Chicago Review mourns the loss of Diane di Prima, who passed away at the age of 86 in San Francisco last Sunday. An essential figure of US poetry during the second half of the twentieth century, di Prima was born in Brooklyn in 1934. She came to prominence with the Beat generation in the late fifties, among the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. In the Village, she edited the journal The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka and was friends with writers such as Audre Lorde and Frank O’Hara.
By the late sixties she relocated to San Francisco, where she participated with The Diggers, an anarchist group of street theater actors, and taught poetry at California College of Arts and Crafts, the New College of California, the San Francisco Art Institute, and Naropa University.
She published over 40 books in her lifetime, among them the semi-autobiography Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969), the poetry collections This Kind of Bird Flies Backward (1958) and Revolutionary Letters (1971), and the long poem Loba (1976–1978). In 1971, Chicago Review 22.4 included her poem “Song of Black Nana,” which we share, in remembrance of di Prima, below.
