Goodbye Diane di Prima, Feminist Beat Poet and My Role Model

The lioness of Beatdom, Diane di Prima, died October 25^th of this year at age 86. She was a role model for women's liberation—before the term even existed. What's more, she was a role model for my very personal liberation—in all ways. Her recent death brought me back to the early 1960s when I was 16 years old.

Escaping the normalcy and middle-class-ness of Manhattan’s Upper West Side where I was living with my parents, I’d take the No. 5 bus at 72^nd Street and Broadway to Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue—to the heart of Greenwich Village. The Village still felt authentic then, a place where the counterculture could thrive. Lured by the legacy of the Beats, I was trying to connect to that moment, which symbolized Freedom, even if I didn’t realize what that meant, though I was pretty sure I knew how it looked.