“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 fourO’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 Collegefor 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 included 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 firstpublished 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 Californiain 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 ofthe 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 prayersand with taboosYet the heart of the magic circle is covered with gray linoleumOver my head fly demons of the pastRoiLoriJimmy, they passWith a whooshing soundThe only ghost who stands on the ground(who stands his ground)Is Freddie-I rise a few inches above the circle, and turn somersaultsI want to go shopping, but all I see is my reflectionI 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 doorwayIn an attitude of leaving, his head is turnedAs if to say goodbye, but he's standing still.

Hedged about with primroseswith promisesThe magic words we said when we were prayingHave 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.