Diane Di Prima collection
Overview
The journal is the author's archives, presumably from when she was located in New York City: collection of carbons and drafts of letters, notes, journals, editorial work, etc. Includes much personal material. The two reel to reel tapes are recordings of Di Prima's poetry, and the "absurd" play was written in the round during the fall or winter of 1959 in pencil in several hands (bookseller indicates the play was by "Diane Di Prima, Freddie Herko, and James Waring").
Dates
- Creation: 1953-1961, 1964?
Creator
- Di Prima, Diane (Person)
Conditions Governing Access
No access restrictions.
Conditions Governing Use
Spencer Library staff may determine use restrictions dependent on the physical condition of manuscript materials.
Biographical / Historical
Diane Di Prima, a feminist beat poet, was born in Brooklyn, New York and moved to Greenwich Village in Manhattan where she joined the Beat movement. She became friends with many other authors of the era, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Amiri Baraka, and Audre Lorde and eventually joined Timothy Leary's community in upstate New York. In 1968 she moved to San Francisco, California, where in 2009 she was named the city's Poet Laureate.
Di Prima co-edited the literary magazine The Floating Bear with Amiri Baraka throughout most of the 1960s. Her published works in poetry, short stories, memoirs, and autobiography include This Kind of Bird Flies Backward (1958), Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems (2001), Dinners and Nightmares (1960), Memoirs of a Beatnik (1968), among other publications.
Extent
.25 Linear Feet (1 document case containing a journal (loose sheets, approximately 200 leaves); 2 reel to reel tape recordings; and a play (4 sheets).)
Language of Materials
English
Physical Location
MS 71
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Phoenix Book Shop, March 24, 1966; Phoenix 87: 196[6], November 7, 1968.
- Title
- Guide to the American Poetry-20th Century Collection
- Subtitle
- Diane Di Prima collection
- Author
- Finding aid prepared by alh, November 17, 1975. Finding aid encoded by mg, 2005. Finding aid revised by mwh, 2019.
- Date
- 2005
- Description rules
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- Language of description
- Finding aid written in<language encodinganalog="language">English.</language>
- Finding aid permalink
- http://hdl.handle.net/10407/4266211628
- Preferred citation
-
Diane Di Prima collection, MS 71, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.
Repository Details
Part of the University of Kansas. Kenneth Spencer Research Library Repository