The early sixties saw her founding an organisation called the Poets Press and she was also involved in setting up the New York Poets Theatre, as well as a newspaper called The Floating Bear. Like many others though she often found herself subject to police attention due to the nature of the work that she was involved in. By the mid-60s the “Hippy” culture was taking off in both the United States and the United Kingdom and her work linked the two movements successfully. It was prevalent on the west coast as well and she visited various parts of California before deciding to move there permanently. There was a growing “Beat” scene in 1950s Manhattan and di Prima was an active part of it. This came out under the title This Kind of Bird Flies Backward. Encouraged by correspondence between herself and other writers such as Kenneth Patchen and Ezra Pound and yet it took until 1958 to get her first collection of poems published. She had ambitions to become a poet and was impatient to get started. She went to school at Hunter College High School and then on to Swarthmore College but did not complete her studies there. She was born on the 6 th August 1934 in the Brooklyn district of New York City, descended from Italian immigrants. She has also written plays and taught poetry. She is popular around the world with her work having been translated into over twenty different languages. Diane di Prima is an American writer and artist whose literary output numbers over forty books of poetry, prose and memoirs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |