Diane di prima biography of donald
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San Francisco’s Diane di Prima is dead at 86: she decided to be a poet at 14, and wrote every day for the rest of her life.
Onstage in 2013 at Stanford
Beat poet Diane di Prima died today after long illness at 86. She was born in Brooklyn, a second-generation American of Italian descent. She went to Swarthmore, then Greenwich Village, and joined Timothy O’Leary’s community in upstate New York, made a lifetime move to San Francisco. She published more than 40 books, including This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards, Revolutionary Poems, and the semi-autobiographical Memoirs of a Beatnik. Seven years ago, she came to Stanford to read her poems and have one of the legendary “How I Write” onstage conversations with Hilton Obenzinger. Below, she and Hilton relax before the November 6, 2013, event. You can listen to the recording of the conversation over at iTunes “How I Write” (it’s #53) here.
His recollections of the conversation • how many days i’ll slip a diamond The summer I was eighteen, I copied this Diane di Prima poem down so many times that now, thirty years later, I not only still have it memorized, inom can hear the cadence—how inom recited the lines like a mantra. Inside notebooks, I wrote it for myself, delighted bygd the sensuality and the anticipation. Along the backs of envelopes, I sent it to boys I hoped would be, too. Either way, I was flaunting my new, used first edition of di Prima’s 1961 Dinners and Nightmares, in which this “more or less love poem” appears and which I’d funnen for sale in a kartong on the sidewalk, in the Lower Haight, in the summer of 1994. I moved to San Francisco that June to follow a friend, T, whom I’d met the previous fall, in our first year at a tiny, chaotic • Revisiting the Beat luminary's radical life and work Memoirs of a Beatnik THE POET DIANE DI PRIMA faces serious health problems, including Parkinson’s disease, the loss of her teeth, and a degenerative failure of vision brought on by glaucoma. The 78-year-old Beat legend continues treatments for these and other health-related problems while her partner, Sheppard Powell, recovers from a liver transplant performed earlier this year. Di Prima’s poetry student, the actress Amber Tamblyn, created a fund to help defray the former poet laureate of San Francisco’s medical expenses and has raised nearly $25,000, thanks in part to the support of the Poetry Foundation. In October, Just Buffalo Literary Center, a community-focused literary organization in Buffalo, New York, staged a benefit featuring di Prima’s 1960 absurdist play Murder Cake. Recently, the Center for the Humanities at CUNY has publi Revisiting the Radical Presence of Diane di Prima
you think I’ll let you go
cool’s not the word I’m after
underneath my tongue
and you
can hunt it downGiving Everything: On Diane di Prima
Recollections of My Life as a Woman