Diane DiPrima's poetry is the expression of a strong, sensitive, intelligent woman during more than two decades of social and artistic ferment ("i am a woman and my poems / are a woman's ..."). Unfettered by the conventions of academia or society, she speaks of life outside the mainstream of middle-class America: the life of bohemia, of the counterculture. Involvement with and concern for the people in her life is central in her work. As she moves from the early years of Greenwich Village pads, the Beat, jazz, drug culture of the 1950s into the revolutionary currents of the flower children and Vietnam War protests of the 1960s and early 1970s, through Buddhism, Hinduism, and Zen to the emerging social consciousness of women in the 1970s, her work charts the shifting streams of America's fringe culture.

Born in New York City, daughter of Francis and Emma DiPrima, she grew up...