We just learned that Diane di Prima passed away on October 25th, 2020. While we did not publish any of her extraordinary stand-alone works, she and her work appear in many Shambhala Publications books. Though I had not been in touch in years, I knew Diane, especially after sitting next to her in some longer retreats with Lama Tharchin Rinpoche. She had an incredible mind. I remember her often picking up on something someone said, catching a turn of phrase that others less perceptive or less tuned into language would have not noticed, illuminating it and playing with it, making it dance. I knew her to be a superb student, teacher, friend and inspiration to many.
Allen Ginsberg described her thus:
“Diane di Prima, revolutionary activist of the 1960s Beat literary renaissance, heroic in life and poetics: a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated and twentieth-century radical, her writing, informed by Buddhist equanimity, is exemplary in imagist, political and mystical modes. A great woman poet in the second half of American century, she broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity.”
But it is her own writing where she comes out and shines.
Diane's was a life well-lived. Palms together to Diane.
Nikko Odiseos, Shambhala Publications