August 6th would have been the 87th birthday of Beat legend Diane di Prima, and is her first birthday since her passing last October. While we didn't have a PennSound author page for di Prima then, we are very glad to have one now, and while its contents are modest, they are nonetheless well worth your time.
First and foremost we have an hour-long 1992 interview with di Prima conducted in San Francisco with Billy Klüver. Writing at Topos, Julie Martin provides some background for the recording, noting that it came out of a collaborative book project focusing on New York City's postwar artistic communities between 1945–1965. She continues:
During a trip to San Francisco in 1992, Billy reached out to Diane de Prima and requested an interview. He had studied at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1954 to 1958, before settling permanently in New Jersey just outside New York City, and had followed art, film and publishing activities on both coasts. He was familiar with di Prima’s work, and had in his archive numerous issues of The Floating Bear, the newsletter/magazine that she co-published from 1961 to 1969.When I read of di Prima’s death on October 25th, I remembered the interview, and I was very pleased to accept the invitation of Jacob Kirkegaard, to prepare the 30-year-old tape of the interview and release it on his group’s artists website TOPOS.
di Prima's participation in the 1973 National Poetry Festival is extensively documented on our homepage for that event, though there are sadly no recordings of events she participated in available to us at this time. Finally we have audio of Pierre Joris reading di Prima's "Rant" at a Poems for the Milennium launch event, as well as Ammiel Alcalay and Ana Bozičević discussing the poet for Cross Cultural Poetics.
With any luck, we hope to be able to expand our holdings in the near future. In the meantime, you can click here to listen to all of the aforementioned recordings on PennSound's Diane di Prima author page.
