Diane is an amazing teacher. She liberated me from a year long bout of writer's block and gave me incredible tools that I will continue using. Now I can tap into a wealth of material that is inside me.
She's not into academic bullshit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_di_Prima
http://www.levity.com/corduroy/diprima.htm
http://louisville.edu/library/uarc/diprima.html
http://www.beatmuseum.org/diprima/dianediprima.html
http://www.angelfire.com/mn2/anarchistpoetry/Diprimadir/Diprima.html
http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/writers/diprima.html
I highly recommend "Foundation of Poetics" -- it's a nine month course where you meet once a month for a four-hour class. She offered four or five one-on-one one hour sessions as part of the class.
Wonderful. I've gotten five of the poems out of that class published. Before that, I had just about kissed publishing goodbye.
From her Web site, examples of the classes she has offered:
THE LYRIC POEM
POST WORLD WAR II
TO THE PRESENT
READING & WRITING THE LYRIC
Why is it so hard to write a good love poem?
Do you still think of poetry as a burst of ecstatic song?
The term "lyric poetry" comes from the "lyre" -- the stringed instrument with which the Greek poets accompanied themselves, and so includes a sense of Poetry as Song. Though the short lyric poem has been largely neglected for the past quarter century, it is still what comes to mind for most of us when we speak of "the poem". In this three-session class we will read work ranging from the late 19th Century to the present.
We will also spend a part of each class day writing.
This class is a continuation of the last two summer's study of the lyric, but you you do not need to have attended the previous classes to join.
Seven-hour sessions
* * *
THE LANGUAGE OF ALCHEMY
Taught by Diane di Prima
Four Lectures
Alchemical literature admits us into a magical universe of rich and bizarre imagery and sudden insights--dimensional shifts, but it is a universe in which we feel the need for some kind of map. In our century, this problem has often been solved by flattening the material: reductively reading the texts as either spiritual allegory, or a primitive form of "science". But, in a correspondent cosmos, the process that is creative of soul is also creative of galaxies --
there is no need to reduce alchemy to psychology or chemistry.
These lectures will search out signposts in some alchemical texts: terms, ideas, methods whereby the particularity of the language itself provides the map for our reading of the material. Thus, this seminar lays the groundwork for comparison of widely divergent works, and is an invitation to enter the world of the alchemist "from the ground up", by taking them "at their word". read more
