496 Pages
Viking Press
ISBN: 0670851663
$29.95
Diane di Prima, one of the premiere poets of the Beat Generation, stands out from the male dominated literary coterie boasting icons like Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti. Raised by first generation Italian-American parents, Di Prima remembers writing at the age of seven, deciding to be a poet at thirteen. In her memoir, Recollections of My Life As a Woman: The New York Years Di Prima discusses her early fascination with the Romantic Poets--Keats, Shelley, Byron--their "tone of passionate urgency I craved" (77).
After leaving Swarthmore College, she moved to New York, becoming part of the avante-garde bohemian crowd, making a living modeling for artists and working in bookstores. Not content to be merely a muse to the men around her, Di Prima devoted time to her own work, even after she became a single mother in 1957. Despite the pressures, both financially and societally, Di Prima followed the birth of her child with the publication of her first volume of poetry This Kind of Bird Flies Backward.
Di Prima's years in New York were filled with a variety of artistic pursuits--dance, theatre, film, and writing. She was co-founder of the infamous Beat newsletter The Floating Bear which she edited with Leroi Jones, a.k.a Amiri Baraka, with whom she had a long-standing affair--despite his marriage to fellow poet Hettie Jones. Despite legal cases against the newsletter for obscenity, Di Prima threw herself whole- heartedly into ventures such as the New York Poets Theatre, and the Poets Press, which she founded in the late 1960's with husband Alan Marlowe. The Poet's Press is often credited with first publishing many emerging and established poets, most notably Audre Lorde.
Despite devoting herself to the pursuits of dance, drama, and writing, Di Prima found herself isolated, like many of the women around her. As a single mother, she was unique, even among the beats.
I do know that choosing to be an artist, writer, dancer, painter, musician, actor, photographer, sculptor, you name it, choosing any of these things in the world I grew up in, the world of the 40's and early 50's, was choosing as completely as possible for those times the life of the renunciant. (101)
Di Prima later published Memoirs of A Beatnik, an autobiography of her struggle to maintain a balance between art and real life. Her later work, drawn largely from studies of Zen Buddhism, alchemy, and female archetype, encompasses 31 books, including the epic poem Loba. The work, which spans over four decades, transcends it importance in the beat canon, making Di Prima one of the principle female poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. In Recollections of My Life As A Woman, she provides us with an invaluable portrait of what being a writer, a mother, and a woman, at a time when an entire aesthetic was being created.