Diane di Prima, Beat Poet And Activist, Dead At 86

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Di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik was a highly sexualized fictional account of the poet’s time with the Beats.

Penguin Books

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Penguin Books

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Di Prima moved to San Francisco in 1968 and got involved with the Diggers — a group of anti-capitalist activists and actors who handed out free food in the community. It was also around that time that she began to study Sanskrit and Buddhism. The poetry collection Revolutionary Letters grew out of her time with the Diggers; in 1976 she got on stage at the famed «Last Waltz» concert by The Band, and read a one line poem, «Get Yer Cut Throat Off My Knife,» before going into «Revolutionary Letter #4»:

Left to themselves people

grow their hair.

Left to themselves they

take off their shoes.

Left to themselves they make love

sleep easily

share blankets, dope & children

they are not lazy or afraid

they plant seeds, they smile, they

speak to one another. The word

coming into its own: touch of love;

on the brain, the ear.

At the press conference when she was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco, she told the crowd about a dream she’d had recently that showed her how all the work was ever written was part of the same big piece that «cuts through time and cuts through space, and we have no idea what it is — it’s so wonderful and large.» Her deepest service, she added, was to poetry and to humans.