Diane di prima biography definition

PERSONAL: Born August 6, , in Brooklyn, NY; daughter of Francis and Emma (Mallozzi) di Prima; married Alan S. Marlowe (an actor, model, and director), November 30, (divorced, ); married Grant Fisher (a poet), (divorced, ); children: Jeanne, Dominique, Alexander, Tara, Rudra. Education: Attended Swarthmore College, ; studied Zen Buddhism with Master Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi. Politics: "Anarchist." Religion: Buddhist.

ADDRESSES: Home— Castro St., San Francisco, CA Office—c/o Wingbow Press, West Seventh St., Berkeley, CA

CAREER: Poet, editor, and educator. Floating Bear (magazine), New York, NY, coeditor with LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka), , editor, ; Signal Magazine, associate editor, ; Poets Press, New York, NY, publisher and editor, ; Eidolon Editions, Point Reyes, CA, editor and publisher, ; formerly affiliated with Wingbow Press, Berkeley, CA. Naropa Institute School of Poetics, instructor, —; New College of California, San Francisco, CA, poetry instructor, ; instructor at California College of Arts and Crafts, , San Francisco Art Institute, , California Institute of Integral

Studies, , and Napa State Hospital. Director and cofounder, New York Poets Theatre, ; cofounder and instructor, San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts, ; cofounder, American Theatre for Poets; founder, Poets Institute.

AWARDS, HONORS: Grant from National Endowment for the Arts, ,

WRITINGS:

poetry

This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, Totem Press (New York, NY),

The Monster, Penny Poems (New Haven, CT),

The New Handbook of Heaven, Auerhahn (San Francisco, CA),

Unless You Clock In, Patchen Cards (Palo Alto, CA),

Combination Theatre Poem and Birthday Poem for Ten People, Brownstone Press (New York, NY),

Poems for Freddie, Poets Press (New York, NY) , published as Freddie Poems, Eidolon Editions (Berkeley, CA),

Some Haiku, Love Press (Topanga, CA),

Earthsong: Poems , edited by Alan S. Marlowe, Poets Press (

American poet (–)

Diane di Prima (August 6, &#;&#; October 25, ) 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 then extended in

Early life and education

Di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York, on August 6, She was a second generation American of Italian descent. Her father Francis was a lawyer, and her mother Emma (née Mallozzi) was a teacher. Her maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, was an activist and associated with anarchistsCarlo Tresca and Emma Goldman. Di Prima changed her last name from DiPrima to di Prima because she believed it better reflected her Italian ancestry.

She attended academically elite Hunter College High School where she became part of a small group of friends including classmate Audre Lorde who formed a sort of Dead Poets Society calling themselves "the Branded". They cut class to roam the city, hanging out in bookstores, sharing their own poetry and holding séances for dead poets.

Di Prima then went on to Swarthmore College before dropping out to be a poet in Manhattan. 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 by Hettie Jones and LeRoi Jones' Totem Press.

Career

Involvement with the Beats

Di Prima spent the late s and early s 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.

She edited the newspaper The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and was co-founder of the New York Poets Theatre an

Diane Di Prima

Diane Di Prima - a well known poetess and student of Shunryu Suzuki and Chogyam Trungpa

Diane di Prima and the Dream of the East Village Avant-Garde - The Nation, Nov. 24,

October 26, - RIP Diane Diprima

Just received this from Jeanne DiPrima: My mother passed this morning.  There will be a family statement tomorrow.  Sending love. 

from this Facebook post on the page for the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
thanks Arnie Kotler

Diane Di Prima (&#;)

Beloved friend & fiercest poet Diane Di Prima has died

&#;&#;Diane was here for the start of the year project that is Naropa, and even more crucially a decisive voice in American poetry & poetics, a voice in which poetry & poetics always implies political commitment to revolution
&#;&#;&#; we owe her a debt that can never be repaid, which is to say we owe her the debt of love and study and solidarity / memory eternal

&#;&#;&#;&#;from Revolutionary Letter #2"

The value of an individual life a credo they taught us to instill fear, and inaction, &#;you only live once&#; a fog in our eyes, we are endless as the sea, not separate, we diea million times a day, we are born a million times, each breath life and death :get up, put on your shoes, get started, someone will finish"

New York Times Obituary for Diane (thanks John Steiner and Linda Ruth Cutts)

Washington Post Obit

San Francisco Chronicle Obit - thanks sister Susan

NPR obit- thanks Daya

Diane di Prima on Wikipedia

January 20,

Dominique DiPrima posted the following on Twitter: Visiting my mom (Diane DiPrima) was a huge inspiration to start off ! She&#;s very sick and in a nursing home but she is busy writing and editing books plus reading and studyingNo excuses! It&#;s go time!!

See Alan Marlowe (an ex) page for more on Diane

See Jeanne DiPrima, Diane's oldest of 5.

***

Tassajara,

Even Buddha is lost i

how many days
you think I’ll let you go
cool’s not the word I’m after

i’ll slip a diamond
underneath my tongue
and you
can hunt it down

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, I can hear the cadence—how I recited the lines like a mantra. Inside notebooks, I wrote it for myself, delighted by 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 Dinners and Nightmares, in which this “more or less love poem” appears and which I’d found for sale in a box on the sidewalk, in the Lower Haight, in the summer of

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 liberal arts college in the cornfields of central Ohio. Over the course of the monochrome winter, under low, grey skies and over mucky, grey snow, we’d set our sights on California.

Articulate and beautiful, with dark hair then kept in a glamorous, if unfussy, bob, T was everything I was not. As if her presence alone was a kind of magic trick, she often found playing cards on our walks to town, conjuring the jack of spades from a crack in the pavement or the nine of clubs stuck in a mailbox. By contrast, I was earnest and uncertain, with tangled hair and no magical abilities. A pen forever in her pocket, T already knew she would become a writer. In this, too, I was inescapably Midwestern: eager to please and inclined to ramble with what I thought people expected to hear, and I couldn’t imagine having anything worthwhile to say. Until T lent me her copy of Diane di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik