the Poetry Center
presents
Saturday April 10
a reading with DIANE di PRIMA and AMMIEL ALCALAY
• 7:30 pm @ Meridian Gallery
535 Powell Street, San Francisco, $10 ($5 student/low income)
http://www.meridiangallery.org/
Diane di Prima, recently appointed Poet Laureate of San Francisco, will be joined by visiting poet Ammiel Alcalay for a reading, co-presented by the Poetry Center and the Meridian Gallery.
Concurrent with their reading, the Meridian Gallery presents “The Visionary Art of Morris Graves” —the largest exhibition of work by the major American painter Morris Graves in recent memory. Curated by eminent art historian Peter Selz, the exhibition marks Graves’ 100th birthday.
“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 second half of American century, she broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity.”
—Allen Ginsberg
“A few people like her get made every few thousand years, in order to highlight the dullness of the rest.”
—Andrei Codrescu
DIANE di PRIMA, born in New York into a traditional Italian American family, grew up in Brooklyn but broke away from her roots to follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she was in high school. Immersing herself in Manhattan’s early 1950s Bohemia, di Prima quickly emerged as a renowned poet, an influential editor —of Floating Bear and Poets Press—, and a single mother. Her autobiographical *Recollections of My Life As A Woman* relates her early years, prior to her migration to the West Coast in the late 1960s.
In San Francisco now for many years, she has taught at a number of alternative schools, including Naropa University, in Boulder, and the former New College of California, San Francisco. Of her many books, *Pieces of A Song: Selected Poems* is published by City Lights Books, the long poem *Loba* and her novel *Memoirs of a Beatnik* by Penguin Books.
She is the subject of *This Bird Flies Backward*, a film by Melanie la Rosa/Octopus Films. Video sample here:
http://www.octopusfilmvideo.com/index.htm
AMMIEL ALCALAY, poet, essayist, translator, and editor, born and raised in Boston, is a first-generation American, son of Sephardic Jews who emigrated from Serbia to the US after the second World War. He teaches at Queens College, New York, and at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he directs Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.
http://opencuny.org/poetics/lost-found/
Alcalay is the author of *After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture* (U. Minnesota), and *Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays: 1982-1999* (City Lights), and editor and translator of *Keys to the Garden*, an anthology of new Israeli writing, Semezdin Mehmedinovic’s *Sarajevo Blues* and *Nine Alexandrias*, and *Outcast* by Shimon Ballas (all published by City Lights). His books of poetry include *the cairo notebooks* (Singing Horse) and *from the warring factions* (Beyond Baroque). His first novel, *Islanders*, is brand new from City Lights Books.
di Prima photo: credit Melanie la Rosa