In my twenties, I joined a small group of Bay Area artists for a lunch celebrating the birthday of the legendary Beat poet Michael McClure, who passed earlier this year. I grew up in California, the daughter of two artists, in the presence of the McClures of the world: men who had helped reshape American culture, like the poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Hirschman, or artists, actors, and musicians like Ed Ruscha, George Herms, Dennis Hopper, and Neil Young. Many of these men would be at McClure’s party, but there was one person I was especially nervous and excited to meet: a woman named Diane di Prima. Di Prima, who died on October 25th, at the age of eighty-six, was a revolutionary feminist poet who was on the front lines of the shifts in art and culture that took place in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. She fought for queer rights, trans rights, and women’s rights long before clothing lines and hashtags began to flood political movements. For six decades, her writing confronted the traditional stereotypes of the female body, how it should look, weigh, and be desired. She was, to my eye, the real sexual liberator of the sixties—a woman who wrote dangerously, lived wildly, and loved daringly, right up to her very last breath.
At McClure’s party, I was, to my surprise, seated directly across from di Prima, and the force of her presence caused me to fidget with my napkin and fumble my words. Wild gray hair coiled on her head like a snake, and she tapped a butter knife on the table to a rhythm only she could hear. She stared at me and smiled. I had read all of her many books by this time, and could quote whole sections of some of her most beloved work: the epic poem “Loba,” which she revised and completed in the course of decades, or her collection “Revolutionary Letters,” from 1971, in which she sketched in verse the contours of resistance. (“I have just realized the stakes are myself,” she writes in the poem “Revolutionary Letter #1.”) Tap, tap, tap went the butter knife. “Hello,” she said to me, “I’m Diane.” I said hello back, and we sat there together, in a room full of tables, flanked by mostly famous men and the women who loved them. “I didn’t think I’d be sitting at this table,” I finally conjured, still awed at being placed directly across from one of my literary heroes. Diane smiled and said, “There will always be a seat for us here, my dear.”
Diane di Prima knew firsthand what it was like to make a seat for herself at tables that had no space for women like her—women who challenged the system, and who thrived in the act. She was always in coalition with such women, and you can hear echoes of her work in the “fight the patriarchy” slogans of modern feminism. She was born to an Italian-American household, in Brooklyn, and was raised by the women in her mother’s family to understand that men are just “a luxury,” not a necessity for women’s survival. To survive in this world as a woman, she learned, was to live in a state of insurgency, and to make peace with that fact. When she was young, in Manhattan, Diane became a fundamental part of the Beat movement, corresponded with Ezra Pound, made magazines with Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), and rejected the traditional ways in which women dressed, created, and loved. She saw herself as a weapon to be deployed—no, detonated—against her oppressors. She wrote about the equality of the sexes. She wrote about women as wolves, women as predators, as hunters, as villains. She wrote about fat women, queer women, androgynous women, disobedient women, women as Gods, as birds, as the wind.
After McClure’s birthday party, Diane and I kept in touch. We began sending each other letters and poems and talking on the phone frequently. Growing up, I had only ever dreamed of living life like she had lived it: as a multi-hyphenate artist who writes what she wants and is taken seriously for it, and whose creativity is driven by a moral energy of the political and spiritual. I yearned to have a life that felt as authentic and free as Diane’s seemed, and, in forging a friendship with her, my life did feel much closer to that. Over the years, and especially in my early thirties, her support helped propel my own existential growth. So much of the woman I am today is because of the woman Diane once was.
Toward the end of Diane’s life, I would visit her and her partner, the artist and healer Sheppard Powell, whenever I was in San Francisco. We would eat dumplings at a local restaurant she loved; when her health began to decline, I helped organize fund-raisers to ease the weight of her medical bills. I watched as donations poured in from all over the world, with notes from people who had been forever changed by her work. Inside her home, books on alchemy, Buddhism, magic, poetry, and Western spiritual traditions sprouted up out of the floorboards in stacks. Whenever I would leave, she would give me what she called “a feather”—a small piece of torn-off paper, marked with a line of poetry, that she had written and left to land somewhere in the house.
When I heard that Diane had passed away, I called her home and was jarred by the sound of her voice on the answering machine, even though the message had been the same for years. Hearing it reminded me of the last time I saw her, when I brought my one-year-old daughter, Marlow, over to her house and watched as she rolled around on Diane’s bed. Diane read to her, played with her toes, and showered little feathers of poetry down over her body like snow. “Here’s a short poem,” the outgoing message said. The sound of it made me cry, and I wept into my phone as it rattled against my ear. “Let the hand shake,” Diane’s voice said, as though saying it for the first time, as though the language between us, between all women, was always speaking. “The line is a living thing.”
