Di Prima was born in Brooklyn and attended Swarthmore College before dropping out to be a poet in Manhattan. Her official online biography notes that she is "a second generation American of Italian descent" and that "Her maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, was an active anarchist, and associate of Carlo Tresca and Emma Goldman."[1] Di Prima began writing as a child and by the age of 19 was corresponding with Ezra Pound and Kenneth Patchen. Her first book of poetry, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward was published in 1958 by Hettie and LeRoi Jones' Totem Press.
Involvement with the Beats
Di Prima spent the late 1950s and early 1960s in Manhattan, where she participated in the emerging Beat movement. She spent some time in California at Stinson Beach and Topanga Canyon, returned to New York City and eventually moved to San Francisco permanently. Di Prima was a bridge figure between the Beat movement and the later hippies, as well as between East Coast and West Coast artists. She edited The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and was co-founder of the New York Poets Theatre and founder of the Poets Press. In 1966, she spent some time at Millbrook with Timothy Leary's psychedelic community and printed the first two editions of "Psychodelic Prayers" by Leary in Spring 1966. In 1969, she wrote a fictionalized, erotic account detailing her experience in the Beat movement titled Memoirs of a Beatnik. In 2001, she published Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years.
Career
In the early 1970s, she moved to California, where she has lived ever since. Here, she became involved with the Diggers and studied Buddhism, Sanskrit, Gnosticism and alchemy. She also published her major work, the long poem Loba in 1978, with an enlarged edition in 1998. She is currently a writing teacher, and has published 35 books of poetry. Her selected poems, Pieces of a Song was published in 1990 and a memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, in 2001.
Personal life
Di Prima is the mother of five.
Bibliography
This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, Totem Press, New York, 1958
Dinners and Nightmares (short stories), Last Gasp, 1961
Poems for Freddie, 1966
War Poems (editor), Poets Press, New York, 1968
Memoirs of a Beatnik, Olympia Press, 1969 (reissued with new afterword, Penguin, 1988)
The Book of Hours, 1970
Selected Poems: 1956-1975, North Atlantic Books, Plainfield, 1975
Loba, Part II, Eidolon Editions, Point Reyes, 1976
Selected Poems: 1956-1976, North Atlantic Books, 1977
Loba, Parts 1-8, 1978
Revolutionary Letters, City Lights, 1971
Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems, City Lights, 1990
Recollections of My Life as a Woman The New York Years, Viking Press, NY, 2001
di Prima, Diane, and Jones, LeRoi [Imanu Amiri Baraka], eds. The Floating Bear, a newsletter: Numbers 1-37, 1961-1969. Introduction and notes adapted from interviews with Diane di Prima. La Jolla, California: Laurence McGilvery, 1973. ISBN 0910938547} (library binding)
di Prima, Diane . Recollections Of My Life As A Woman. Viking USA. (2001) ISBN 0-670-85166-3
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