di Prima, Diane

Dinners and Nightmares

New York, NY, USA: Corinth Books, 1961. First Edition. Softcover. “Well I had gotten to a warmer place for starving and lived on beaches, and it seemed to me that everything would swing if I had some book or other. So I wrote my mother (found paper) and told her General Delivery and then I went back to beach and waited. Nights warm enough to sleep and fish ok and paper occasionally a poem, and then it seemed like time enough and I went to the post office. / A package I said a book my name is thus and they said identification please. And I looked in all pockets but a lucky wave had gotten the cards with my name. / Please I said, please please please. A book inside, Rimbaud, open and look open for gods sake please. / Sorry they said why not go home they said and get your i.d. / Sure I said I’ll ask that wave next time I see it but now give me package. Sorry they said and put it on shelf / high / behind wire and screen. Rimbaud there and maybe food / probably tucked around. Salami and cans of things food / you know. / Please I said please well good day. / Good day they said.”--Diane di Prima, “Nightmare 1,” Dinners and Nightmares, pg. 41. Diane di Prima (1934-2020) was a Beat poet, artist, prose writer, and teacher. A New York woman, born and raised, di Prima immersed herself in the burgeoning Beat movement as it was developing in Greenwich Village, where she befriended Allen Ginsberg (1924-1997), Frank O’Hara (1926-1966), Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) a/k/a Leroi Jones (with whom she co-edited the literary magazine The Floating Bear from 1961 to 1969), and Audre Lorde (1934-1992). Di Prima published more than 40 books. Her poetry collections included This Kind of Bird Flies Backward (1958), the long poem Loba (1978, expanded 1998), and Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems (2001). She is also the author of the semi-autobiographical Memoirs of a Beatnik (1968), and the memoir Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (2001). Offered today is the 1961 collection of short stories, poems, and interviews, Dinners and Nightmares. A highly experimental collage of genres, including plays, conversations, interior monologues, free verse, and lists, Dinners and Nightmares is a postmodern text long before that term became mainstreamed. di Prima’s straightforward, vulgar, explicit, and visceral prose cuts through the niceties and bullshit to deliver something truly subversive and experimental; breaking conservative conventions of the time and fore-telling the sort of sexual-bohemian experimentation of the hippies in the mid to late 60s. From the collection of Richard Cupidi (b. 1945), our esteemed mate in the UK who managed the fabled Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton, England for founder Bill Butler (1934-1977, the famed American-expatriate bookseller & publisher). From the late 1960s through the early 1970s, Unicorn proffered & published many outstanding productions by William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard et al., some of which have become the scarcest, all-but-unobtainable Beat-&-Beyond collectibles (see for example our item nos. 8217-8366). After prevailing against censorious harassment efforts, Unicorn closed & Butler died in short order. Cupidi went on to found the Public House Bookshop in Brighton, which had a long & successful run but is also now closed, & he still resides there. We have been honored to obtain what Cupidi has termed "The Last Hurrah," all the remaining treasures of Unicorn & Public House, some of which have become the stuff of myth. Trade-format softcover original. First edition though not explicated as such, presumed first printing though similarly not explicated. In relatively fine-very fine condition with minor wear to fine edges, moderate scratching/smudging to front and back covers, minor chipping/scratching to spine, and moderate discoloration due to age-toning; interior very fine throughout. Fine-Very Fine. [Item #8402]

Price: $100.00