Diane di Prima, feminist poet of the Beat Generation, dies at 86
Diane di Prima, a poet and writer who was regarded as the most significant female member of the Beat Generation, the male- dominated countercultural movement of the 1950s to which she lent her feminist, sometimes anarchist sensibility, died Oct. 25 at a hospital in San Francisco. She was 86.
She had Parkinson’s disease and Sjogren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disorder, according to a statement fromher family.
For di Prima, the author of more than 40 works of poetry, prose and theater, writing was “like being a hermit or a samurai. A calling. The holiest life that was offered in our world.” By her actions, she declared herself a conscientious objector to the bourgeois life of her childhood, quitting college because it distracted her fromher artistic pursuits andmaking a name for herself, first in New York and later in San Francisco, amid the tumult of the counterculture.
“Certain times, certain epochs, live on in the imagination as more than what they ‘actually’ were. . . . They are, if you look close, times when the boundary between my thology and everyday life is blurred,” she wrote in her 2001 memoir, “Recollections of My Life as a Woman.” “This meeting of world and myth is where we all thought we were going.”
The Beat movement, epitomized by the works of such writers as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, was largely a male preserve, although it did make room for female poets including Joanne Kyger and Anne Waldman.
Di Prima made her poetic debut with the collection “This Kind of Bird Flies Backward” (1958). City Lights, the venerable San Francisco bookseller and publisher cofounded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, describes her collection “Revolutionary Letters” (1971) as “a series of poems composed of a potent blend of utopian anarchism and ecological awareness, projected through a Zen-tinged feminist lens.”
Her work “is the expression of a strong, sensitive, intelligent woman during more than two decades of social and artistic ferment,” reads an entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.