Diane Di Prima Papers

Diane Di Primais best known for her work as a Beat poet and writer, but she is also distinguished as a feminist and civil rights supporter. Born on August 6, 1934 in Brooklyn, New York, Di Prima is the only daughter and eldest child of Francis and Emma Di Prima. Di Prima's maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozi, was an active anarchist and friend of Carlo Tresca, the famed Italian anarchist and advocate of workers rights. Mallozi's influence on his granddaughter is evident in her life and her work. In 1962, Di Prima married her first husband, writer Alan Marlowe, whom she divorced in 1969. In 1972 she married Grant Fisher whom she divorced in 1975. Di Prima is the mother of five children: Jeanne, Dominique, Alexander, Tara, and Rudra.

Because her parents were college educated, Di Prima was afforded educational opportunities that many middle-class Americans, male or female, did not during this era. It was at the prestigious Hunter College High School in New York City that she began writing. Following high school, she attended Swarthmore College for two years until 1953 when she left to immerse herself in the Bohemian lifestyle of lower Manhattan's Greenwich Village. The confluence of artistic energies in Greenwich Village provided Di Prima a setting to inspire her writing to which by now she had devoted her full attention. She is an associate of Audre Lord, Ezra Pound, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Le Roi Jones, and Timothy Leary.

Beat writers and artists, dissatisfied with the status-quo during the 1950s, distrusted authority figures and challenged cultural norms throughout their lives in an effort to promote personal freedom. The Beats experimented with new ways of thinking, medicated states, and lifestyles to enhance their understanding of the world. Di Prima by her own account experimented with drugs. She participated in former Harvard professor Timothy Leary's Millbrook, New York LSD experimentation in 1966.

Many Beat luminaries encountered difficulties with the law and the government. Diane Di Prima was no exception. She personally faced charges of obscenity on multiple occasions by the United States government concerning her work through the New York Poets Theatre and the newspaper The Floating Bear. Di Prima was initially co-editor of The Floating Bear from 1961-1963 with Le Roi Jones. From 1963-1969, she was the sole editor of the influential underground newspaper in Greenwich Village. In 1961, Di Prima was arrested by the FBI for alleged obscenity of two poems published in The Floating Bear. The case was thrown out by a grand jury. The New York Poets Theatre, an art theatre she co-founded with choreographer James Warring, operated for four seasons from 1961-1965. In 1963, The Poets Theatre was implicated in an obscenity case involving Jean Genet's movie, Chant d'Armou. She and Warring fought the government's charges. Again, Di Prima won her obscenity case against the United States. By her own accounts, she was consistently harassed by the law enforcement concerning the content of her work.

Di Prima, along with husband Alan Marlowe, founded the Poets Press in New York City (1964-1969). They designed, printed, and published books by various contemporaries. Poets Press published the first books by Audre Lord, Di Prima's high school classmate, David Henderson, Clive Matson, and Herbert Huncke. By the end of the 1960s, Di Prima moved to the west coast to continue her writing. She became involved in a commune known as the "Diggers" who provided free-food to anyone in need. She also became a follower of Zen priest Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in San Francisco. This fostered her spirituality and her studies in eastern religion.

In 1958, Di Prima published her first book of poetry, This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards. She is perhaps most well-known for her later works. Memoirs of a Beatnik, published in 1969, described her experiences as part of the Beat culture in 1950s New York. Revolutionary Letters, a series of poems in the form of letters published in 1971 concern Di Prima's thoughts on her counter-culture beliefs. Loba, published in 1973 is a mythological poem concerning a strong female protagonist with feminist, pagan, and natural world themes. This is widely considered to be her best work.

From 1971 to 1975, Di Prima traveled extensively for the Poetry-in-the-Schools program sponsored by the National Endowment on the Arts. She taught students ranging from elementary to college level. Since then, Di Prima has taught poetry primarily at the New College of California as well as the Naropa Institute for writing in Boulder, Colorado. She was one of the founders of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa in 1974. In 1980, Di Prima was a co-founder and core faculty member of the Masters in Poetics Program at New College of California. Writing, as she states, is her life and she has been teaching writing techniques since the 1960s. The techniques that she teaches are similarly unique like much of her life. Di Prima encourages experimentation amongst her students in expanding their minds. This is in an effort to relate more closely to the earth, to the past, and to themselves.