In her 1996 book, Women of the Beat Generation, Brenda Knight assessed: “More than any other woman of the Beat, di Prima has taken her place alongside the men as the epitome of Beat brilliance.”īut di Prima was questing for far more than just to be “alongside” the talky men-Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S.
She was keenly important, not just as the author of dozens of books and thousands of poems, but also as a figure of mid-20th-century feminism and independence.
Never one to accept the shadows or the margins, she made a complicated life-strewn with obstacles and imperfect edges-into richness. Ransom money, nothing to break or barter b ut my lifeĭi Prima distinguished herself as just this: Risk-taker. In addition to Memoirs of a Beatnik, there were Loba and Dinners and Nightmares, as well as various iterations of Revolutionary Letters, her ever-evolving volume of manifestos, prescriptions, and recipes for surviving a repressive and often inhospitable world.Īs she wrote in “Revolutionary Letter #1”: I have just realized that the stakes are myself These books were correctives to first-draft lives, offering alternatives to the main road. She wasn’t looking for confirmation from without. Instead, she devised the means to achieve what she needed. The range of material-mimeographed leaflets to letterpress chapbooks to perfect-bound books-was vivid testimony to a writer’s thirst: di Prima didn’t wait to be found. My media feeds overflowed with photos of her back catalog: well-worn copies of titles dog-eared and penciled in. And as I revisited it, I once again found di Prima’s worlds alight, epiphany-and-kicks-filled, with a blur of faces, experiences, and possibilities. The scrawled note on the title page brought back the memory: “I thought you’d find this interesting.” Then, as now, I’d translated it as: “This is something I thought you might need.” Di Prima’s memoir is bold, salacious even. While I knew precisely where to look, I’d forgotten that my copy of di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik had been a birthday gift from an artist friend, when I was studying to become a writer. Last October, not long after the death of poet, feminist, and shape-shifter Diane di Prima, I wandered over to my shelves of past selves and eased out a book by the top of its thin spine.
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