A prominent Beat poet, Diane di Prima has shaped and transcended literary movements over the course of six decades and more than 50 genre-bending books of poetry and prose. As an activist, small press publisher, and founder of the New York Poets Theatre, she helped build essential countercultural communities on two coasts, first in New York City in the 1950s and 60s, and then in San Francisco. Throughout her writing and her life, di Prima has denounced injustice, defied conformity, and broken down barriers of gender and patriarchal norms. She has redefined the political poem, the epic poem, and the literary memoir, and her feminist, visionary writing continues to find new forms for exploring our evolving cultural moment and imagining new possibilities for liberation.

Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn in 1934. A second-generation Italian-American, di Prima’s early poetic sensibility was nurtured by her maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi; Mallozzi, an anarchist and friend of Emma Goldman and Carlo Tresca, introduced his granddaughter to Dante and Verdi. Di Prima began writing her own poems as a child and studied the Romantic poets while a student at Hunter College High School. She and the poet Audre Lorde were fellow students and friends at Hunter, and the two poets would remain friends for the rest of Lorde's life. After high school, di Prima briefly attended Swarthmore College but left academia to embark on an independent life in New York City among artists, dancers, and poets.

Formative influences for di Prima included the work of H.D., as well as Ezra Pound, whom she spent several weeks visiting at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., in 1955. During her time in New York, di Prima befriended many poets and writers, including New York School poets, such as Frank O’Hara, and poets associated with the Black Arts Movement, including LeRoi Jones, who would later change his name to Amiri Baraka. She also encountered Beat writers, such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Other important collaborators included Judson Dance Theater founding member Fred Herko and dancer and choreographer James Waring. In 1958, her debut poetry collection, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward, was published as the first title of Totem Press, started by Baraka with his then wife Hettie Jones.

Di Prima played a hugely consequential role as a culture producer, not only through her own work, but also as a publisher and presenter of the works of other poets. Together with Baraka, di Prima co-founded and edited The Floating Bear, a mimeographed newsletter of poetry and prose. Di Prima and Jones were arrested in 1961 by the FBI on obscenity charges for content printed in the newsletter, though the charges were dismissed. The Bear, which ran until 1971, was instrumental in distributing the work of Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer, John Weiners, and many others. Concurrent to The Floating Bear, di Prima formed Poets Press, publishing the first books of Audre Lorde, David Henderson, and Herbert Huncke, and New York Poets Theatre, staging one-act plays written by poets including Michael McClure, Frank O’Hara, and di Prima herself.

In the wake of Fred Herko’s suicide in 1964, di Prima began to withdraw from New York City and seek other spiritual and activist paths that would inform her writing. She participated in Timothy Leary’s experimental LSD community in Millbrook, NY, started reading the 16th-century writings of German Renaissance physician and alchemist Paracelsus, and studied Zen and Tibetan Buddhism. In the late 60s, she moved with her children to San Francisco and became a student of Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, while working with Peter Coyote and the Haight-Ashbury activist group The Diggers to distribute free food to activists and artists in the Bay Area. By 1969, she was a highly visible figure of the Beat poetry scene with several published poetry collections and works of translation, as well as the semi-autobiographical novel Memoirs of a Beatnik, a notorious recounting of sexual and artistic experimentation in 1950s New York City. The epistolary poems known as Revolutionary Letters, one of di Prima’s most influential bodies of work, came into being during this time. A fusion of utopian anarchism and protest—against war, sexism, ecological devastation, and a repressive state—these poems were syndicated to underground publications nationwide through the Liberation News Service and first published as a book by City Lights in 1971; several subsequent editions have been released, each time with new material.

Her intensive study of global spiritual traditions, alchemy, and mythology would play a part in the evolution of her radical poetics. Di Prima began composing her epic poem Loba in the early 1970s, and Capra Press would publish Part I as a chapbook in 1973. In 1978, a full-length collection of Loba, featuring Parts I–VIII, was published by Wingbow Press. Loba grew to 16 parts, divided into Books I and II, and was published as one edition by Penguin in 1998.

While remaining true to a countercultural position as a poet and literary citizen, di Prima has been a driving force in establishing alternative, experimental programs for the study of poetry and other arts. She was a founding faculty member of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa College, established by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman in 1974. Di Prima also helped found the Poetics Program at the New College of California in 1980, where she taught for seven years. Additionally, she co-founded the San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts in 1983, teaching courses on pre-Christian Western spiritual traditions until 1992.

In the new millennium, di Prima has continued to produce significant works of poetry and prose. In 2001, Viking Press published Recollections of My Life as a Woman, di Prima’s memoir of the first 30 years of her life, including her early years as a poet and single mother. More recent books include The Poetry Deal (City Lights, 2014). In 2019, City Lights will publish Spring and Autumn Annals, di Prima’s account of the year following Fred Herko’s death, as well as a new, expanded edition of Revolutionary Letters. Diane di Prima continues to live in San Francisco—where she served as Poet Laureate in 2009—and her influence can be felt nationwide across generations of writers.

—Co-written by Suzanne Wise, Staff Writer at Poets House, and Iris Cushing. Initial research contributed by Sarah Ruth Jacobs. 

Iris Cushing was a recipient of the Diane di Prima Fellowship from the Center for the Humanities from 2016–2018. A doctoral candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, Cushing is currently at work on a biographical dissertation, titled "Pierce and Pine: Diane di Prima, Mary Norbert Korte and the Question of Matter and Spirit."

Sarah Ruth Jacobs was a Poets House Special Collections Research and Writing Fellow, as part of a joint program with the CUNY Graduate Center.

Established in Santa Barbara, California, in 1969, Capra Press made a name for itself as an influential independent publisher of avant-garde writing, including work by Diane di Prima, Raymond Carver, Henry Miller, Ray Bradbury, and Anaïs Nin. Noel Young—a poet, fiction writer, printer, and book designer—founded Capra and brought his literary and design acumen to more than 300 titles. The press’s design quality, the range of its list, and Young’s commitment to both writers of stature and emerging talents made Capra a standout in California’s vibrant small press scene during the Mimeo Revolution. Young’s daughter Hilary Young Brodey, who acquired the press in 2011, characterized her father’s vision this way: “to keep the human touch as much as possible in the environment of mechanization and to retain the mantra of a small independent trade publisher.”

Born in San Francisco on December 25 in 1922, Noel Young majored in journalism at Stanford with dreams of becoming a foreign correspondent. When World War II broke out, he served in the Army Air Corp in the Philippines. After the war, Young settled in Santa Barbara, where he would work as commercial printer and learn book design. He eventually printed and designed titles for independent publishers, including Black Sparrow Press, Scrimshaw, Oyez, Something Else Press, Christopher’s Books, and Unicorn Press. Young also began to design and print his own books, starting in 1969 with Journey, a poetry collection by his friend Gordon Grant.

At a rate of ten to 15 titles per year, Capra Press printed the poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction of many famous and lesser-known writers, as well as eclectic general-interest books about such topics as wine-making and hot tubs. Young reportedly started the press with the following strategy: “Approach writers you admired, acquire book rights to their shorter and offbeat works and turn them into books.” He drove to the Big Sur home of Henry Miller in 1959, befriended the writer, and went on to publish a number of works by him. Among the press’s most recognized literary titles is Four Visions of America (1977), which features essays by Erica Jong, Henry Miller, Thomas Sanchez, and Kay Boyle. Young also released emerging authors who would go on to be household names; Capra published the first Raymond Carver short story to appear in book form.

Capra used the book and chapbook form to innovative ends. An essay by Miller, "On Turning Eighty," was turned into the first in a series of 41 chapbooks written by different authors in the 1970s. Diane di Prima’s chapbook Loba, Part I, the tenth in this series, was a collaboration between Robert Durand of Yes! Press, who edited the chapbook, and Noel Young, who designed and printed it. In the next decade, Capra published a “Back-to-Back” series of two-sided books, each featuring a well-known writer paired with a lesser-known name; the writing of one author could be read one way, then flipping the book over brought the words of the other writer forward, with the texts meeting in the middle.

When Young’s health declined, Capra Press was sold to Robert Bason, an antiquarian book dealer, in 2001. Young passed away in his home in Santa Barbara in 2002 at the age of 79. In 2011, the press was purchased by Hilary Young Brodey and three other family members and friends, with the intention of continuing Capra’s legacy of publishing noteworthy, artfully crafted titles in the spirit of the independent small press. Noel Young’s commitment to producing beautifully designed books and chapbooks by writers of both large and small reputation made Capra Press an essential force of the Mimeo Revolution.

—Co-written by Suzanne Wise, Staff Writer at Poets House, and Sarah Ruth Jacobs, a Poets House Special Collections Research and Writing Fellow, as part of a joint program with the CUNY Graduate Center.