Chat with Diane di Prima

Poet & Activist

About Diane di Prima

In 1961, while pregnant and living in a cold-water flat on New York’s Lower East Side, Diane di Prima typed the first pages of 'Revolutionary Letters' on a manual typewriter, each poem a clenched fist wrapped in jasmine. She didn’t wait for permission to merge mysticism with direct action, or motherhood with militancy; she wrote incantations that doubled as street-corner manifestos, binding Buddhist chant, anarchist theory, and menstrual blood into syllables that still pulse in feminist poetics today. Her 1978 memoir 'Recollections of My Life as a Woman' wasn’t just autobiography, it was a structural intervention, fracturing linear time to show how spiritual seeking, police surveillance, childcare, and underground publishing coexisted in one woman’s daily breath. She co-founded the New York Poets Theatre and the Floating Bear newsletter not as sidelines but as lifelines, networks where poetry circulated like contraband, smuggled between apartments, mimeographed at midnight, read aloud over burnt coffee while FBI files thickened in distant drawers.

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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Diane di Prima:

  • “How did writing 'Revolutionary Letters' while pregnant shape your view of revolutionary time?”
  • “What did you mean when you called poetry 'the only weapon that can’t be confiscated'?”
  • “Can you describe the exact moment you decided to leave the male-dominated Beat inner circle?”
  • “What role did Tarot play in your drafting process for 'Loba'?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Diane di Prima face censorship or suppression for her work?
Yes, her 1962 poem 'The Pisan Cantos' parody led to an FBI investigation after she mailed it to government officials as satire. More significantly, City Lights refused to publish 'Revolutionary Letters' in 1968 due to its explicit anti-war and pro-abortion stances, forcing her to self-publish via The Floating Bear press. Customs seized multiple shipments of her 1974 collection 'Pieces of a Song' at the Canadian border for 'obscene content', later overturned in court after testimony from Allen Ginsberg and Muriel Rukeyser.
What was Diane di Prima's relationship to second-wave feminism?
She was a critical outsider, collaborating with Shulamith Firestone on early New York Radical Feminists meetings but rejecting the movement’s institutional ambitions. Her feminism emerged from Taoist cosmology and Italian anarchist traditions, not consciousness-raising models. She criticized Betty Friedan’s 'The Feminine Mystique' for ignoring working-class mothers and refused to sign the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality manifesto, arguing it centered white, middle-class demands over prison abolition and reproductive autonomy for all women.
How did Buddhism influence Diane di Prima's poetry structure?
After studying with Chögyam Trungpa in the early 1970s, she adopted 'non-sequential composition', writing poems in fragments across days, then arranging them by resonance rather than chronology, mirroring Tibetan lojong slogans. In 'Loba', she used the 16-line 'tantra stanza', four quatrains built on shifting vowel sounds, to embody impermanence, refusing end-rhyme as 'a colonial insistence on closure.' Her notebooks show Sanskrit mantras scribbled beside grocery lists and protest chants.
What was the significance of The Floating Bear newsletter?
Co-edited with LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) from 1961 to 1969, it was a mimeographed, non-commercial conduit for uncensored experimental work, publishing early pieces by Audre Lorde, Etheridge Knight, and Sun Ra before they were widely recognized. Each issue included hand-drawn maps of NYC safe houses for draft resisters and a rotating 'Bureau of Unanswered Letters' column responding to reader queries about herbal birth control and commune law. It operated without masthead or ISSN, surviving six IRS audits by circulating solely through poet-to-poet mail chains.
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Topics

poetryfeminismactivismliteraturecounterculturebeat generationfemale poets

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