Diane di Prima (August 6, 1934 – October 25, 2020) was an American poet, known for her association with the Beat movement. She was also an artist, prose writer, and teacher. Her magnum opus is widely considered to be Loba, a collection of poems first published in 1978 then extended in 1998.
Di Prima spent the late 1950s and early 1960s in Manhattan, where she participated in the emerging Beat movement.[3]
She edited the newspaper The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)[4] and was co-founder of the New York Poets Theatre and founder of the Poets Press. On several occasions she faced charges of obscenity by the United States government due to her work with the New York Poets Theatre and The Floating Bear. In 1961 she was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for publishing two poems in The Floating Bear.[5][6] According to di Prima, police persistently harassed her due to the nature of her poetry.[7] In 1966, she spent some time at Millbrook with Timothy Leary‘s psychedelic community.[8]
From 1974 to 1997, di Prima taught poetry at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,[3] of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, sharing the program with fellow Beats Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman (co-founders of the program), William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and others.
In the late 1960s, di Prima moved permanently to California. There, she became involved with the Diggers and studied Buddhism, Sanskrit, Gnosticism, and alchemy. In 1966, she signed a vow of tax resistance to the Vietnam War.[9] In the 1970s, she published the collection Revolutionary Letters, influenced by her time with the Diggers.[6] At The Band’s famous Last Waltz concert in 1976, she read aloud from Revolutionary Letters and the one-line poem “Get Yer Cut Throat Off My Knife”.[6]
She published her major work, the long poem Loba, in 1978, with an enlarged edition in 1998. From the 1960s on she worked as a photographer and a collage artist, and in the last decade or so of her life she took up watercolor painting.
From 1980 to 1987, di Prima taught Hermetic and esoteric traditions in poetry, in a short-lived but significant Masters-in-Poetics program at New College of California,[10] which she established together with poets Robert Duncan and David Meltzer. She has also taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. She was one of the co-founders of San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts (SIMHA), where she taught Western spiritual traditions from 1983 to 1992.[11]
In 2009, di Prima became San Francisco’s poet laureate.[1]
“Diane Di Prima.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_di_Prima. Accessed 21 May 2022.
Links:
Get Your Cut Throat Off My Knife:
The Band – Get Yer Cut Throat Off My Knife / Revolutionary Letter #4 – 11/25/1976 (Official)
The Band – Get Yer Cut Throat Off My Knife / Revolutionary Letter #4 (Diane DiPrima)Recorded Live: 11/25/1976 – Winterland – San Francisco, CAMore The Band a…
The Last Waltz film trailer:
The Last Waltz – Trailer – (1978) – HQ
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Diane Di Prima reading from Revolutionary Letters:
diane di prima reads revolutionary letters #29 & #19
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American poet Diane di Prima gives reading onstage, Berkeley,…
American poet Diane di Prima gives reading onstage, Berkeley, California, March 1976. Get premium, high resolution news photos at Getty Images
American poet Diane di Prima (1934 – 2020) gives reading onstage, Berkeley, California, March 1976. (Photo by Janet Fries/Getty Images)
This is “Three: The Floating Bear” by Citizen Film on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.Three: The Floating Bear
This is “Three: The Floating Bear” by Citizen Film on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.