Haiku originated in New York City in 1964, when Beat Generation poet Diane di Prima gave West Coast assemblage artist George Herms a series of seasonal poems that would lead him to create a suite of woodcuts illustrating them.

Diane di Prima (1934-2020) was a poet whose writing, activism, and organizing helped define the Beat Generation. She has published more than thirty collections of poetry, as well as memoirs and short stories. She was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009 and has received the National Poetry Association's Lifetime Service Award.

George Herms (born 1935 in Woodland, California) is an artist/alchemist whose work finding the beautiful in found and discarded objects has led to his being known as one of the founders of the West Coast “assemblage” movement. He has created jazz-inspired sculpture, installations, paintings, drawings, prints, and music all based on an ethics of discovery, rearrangement, and play.

Feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Swarthmore College for two years before moving to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and becoming a writer in the emerging Beat movement. There, she developed friendships with poets Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara and Audre Lorde. After joining Timothy Leary's intentional community in upstate New York, she moved to San Francisco in 1968. One of her collections of poetry, The Poetry Deal, is also published by City Lights Publishers. Di Prima was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009. She has been awarded the National Poetry Association's Lifetime Service Award and the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement and has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Committee on Poetry, the Lapis Foundation and the Institute for Aesthetic Development. St. Lawrence University granted her an honorary doctorate.

Diane di Prima began writing her ‘Letters’ in 1968, conjuring a potent blend of utopian visions, ecological urgency and spiritual insight. By turns a manifesto for breaking free, a manual for street protest and a feminist broadside, these poems are as relevant to the convulsions and crises of today as they were fifty years ago.

During the last years of her life, di Prima worked on the final iteration of her enduring project. This volume brings together fifteen new poems with all the previously published Letters in an expanded fiftieth anniversary edition.

With a Foreword by Francesca Wade and an Introduction by Sophie Lewis

Publication: 20 October 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9957162-6-1
Extent: 232 pages

'Di Prima is one of the greatest writers of her generation.' - Chris Kraus