Diane di Prima, prolific Beat poet, dead at 86

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Diane di Prima, a prolific poet who pursued the life of a Beat and rose to the position of San Francisco poet laureate, died Sunday, Oct. 25.

For eight years, di Prima had battled Parkinson’s disease, a progressive disorder of the central nervous system, and Sjogren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease characterized by dry eyes and mouth. She also had arthritis, which made it difficult to walk, and had been living in a skilled nursing facility not far from her longtime home in the Excelsior district of San Francisco.

Still she wrote poetry every day and had several book projects going even as she was moved to San Francisco General Hospital, where she died. Her partner of 42 years, Sheppard Powell, was at her bedside. She was 86.

“Her death was easy and graceful,” Powell told The Chronicle in an email.

Di Prima dropped out of college to join the poetry swirl in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s. She arrived in San Francisco in 1968, too late for the North Beach Beats, but she established herself as a singular force, a feminist in a poetry culture that was overwhelmingly male. Her publishing career spanned more than 60 years and 40 books.

In an interview three years ago, di Prima described her impact of her verse on readers as “giving them the courage to change their lives. People get caught in the conventions of society and they forget what they are really after.”

Di Prima knew what she was really after at age 14. After reading John Keats’ letters, she knew she wanted to be a poet. She got a composition book and wrote every day from then on.

“You never stop,” she said. “It’s not like a career where you retire. To write is a way of life.”

Di Prima was born Aug. 6, 1934, in Brooklyn, raised in the Italian-American neighborhood of Carroll Gardens. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a schoolteacher. She told The Chronicle her grandfather spoke Italian to her and taught her to be an anarchist, a political leaning she supported ever after.

Di Prima attended parochial school and was reported to have scored the highest in New York City on the written test to attain admission to the prestigious Hunter College High School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It took her three trains to get there from Carroll Gardens by subway, she said, but she was always early for school. She and a group of eight girls, including future feminist poet Audre Lorde, would meet each morning before class to read aloud the poetry they’d written the day before.

She went on to win a citywide competition for excellence in Latin and earned a scholarship to Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania to major in physics, according to her younger brother, Frank DiPrima, a lawyer in Morristown, N.J.

“She was absolutely brilliant in every field she studied,” said DiPrima, who noted his sister chose to spell her last name differently to correct a misspelling from when their grandparents arrived at Ellis Island from Italy. “She was a great sister and anytime I had academic problems in high school, she was there for me.”

Di Prima ended up dropping out of college after one year and went to Greenwich Village, where she found a flat for $33 a month. At her second apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, she met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who needed a place to stay on their way out of the country.

By the time di Prima came to the West Coast, she had already established herself as co-founder of both the Poets Press and the New York Poets Theatre and was co-editor of the literary magazine the Floating Bear. She’d published a poetry collection, “This Kind of Bird Flies Backward,” and a short story collection, “Dinners and Nightmares,” which expanded the form by including lists and rants, and colorful descriptions of lowlife Bohemians.

In the early 1960s, she married Alan Marlowe, a model and actor. By then, she already had two kids, Jeanne DiPrima by Stefan Baumrin, and Dominique DiPrima by writer Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones). She and Marlowe had a son, Alexeander Marlowe, and a daughter, Tara Marlowe.

Di Prima first came to San Francisco in 1961 to visit poet Michael McClure, whom she had met in New York.

“Diane di Prima is the most important living poet because of the depth, the range of her imagination and for the number of decades it has thrilled us, from being a child in Brooklyn to being an important member of the new consciousness on the West Coast,” McClure, who formed the San Francisco Renaissance and died earlier this year, had told The Chronicle in 2018.

When she finally made it to San Francisco, she went to City Lights Booksellers in North Beach. Poet and shopkeeper Lawrence Ferlinghetti had written the introduction to her first book, published in 1957. When she spoke admiringly of the City Lights inventory, Ferlinghetti responded, “I’ve got books the way other people have mice,” and she never forgot it.

Her decision to leave New York was for two reasons: to work with the Diggers, the anarchist collective that took on the job of feeding and caring for the poor wanderers who came West for the Summer of Love; and to deepen her study of Zen Buddhism.

Di Prima announced her Bay Area arrival with the publication of “Memoirs of a Beatnik.” This caused a stir in the male-dominated Beat poetry community because in the first few pages, di Prima described her sexual adventures in terms far more graphic than anything published by any of the men.

“She was important as the feminist voice of the Beat generation,” said Ferlinghetti, co-founder of City Lights.

When di Prima was asked if she considered herself a Beat, in a 2014 interview with The Chronicle, she answered, “Yes, if you define Beat as a state of mind not bound by any particular time or by a single generation. Beat belongs to the great American counterculture.”

Di Prima moved to San Francisco in 1968. Her husband, Marlowe, was on an extended stay in India, so Di Prima rented a 14-room house on Oak Street in the Panhandle and settled in with her four children.

By 1970, di Prima and Marlowe were estranged and she was involved with Grant Fisher, a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. In 1973, she divorced Marlowe and married Fisher, with whom she had a son, Rudi DiPrima.

The blended family moved to Marshall, in West Marin, where they rented a ramshackle house on stilts on Tomales Bay for $100 a month. Across Highway 1 from her home was a shed that di Prima converted to a writing studio.

During the Band’s “Last Waltz” at Winterland, on Thanksgiving Day 1976, di Prima and McClure were selected to read onstage during the concert. Di Prima read three very short poems from three decades: from the 1950s, “Get Your Cut Throat off My Knife”; from the ’60s, “Revolutionary Letter #4”; and from the ’70s, “The Fire Guardian.”

“It’s all one sentence,” she told the audience, “but it goes around in circles.”

The five years in Marshall were a productive period for di Prima. In 1978, she published her epic “Loba,” which was labeled a feminist answer to Ginsberg’s “Howl,” which launched the San Francisco Beats when published in 1955.

Like many of her poems, “Loba” was an open-ended poem, and even its publication did not put an end to it. “Loba” turned out to be eight parts and was not published in its completed form until 1998, 20 years after its debut.

Her classic, “Revolutionary Letters,” was in several volumes and kept going, from No. 1 through No. 63.

“These are some poems from ‘Revolutionary Letters,’” she said before a reading in 2014. “It was written in the ’60s and is still being written from time to time.”

Though she had dropped out of college after one year, di Prima found work as a college instructor. For years, she taught at the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics, at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo. She’d load the kids in a truck with a camper and drive to the Rockies, returning in time for the public school year to start in Point Reyes Station.

She moved her kids from Marshall back to San Francisco in 1978 when she was hired to teach poetics at the New College of California, on Valencia Street in the Mission. She rented a flat at Laguna and Page streets, this time for $330 a month.

“I remember her complaining about the rent,” recalled her son Rudy DiPrima. “She’d say her first apartment was $33 a month and now she was paying $330.”

The poetics program at New College did not last, but di Prima continued teaching, at the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts.

In addition to her commitment to literature, di Prima was a co-founder of the San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts, where she taught Western spiritual traditions.

By the early 1980s, di Prima had divorced Fisher and met Sheppard Powell, an energy healer and meditation teacher. They lived together and in the mid-1990s moved to the Excelsior when di Prima became a homeowner.

Eight years ago, she and Powell were married at San Francisco City Hall.

“We were like teenagers,” Powell recalled. “We just kept falling in love over and over again.”

While suffering from arthritis, di Prima continued to write.

“She never found a keyboard useful for poetry,” said Powell. “She has always written by hand.”

She was named San Francisco poet laureate in 2009, and in 2011 was the subject of a 30-minute documentary film titled “The Poetry Deal.”

Three years later, City Lights released “The Poetry Deal,” her first full-length book of poetry in decades.

“I don’t think about it as a legacy,” she said. “I’m more concerned with the fact that I have about 50 more books I have to get out.”

In October 2017, di Prima was first hospitalized and moved to a care center. She was always determined to come home and though she never made it, her voice remained on her answering machine, wavering but clear in a haiku she had written.

“Let the hand shake,” she said. “The line is a living thing.”

She is survived by her husband and five children, who all went on to creative endeavors of their own, getting into TV and radio, music and literature: Jeanne DiPrima of Bozeman, Mont.; Dominique DiPrima of Los Angeles; Rudi DiPrima of Richmond; Alexander Marlowe of Melbourne, Australia; and Tara Marlowe of San Francisco. She is also survived by five grandchildren, three great-grandchildren; and her brothers, Richard DiPrima of Madison, Wis., and Frank DiPrima of Morristown, N.J.

“My mom was fearless,” Dominique DiPrima, a talk radio host and activist, told The Chronicle. “She taught us to question authority and believe in the power of our creativity. She was truly a pioneer.”

There will be a small private prayer service and virtual memorial. A public tribute is being planned.

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“remember,
you can have everything you ask for, ask for
everything”
— Diane Di Prima, Revolutionary Letters.

Revolutionary Letter #46

And as you learn the magic, learn to believe it

Don't be 'surprised' when it works, you undercut

your power.

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