Transcript Document

“Disorder, both material and moral, is of the
essence in a painter’s life. Their incomes and
their love-lives are as jumpy as a fever chart.
Their houses are as messy as their palettes.
They view life as a multiplicity of visible
Objects--all completely different. A dirty towel
in the middle of the floor, wine spots on the piano
keys, a hairbrush in the butter plate are for
them just so many light-reflecting surfaces.
Their function is to look at life, not to
rearrange it...this plus the fact that they
all have perfectly clear consciences after four
O’clock, or at whatever hour the daylight starts giving
out...The painter’s whole morality consists of keeping
his brushes clean and getting up in the morning.
Diane di Prima, feminist writer, poet, and teacher, was born in
Brooklyn, New York, on August 6, 1934. Di Prima is the eldest
child and only daughter of Francis and Emma di Prima, who
were college-educated, middle-class Italian-Americans. Di Prima
has two younger brothers, Frank (born November 6, 1937) and
Richard (born September 19, 1941) who followed more traditional
career paths, becoming an attorney and the owner of an
educational electronics firm, respectively.
Diane di Prima graduated from the college preparatory program
at Hunter College High School, an elite public school for girls in
New York City, where she worked on the editorial board of the
school paper, Scribimus. She then attended Swarthmore College
for two years. She left college in 1953 to live in Manhattan with
her lovers and to write full-time. While living in Greenwich Village,
di Prima became part of the Bohemian intellectual culture:
well-educated, white, middle-class individuals who rejected
middle-class values, choosing a rebellious life-style which includ
sexual freedom and the use of drugs. Di Prima began a
correspondence with the poet Ezra Pound, visiting him daily for
two weeks in 1955 at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, in Washington, D.C.,
where he was hospitalized.
Di Prima continued to write and was associated with such
"Beat Poets" as Le Roi Jones (Imanu Amari Baraka), Allen
Ginsberg, Audre Lord, and Jack Kerouac. Together with Jones,
she edited The Floating Bear, an influential underground
newsletter of Greenwich Village, from 1961-1969. In 1958 This
Kind of Bird Flies Backwards, her first book of poetry, was
published, followed in 1960 by Dinners and Nightmares, her first
published book of short stories. In 1961 she helped to organize
the New York Poets Theatre with Jones, Fred Herko, James
Waring and Alan Marlowe. She also helped establish the Poets
Press with Kerouac, McClure, Ginsberg, and Lord. She moved
to Monroe, New York, in 1965, and then to Kerhonkson, New
York, and Millbrook, New York, (Timothy Leary's experimental
community) in 1966. In 1967 she traveled around the United
States doing poetry readings. She headed for San Francisco in
1968 to work with the "Diggers" distributing free food. She also
took up the study of Zen Buddhism and the occult.
Di Prima has taught poetry at the New College of California
in San Francisco; the NAROPA Institute (the Jack Kerouac
School of Disembodied Poetics) in Boulder, Colorado; and the
Poetry-in-the-Schools Program of the National Endowment for
the Arts. She has also served as an instructor in Tarot reading
and the art of healing as a member of the San Francisco Institute
of the Magical and Healing Arts. Claiming to be most strongly
influenced by poets John Keats, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas,
di Prima is widely published, including such works as The
Calculus of Variation (1972), Dinners and Nightmares (1961, 1974)
Loba, Parts I-VIII (1978), Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969, 1988),
Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems (1990), Revolutionary Letters
(1968, 1969, 1971), Selected Poems, 1956-76 (1975), and
Seminary Poems (1991). She has also contributed to and edited
various anthologies of poetry, as well as translating medieval
Latin into English in Seven Love Poems from the Middle Latin
(1965, 1967). Her plays include: The Discontent of the Russian
Prince, Discovery of America, Like, Murder Cake, and Whale
Honey. Her work has been translated into more than eight
languages and four of her plays have been produced off-Broadway.
Besides being a co-founder of The Floating Bear, the Poets
Theatre and the Poets Press, di Prima helped to organize The
Gold Circle with other artists in 1978, and the San Francisco
Institute of Magical and Healing Arts (with Janet Carter, Carl
Grundberg, and Sheppard Powell) in 1983, and is the founder
of Eidolon Editions (1972) and The Poets Institute (1976).
Diane di Prima was married in 1962 to writer Alan Marlowe
(divorced 1969) and in 1972 to Grant Fisher (divorced 1975.)
She is the mother of five children: Jeanne (born October 28, 1957),
Dominique (born June 4, 1962), Alexander (August 12, 1963),
Tara (December 23, 1967), and Rudra (September 17, 1971).
She was for years the icon of
the Beatnik “chick”
"I never wrote for money. . . ," she says.
"I've always written for the joy of it, and
one of the joys has been to talk about taboo
topics and make it possible for others to
write about them, too."
In Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969), her fictionalized autobiography,
she described her own sex life in graphic detail, and how she
became a bohemian poet in the 1950s.
"I came from Brooklyn," she wrote in Memoirs. "My parents
were first-generation Americans, my grandparents Italian." In
short order, she goes on in Memoirs to recount how she and her
friends "made art, smoked dope, dug the new jazz and spoke a
bastardization of the black argot."
Amiri Baraka, was born in Newark, New Jersey on October 7, 1934
under the name of Everett LeRoi Jones.He is a respected
playwright, poet, novelist and essayist who is
best known for his exploration and examination of African
American experiences and his "affirmation of black life".He
graduated from Howard University and then published his
first work, a collection of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume
Suicide Note, in 1961. He followed this work with The Dead
Lecturer in 1964 and later produced It's Nation Time (1970),
Spirit Reach (1972), Hard Facts (1974) and AM/TRAK (1979).
His plays include Dutchman (1964) which won critical acclaim
during its off-Broadway performances. Two other plays, The Slave
and The Toilet were produced later that same year.Baraka also
founded The Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem in 1965. In
1968 he founded an organization known as the Black Community
Development and Defense Organization which was a Muslim group
that focused on affirming black culture and aided African-Americans
in gaining political power.
"I thought of myself as [LeRoi] Jones' mistress in the European
bohemian tradition," di Prima tells me during our interview.
"I had lovers before him, but I didn't fall in love until I met him,
and after him I didn't fall in love for a long, long time. He had
political commitment and passion. The relationship was creative
and inspiring for both of us."
Ode to Keats, 2, The Dream ( Top of Page )
Hedged about as we are with prayers
and with taboos
Yet the heart of the magic circle is covered with gray linoleum
Over my head fly demons of the past
Roi
Lori
Jimmy, they pass
With a whooshing sound
The only ghost who stands on the ground
(who stands his ground)
Is FreddieI rise a few inches above the circle, and turn somersaults
I want to go shopping, but all I see is my reflection
I look tired and sad. I wear red. I am looking for love.
On the sidewalk are lying the sick and the hungry:
I hear "Spencer's Faerie Queen cost them all their
lives."
And Spencer? I ask, "What did this life buy?"
Through the door is the way out, Alan stands in the
doorway
In an attitude of leaving, his head is turned
As if to say goodbye, but he's standing still.
Hedged about with primroses
with promises
The magic words we said when we were praying
Have formed a mist about us...

What's inspiring here is her ongoing commitment to
her work, despite the fact that she was often excluded
from male literary circles--from poetry readings and
poetry anthologies. "I was a poet," she writes. "I had
work to do. It has carried me all these years." Indeed it
has.
"The imagination may be compared to Adam's
dream, he awoke and found it truth." Creative
imagination: that idea keeps growing with him all
through his life. Somebody, it was one of those
question and answer periods after a reading-asked me what I thought the function of the poet
was in this society. And I said that if you could
imagine anything clearly enough, and tell it
precisely enough, that you could bring it
about.

for me, one of the guiding sentences of twenty
years of my life, or maybe still, maybe always-is, "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of
the heart's affections and the truth of the
imagination." That about says it.

I have been asked, "how does the artist function in
society?" I'm not saying that the high role of the
artist is to function in society at all. But the way
that your art does function socially is that when
you can visualize clearly any possible human
state, or social state for that matter, or universe,
and focus it clearly and precisely enough, and then
bring it into being either verbally in a poem, or in
a painting--you bring that world into existence.
And it's permanently here, it doesn't go away.
Doesn't even go away when the book gets burned,
look at Sappho. Those worlds don't go away.

Your whole purpose as an artist is to make
yourself a fine enough organism to most precisely
receive, and most precisely transmit. And at that
point--total attentiion to total detail, total
suspension of everything but that vision, whatever
it is, and gain, at that point, no idea at all, no idea.
The idea was just your first--the idea is what made
you get up that morning and put your shoes on.
And when you find yourself in an incredible
grove, it's not because you had an idea you were
gonna get there. But when you get to the grove,
you damn well better open your eyes. It's two
different parts of the process.

This is a wonderful book, presenting a brilliant vibrant
picture of a cultural movement and time, the
Beats/Hippies, and a woman who embodied all the artistic
and humanistic values in an incredibly pure form. To me,
the book (and the woman) are inspiring in their dedication
to the values of art, spontaneity, love, and Zen
naturalness. An invaluable read for women artists,
especially, and also for artists in general, and people
interested in a certain world view and life style.

It's her poetry all over again: gritty, surreal,
heartbreaking, fluid, and ever returning to her theme
of what it means to be a woman and how she sought
to find that meaning. This is especially gripping in
terms of being a bisexual street poet (and later a
single mother) in 1950s America. In an era when
"gray was the color and vanilla the flavor" -- when
any deviation in hemline or hair length labeled you a
communist, her differences were painful. Even the
New York beats had a male chauvinist hierarchy that
considered themselves far too good for Diane's
realism, street language, slang. It seems that every
life lesson we have to learn is somehow couched in
this book, even through experiences one would hope
to never endure.

Diane di Prima has led an extraordinary life. A rebel from
an upwardly-mobile immigrant family, pioneering beat
writer, single mother, friend to artists of all stripes,
explorer of consciousness, and classical scholar, her story
takes the reader through the many worlds of New York
City from the 30s to the 60s. At the same time she explores
the inner worlds of memory, dream, and vision -- reveals
how the soul's struggle for its own liberation is intimately
related to the struggle for freedom in society. di Prima uses
language with a poet's freedom, weaving her memoir from
straight narrative, reflective essay, family stories, inside
jokes, journal entries, letters, Buddhist cosmology, and
western occultism. di Prima struggled through the abuse of
her family and broke the rules of society to create a life on
her own terms; as an artist, a woman, and a mother. What a
gift this book is.