From Andrew Limbong's 10-27-20 NPR obituary for Diane di Prima....
Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn in 1934. She committed herself to poetry as a teenager, and by the 1960s she was working on her own poetry while editing the newsletter The Floating Bear with poet Amiri Baraka (with whom di Prima had a child). According to an archive of di Prima's papers at the University of Connecticut, this work got her arrested by the FBI for alleged obscenity (the case was eventually thrown out) [...].
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 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.
To read the entire obit, click HERE.
If you haven't read di Prima's work, I suggest beginning with MEMOIRS OF A BEATNIK (1969) and PIECES OF A SONG: SELECTED POEMS (1990).
Note: Di Prima's poem "Rant" (see below) directly inspired my essay "The War Against the Imagination."
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT
--Diane di Prima, "Rant," 1985
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