Revisiting the Radical Presence of Diane di Prima

how many days
you think I’ll let you go
cool’s not the word I’m after 

i’ll slip a diamond
underneath my tongue
and you
can hunt it down

The summer I was eighteen, I copied this Diane di Prima poem down so many times that now, thirty years later, I not only still have it memorized, I can hear the cadence—how I recited the lines like a mantra. Inside notebooks, I wrote it for myself, delighted by the sensuality and the anticipation. Along the backs of envelopes, I sent it to boys I hoped would be, too. Either way, I was flaunting my new, used first edition of di Prima’s 1961 Dinners and Nightmares, in which this “more or less love poem” appears and which I’d found for sale in a box on the sidewalk, in the Lower Haight, in the summer of 1994.

I moved to San Francisco that June to follow a friend, T, whom I’d met the previous fall, in our first year at a tiny, chaotic liberal arts college in the cornfields of central Ohio. Over the course of the monochrome winter, under low, grey skies and over mucky, grey snow, we’d set our sights on California.

Articulate and beautiful, with dark hair then kept in a glamorous, if unfussy, bob, T was everything I was not. As if her presence alone was a kind of magic trick, she often found playing cards on our walks to town, conjuring the jack of spades from a crack in the pavement or the nine of clubs stuck in a mailbox. By contrast, I was earnest and uncertain, with tangled hair and no magical abilities. A pen forever in her pocket, T already knew she would become a writer. In this, too, I was inescapably Midwestern: eager to please and inclined to ramble with what I thought people expected to hear, and I couldn’t imagine having anything worthwhile to say. Until T lent me her copy of Diane di Prima’s 1969 Memoirs of a Beatnik before we headed West.

Born in 1934, di Prima was raised in Brooklyn and later dropped out of Swarthmore to traipse around the Village and become a poet. While she would lead a long, rich life and become so much more than a Beat poet, including a peace activist, the mother of five children, a dedicated practitioner of Zen Buddhism, and the 2009 Poet Laureate of San Francisco, she remains celebrated, for good reason, as the female Beat, holding her own—in both blunt, literary radiance and while resisting social conformity—amidst the otherwise relentlessly macho, more than a little misogynist, New York scene.

In 1958, two years after Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Lawrence Ferlinghetti published and wrote the introduction for di Prima’s first collection, This Kind of Bird Flies Backward. In 1961, together with her then-lover and father of her second child Amiri Baraka, still called LeRoi Jones, she founded the New York Poets Theater. In 1968, she made her way to San Francisco and had been there, writing and writing and writing, ever since.

Especially for impatient teenagers, it’s difficult to establish, now, how mysterious the world was before the Internet. At eighteen, I didn’t know where to look or what questions to ask or what books to read, and I only saw myself as inadequate and provincial. Though I later read that the French editors of Memoirs of a Beatnik harangued di Prima for “more sex,” I fell in love with the book not because it was erotic, but because it was familiar. Di Prima’s preoccupations were my preoccupations: longing for boys and sex with boys and figuring out what to eat when you had no money. And yet, in her depictions, these were not diversions about which to be mildly ashamed, but the liberated and lyric experiences of a creative life, which was reason enough to chase her, some twenty-five years later, across-country.

T’s internship at a summer program for middle school students with behavioral issues came with a small room on the school’s grounds, in the Outer Sunset, which was clean and warm but creepy at night when the radiator banged like a sledgehammer. I stayed with my aunt, in the extra bedroom of her narrow, second story apartment on a foggy hill, north of the Panhandle. Undeterred by our decidedly not-Beat living arrangements, we got under-eighteen bus passes, because the drivers never checked IDs, and rode all over the city for thirty-five cents a pop.

I mentioned Diane di Prima to my aunt, explaining that she was a poet in the city and that I hoped to hear her read that summer. To my surprise, my aunt, who was not one for literature or women who didn’t wear makeup, recognized the name, saying she would ask around. A few days later, my aunt confirmed that she and di Prima’s oldest daughter, Jeanne, shared a mutual friend and that she would arrange for us to meet.

Not long after, I did meet Jeanne, who hired me on the spot. Half of my job was clerical work in the office she ran, which had something to do with monitoring the drug tests of Pacific Gas and Electric employees. (I remember one worker sending in the wrapper from his poppy seed muffin after testing positive for opiates.) The other half was planning Diane di Prima’s sixtieth birthday, which was to take place that August. By the end of my first week, I had spoken to Ferlinghetti on the phone and handwritten an invite list that included Wavy Gravy, Huncke the Junkie, and Bob Dylan.

At the time, I was both shocked and a little smug, convinced with adolescent hubris that I earned this providence. That the right book really was all it took. In her youth, Diane di Prima visited Ezra Pound at a D.C. mental institution, and now I was going to meet di Prima herself, taking what I wanted to believe was my lawful, if premature, first step into the tradition of literary mentorship. Never mind that I had no poems of my own to share or questions about meter or form or becoming a writer to ask, I took this turn of events as evidence that, although I had never found a queen of diamonds on the sidewalk, I was, somehow, being ordained.

Diane di Prima had knowing brown eyes, long, wavy brown hair, and a wise, open face I recognized from the cover of Memoirs. Wider and softer with age, she sat in an armchair and regarded me not unkindly but with rightful skepticism. While we chatted about who else to invite, I have to imagine she was thinking that I was not at all the person to persuade Bob Dylan to come drink champagne. Within a few weeks, it was clear there was no money, and the party wasn’t going to happened. I never saw Diane again, and the rest of the summer devolved from there.

Although I showed up at the office every day, there wasn’t really anything to do. Jeanne went on vacation and left me to housesit. At one point, four plainclothes FBI officers cornered me while I was unlocking the gate, asking who I was and making me promise not to tell anyone they’d stopped by. When Jeanne called the following week, still out of town, she knew about the FBI and cursed me for not telling her. I didn’t blame her, but no one had ever said, “fuck you” to me before, and it stung.

Meanwhile, a boy I’d sent one of those letters to showed up in San Francisco, which I hadn’t expected or wanted. Memoirs of a Beatnik was a better guide for sparking seduction than for deciphering how to end it. I borrowed his car one morning and found it towed by lunch. Getting it out of the pound took almost all the money I had, but we were both frustrated enough to say goodbye. Then a blond man I worked with, who wanted to be a stand-up comedian and spent the days we had nothing to do practicing his jokes, tried to kiss me in Golden Gate Park. I’d confided in him and said when his punchlines sucked because I’d assumed he was gay. He seemed so old but was probably not even thirty. Still, I was eighteen and felt betrayed.

If being Beat meant handling, with eloquent indifference, boys and men and cops and other people’s disappointment in me, then I understood, with grim clarity, that I wasn’t cut out for this life I thought I wanted. When I left the city at the end of August, I left my copy of Memoirs of a Beatnik at a café—not because I wasn’t still in awe of her, but because I was embarrassed by everything I thought I’d done wrong that summer—and I didn’t read any of her poems again for a long time.

When Diane di Prima died in the fall of 2020, I bought a new, used copy of Memoirs of a Beatnik. Relieved to avoid my own notes in the margins, I was nonetheless heartened by the kinship of someone else’s underlined passages. I still knew by heart scenes of this lover or that, though I scoffed, now a mother, at di Prima’s claims that navigating birth control was harder than raising children.

More than the words themselves, though, the essence and intimacy of the book spread through my solar plexus not with the mortification of the missteps and yearnings of my younger self, but the opposite. Surfacing in di Prima’s language and my body simultaneously was an unexpected sensation of abundance. Of having enough, even if it was nothing. And of the radical veracity of freedom not granted or withheld by someone else or any specific circumstances, but as perspective.

T and I had no money. I don’t think we made any new friends or went to any parties. Sometimes we drank cheap wine. Sometimes we wore lipstick. Two or three times, we dropped speedy acid and laughed until we couldn’t breathe. Mostly, though, we were sober and broke, and I thought that the playing cards T continued to unearth on the hills of San Francisco were like blazes in the forest, pointing us forward, on a path that led somewhere else. Now, though, I see those cards like di Prima’s poems, which didn’t point anywhere other than right where we stood. Once distilled, the miracle of that summer was the camaraderie of a best friend who saw in me something I hadn’t, which was the same quality that drew me to di Prima’s writing—that in community and with poetry, there was nothing else for which to pine or to wait.

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…

These lines are from di Prima’s “Revolutionary Letter #4,” dedicated to Bob Dylan. While it’s true that her 1969 memoirs, all sex and shifting Manhattan addresses, suggest volatility or instability, her poetry remains steady, at once calming and edifying, a meditation that is also liberation. At eighteen, I was enamored by how uninhibited her writing was around pleasure. Now, I see her work as far more radical for the consistent and reassuring love she had for herself and her own presence. Each moment worthy of her attention and vice-versa.

Diane di Prima wrote and lived in ways that might now be cast as either bankrolled by a surreptitious trust fund or destitute and delusional: being broke in dilapidated lofts, sharing beds and bathtubs with a rotating cast of friends and lovers, scraping it all together, collectively, but also independently, for the love of art and language and the human capacity to create. In middle-age, I see this not as cliché or misguided, but as pragmatic and right.

For decades, I thought I failed di Prima, bungling her birthday and everything else. But looking back, I see that summer as the season I learned that poets were real. That poems were real. I had one friend and one notebook and a diamond underneath my tongue. And whether or not anyone ever hunted it down wasn’t, actually, the point. Even if I was the only one who knew it, Diane di Prima’s poems were how I discovered that that diamond had been there all along.