Diane di Prima

Diane di Prima (6 August 1934 – 25 October 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.

Diane di Prima in 2004

Quotes from Diane di Prima

• I wanted everything — very earnestly and totally — I wanted to have every experience I could have, I wanted everything that was possible to a person in a female body, and that meant that I wanted to be mother. ... So my feeling was, 'Well' — as I had many times had the feeling — 'Well, nobody's done it quite this way before but fuck it, that’s what I'm doing, I'm going to risk it.
  • Interview with Jacket magazine, quoted on Poetry Foundation's 'Diane di Prima' biography

• I decided I didn't want to live with a man. My family experience of growing up made me think that living with men wasn't a nice idea. I had lots of lovers, and I asked people if they wanted to father a kid, and everybody thought I was insane, and finally I didn't ask — I just got pregnant and had Jeanne.
  • In conversation with San Francisco poet David Meltzer, quoted in Los Angeles Review of Books

Poetry

Revolutionary Letters

• I have just realized that the stakes are myself
  I have no other
  • Excerpt from "Revolutionary Letter #1"

• get up, put on your shoes, get
  started, someone will finish
  • Excerpt from "Revolutionary Letter #2"

• Left to themselves people
  grow their hair.
  Left to themselves they
  take off their shoes.
  Left to themselves they make love
  sleep easily
  share blankets, dope & children
  they are not lazy or afraid
  they plant seeds, they smile, they
  speak to one another.
  
  • Excerpt from "Revolutionary Letter #4"

• avoid the folk
  who find Bonnie and Clyde too violent
  • Excerpt from "Revolutionary Letter #6"

• but don’t get uptight : the guns
  will not win this one, they are
  an incidental part of the action
  which we better damn well be good at,
  what will win
  is mantras, the sustenance we give each other,
  the energy we plug into

(the fact that we touch

share food)

the buddha nature

of everyone, friend and foe, like a million earthworms
tunnelling under this structure
till it falls

• • Excerpt from "Revolutionary Letter #7"

• NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us
  shoving at the thing from all sides
  to bring it down.
  • Excerpt from "Revolutionary Letter #8"

Quotes about Diane di Prima

• Diane di Prima, revolutionary activist of the 1960s Beat literary renaissance, heroic in life and poetics: a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated and twentieth-century radical, her writing, informed by Buddhist equanimity, is exemplary in imagist, political and mystical modes [...] She broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity.
  • Allen Ginsberg, quoted on poets.org 'Diane di Prima' biography

• For six decades, her writing confronted the traditional stereotypes of the female body, how it should look, weigh, and be desired. She was, to my eye, the real sexual liberator of the sixties — a woman who wrote dangerously, lived wildly, and loved daringly, right up to her very last breath. [...] Diane di Prima knew firsthand what it was like to make a seat for herself at tables that had no space for women like her — women who challenged the system, and who thrived in the act. She was always in coalition with such women, and you can hear echoes of her work in the "fight the patriarchy" slogans of modern feminism. She ... was raised by the women in her mother’s family to understand that men are just "a luxury," not a necessity for women's survival. To survive in this world as a woman, she learned, was to live in a state of insurgency, and to make peace with that fact. ... She saw herself as a weapon to be deployed — no, detonated — against her oppressors. She wrote about the equality of the sexes. She wrote about women as wolves, women as predators, as hunters, as villains. She wrote about fat women, queer women, androgynous women, disobedient women, women as Gods, as birds, as the wind.
  • Amber Tamblyn, 'The Undying Voice of Diane di Prima' (2020) in The New Yorker

• We had a birthday party for her when she turned 80 and there were, you know, punk rockers and, you know, trans people and old hippies and beatniks and little teenagers.

It was the most diverse group of people. And it made me smile because it showed me that the people that my mom meant something to, they showed up for her. And she was happy to embrace them. I had a trans woman tell me my mom was the first person to give her a pair of earrings. I had an old hippie telling me that my mom was one of the elders that never sold out.

• • Dominique di Prima, Diane di Prima's daughter (2020), interviewed by CBC Radio

External links

• Diane di Prima on Poetry Foundation
• Diane di Prima on poets.org