Event

Diane di Prima

Poetry reading by Beat icon and current San Francisco Poet Laureate Diane di Prima. In her 7th annual solo appearance for EXIT Theatre's DIVAfest, she will read several of her poems, unpublished and "slightly published," over the past five years.
Diane says: "My DIVAfest reading is titled "What's New?" and I'll be reading from UNPUBLISHED, new work written over the past 2-3 years for the most part. Not must published work probably, tho I always read what I please at DivaFest. It is the one solo reading I do every year in my home town.

This year I and Christina chose the theme "What's New?" and I'll pretty much stick to it. I have plenty of new, unpublished poems, and a good number of them will be added to the Revolutionary Letters series if another edition comes out. The most recent edition of Revolutionary Letters was published by Last Gasp Press here in San Francisco in 2007. Ever since the first printing of this work in 1971 City Lights I have always added the new political poems I've written (& that fit) to each new printing. In 2007, it had been a long time since Revolutionary Letters was in print, and there were 23 new poems. I may read some of those. But mostly I'll stick to unpublished stuff.

"What's New?" is the theme and I will concentrate on my new work, and within that category, perhaps I'll slant it toward new poems that also deal with the news. Pound once said "Poetry is news that stays news."

He also said "Poets are the antennae of the human race" & that don't feel too good in the middle of a meltdown, do it?

I hope this helps clarify what I'll be up to."