Feminist poet of the Beat Generation
Diane di Prima, a poet and writer who was regarded as the most significant female member of the Beat Generation, died Oct. 25 in San Francisco, at 86.
She had Parkinson's disease and Sjogren's syndrome.
For di Prima, author of more than 40 works of poetry, prose and theatre, writing was “the holiest life that was offered in our world.” She was a conscientious objector to the bourgeois life of her childhood, quitting college and making a name for herself, first in New York and later in San Francisco amid the tumult of the counterculture.
Di Prima made her poetic debut with the 1958 collection This Kind of Bird Flies Backward.
Di Prima had five children while pursuing the self-discovery the counterculture promised. But she described maternal responsibility as imposing on her the discipline that made writing possible.
Di Prima moved in 1968 to San Francisco, where she joined the Diggers, an anarchist group in Haight-Ashbury, and continued writing. Loba, an epic poem published in instalments beginning in 1973, centres on a wolf goddess and is often described as the female answer to Alan Ginsberg's Howl.
Di Prima became San Francisco's poet laureate in 2009 and at her death was one of the few surviving members of the Beat generation, whose icons were Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka.
Diane Rose di Prima was born Aug. 6, 1934, to an Italian-American family in Brooklyn. An early influence on her political sensibilities was her immigrant grandfather, who, di Prima said, “brought over anarchism and a sense of poetry as belonging to everyone.
He would say that everyone had read Dante, and I pictured all the housewives reading Dante.”
Describing her sense of purpose, she wrote that she could “taste the struggles. The things I now leave behind … leaving the quiet unquestioned living and dying, the simple one-love-andmarriage, children, material pleasures, easy securities. I am leaving the houses I will never own. Dishwashers. Carpets. Dull respect of dull neighbors.”
She helped found the New York Poets Theatre, lived for a period at a commune led by Timothy Leary and published an early prose work, Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969).
Her marriages to Alan Marlowe and Grant Fisher ended in divorce.
Survivors include her partner of 42 years, Sheppard Powell; five children; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.