Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years : a Memoir

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Viking, 2001 - Biography & Autobiography - 423 pages
In this rich and passionate memoir, influential poet Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Only by heroic effort was she able to break away from her intense Brooklyn Italian family to follow through on the lifelong commitment to poetry she made in high school. Immersed in the proto-Beat world of Manhattan's early 1950s Bohemia, she emerged as a major force, not only establishing herself as a poet, but also coediting the influential literary newsletter, The Floating Bear, and cofounding The Poet's Theatre.

Recollections of My Life as a Woman chronicles the intense, creative cauldron of those years as the Beat movement emerged on both coasts, and the country accelerated into the sixties. Poetry, painting, dance, and theater flowed into one another, and well-known figures from all those worlds -- including Merce Cunningham, Frank O'Hara, Audre Lorde, Trisha Brown, and Franz Kline -- move through her story. Di Prima was a deliberate single parent at a time when that was unheard of, and her relationships and sexuality were as revolutionary as her writing. This is a powerful and unique remembering of how one woman's life revealed itself to her.

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Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
17
Section 3
33
Copyright

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About the author (2001)

Diane di Prima was an American poet, artist, author, and teacher born on August 6, 1934 in Brooklyn, New York. She studied at Swarthmore College but dropped out. She spent the late 1950s and early 1960s in Manhattan, involved in the Beat movement. She was a co-founder of Poets Press and the New York Poets Theatre. She was also co-editor of the literary magazine, the Floating Bear. In the late 60s she moved to California. She wrote over forty books. Her first book was published in 1958, This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards. Some of her other books include Memoirs of a Beatnik; Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems; Loba; Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years; Revolutionary Letters and The Poetry Deal. Diane di Prima was named San Francisco poet laureate in 2009 and 2011. She died on October 25, 2020 in San Francisco at the age of 86.

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