was living in San Francisco. I loved her presentation — confident, clear, and soft spoken. After hearing her read, I felt that we, the audience, had been gifted in the way that we’re gifted by the elemental sounds of a running stream or wind in the trees. There was nothing pretentious about her or her work, nothing felt forced or unnatural. I wouldn’t see her again until the early 80s, this time at the San Francisco Zen Center where she was teaching a one day workshop. Here, the class was down on the floor, practicing automatic writing and, as I remember, cutting up poems to rearrange them in unexpected ways. Later, in the 90s I heard her read once again, at City Lights Bookstore in North Beach. The room was packed and we were lucky to get seats. The occasion was the publication of her collection, Pieces of a Song (City Lights, 1990). Ferlinghetti was there, his blue eyes happily taking it all in, the crowd, the energy. Each poem was just right, belying the work that went into them, and they rolled off her tongue as if she was uttering them extemporaneously. I saw her a few more times after that, greeting people at a bookstore in San Rafael where a series of Tibetan Buddhist teachers was appearing. “You’re just an old hippie, aren’t you?” she asked me once, and I laugh thinking of that, now. How easy it was for her to break through the walls and find common ground, which is exactly what her poetry does. 

She took poetry out of the halls of academe and into the streets, the coffee houses, and the bookstores. Yet her work is informed by a wide range of knowledge and interests, including metaphysics, Sanskrit, and Buddhist philosophy (she was a practicing Buddhist), as well as her early study of Keats and Pound (she sought out Pound as a mentor while he was confined to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital). In 2009, as Poet Laureate of San Francisco, she read from her poem, “First Draft,” which still resonates today:

my vow is:

to remind us all

to celebrate

there is no time

too desperate

no season

that is not

A Season of Song

The New York Times has described Diane di Prima as “…a rare female voice in a male world…” while NPR has referred to her as “one of the most prominent voices of the Beat Generation.” She taught in the poetics programs at the Naropa Institute, the California College of Arts and Crafts, and the New College of California. Among her honors are the National Poetry Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award and an honorary doctorate from St. Lawrence University. Her most recent book, The Poetry Deal, was published by City Lights Foundation in 2014. In his review of that book in Poetry Flash, Brue Isaacson wrote that, “In principle and poetry, di Prima is all about people — loved ones, family, social observations of simple interactions that show larger truths.” Besides her husband, Sheppard Powell, she is survived by five children, four grandchildren, three great grandchildren, and two brothers, according to the L.A. Times.