“in my city”: Diane di Prima and the Lineage of Haiku
by Daniel Shank Cruz
The role of the Beat poets, especially Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, in cultivating awareness of haiku in the United States after World War II is widely acknowledged. However, the haiku and other haiku-like short poems of another Beat poet, Diane di Prima, are less well-known, despite their quality and despite di Prima’s status as an occasional practitioner of the genre for more than fifty years until her death in 2020. This lack of renown perhaps results from di Prima’s most notable foray into the genre, her 1967 collection Haiku, being out of print for half a century. I think her haiku deserve a more prominent place in the history of the genre because they raise thought-provoking questions about how we write haiku during this time of what disability justice activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha calls “the triple pandemic” of climate change, COVID-19, and fascist tendencies in global politics.
Haiku was published in 1967 in an edition of 112 copies, which were sold by the Phoenix Bookstore in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. These copies consisted of thirty-two unbound haiku by di Prima (100 copies of the poems were printed and di Prima wrote twelve out by hand) and thirty-six woodcuts by George Herms that were contained in a light brown leather envelope with the collection’s title and di Prima’s name on the front and Herms’s name on the back flap. After these copies were sold, Haiku remained out of print until X Artists’ Books reprinted a bound edition of 1,000 copies in 2019. This edition (new copies of which are still available from the publisher and amazon.com) includes Herms’s illustrations in full color along with photographs of the front and back of the original edition’s envelope. The book’s poems are divided into four sections named after the seasons, beginning with spring.