About Diane Di Prima
Diane di Prima (New York, 6 August 1934 - 25 October 2020) was an American poet of the Beat Generation. Born in Brooklyn, she studied at Swarthmore College. Of Italian descent, Diane di Prima began to write when she was still a child. At nineteen dhe met Ezra Pound and Kenneth Patchen. Until 1960 she lived in Manhattan, where she took part in the beat movement.Hers first poetry collection, This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards, was published in 1958 by Totem Press. In 1962, she met the Zen master Suzuki Roshi, thanks to whom she approached Buddhism, practicing meditation. After the death of her first teacher, she was a disciple of Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche.
Diane di Prima wrote The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka, and together they founded the New York Poets Theater. She also founded the Poets Press. In 1966, she moved to Millbrook, joining the psychedelic community of Timothy Leary. In 1969, she published the story of her beat experience in Memoirs of a Beatnik. In 1970, she moved to California. Here, she joined the Diggers movement and studied Buddhism, Sanskrit, Gnosticism and alchemy, as well as publishing her major work, the poem Loba, in 1978 and become a teacher.
From all her published thirty-five poetic collections, a selection of poems was collected in Pieces of a Song, in 1990. In 2001, her memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, was released.
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