Memoirs of a Beatnik  

"What do you suppose happened to all those Beatniks?" mused a blonde freshman as she drove me back to San Francisco after my reading at Berkeley last year.

Well, sweetie, some of us sold out and became hippies. And some of us managed to preserve our integrity by accepting government grants, or writing pornographic novels. John Wieners is mad and in make-up in Buffalo, Fred Herko walked out a window, Gary Snyder is a Zen priest. You name it. Or, as my eleven-year-old daughter recently said to me, remembering the early years of her childhood:

"I really miss those old days. They were hard, but they were beautiful."

Things now are more like pretty. A New Age, with a bit of the baby fat still showing.

Stay stoned."

--Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969) by Diane di Prima, foreword