The Beats: New York

This Kind of Bird Flies Backward

This Kind of Bird Flies Backward

Diane Di Prima New York: Totem Press, 1958. Marvin Tatum Collection of Contemporary Literature.

One of the few women Beat writers to maintain a lifestyle as flagrantly unconventional as her male contemporaries, Diane Di Prima was often called the archetypal Beat woman. She was already into free jazz, free love, and free experimentation with drugs, when a friend handed her a copy of Howl. She wrote, "I knew this Allen Ginsberg, whoever he was, had broken ground for all of us..." She took LeRoi Jones as her lover and business partner, and they started a small magazine called the Floating Bear, publishing the poetry and prose of most of the Beat writers. This Kind of Bird Flies Backward was Di Prima's first published book of poetry. In 1969 she wrote Memoirs of a Beatnik, relating her experiences during the Beat period.

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