Craft: Diane di Prima

Diane di Prima (1934—2020) is known mainly as a poet of the Beat Generation, but she was also one the important, underrated 20th century American poets beyond category. Her politically fearless poems push into other realms of knowledge: Zen Buddhism, Paracelsus, alchemy, Kabbalah, and revolutions in consciousness.

She is best known for her epic masterpiece, Loba, written in 1978, in which she found camaraderie in the voice of the She-Wolf, a goddess from Roman mythology with the power, according to Ovid, “to open what is shut and shut what is open.” She also wrote Revolutionary Letters, begun in 1968 after her move from New York to San Francisco and first disseminated in pamphlets and underground newspapers of the counterculture.

Di Prima wrote more than 40 books of poetry and prose. She founded Naropa University with Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, coedited Floating Bear with LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, and was the Poet Laureate of San Francisco.