San Francisco Renaissance

The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco, which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetry avant-garde. ^[1]However, others (e.g., Alan Watts, Ralph J. Gleason) felt this renaissance was a broader phenomenon and should be seen as also encompassing the visual and performing arts, philosophy, cross-cultural interests (particularly those that involved Asian cultures), and new social sensibilities.

First beginnings

Kenneth Rexroth—poet, translator, critic, and author—is generally considered to be the founding father of the renaissance. Rexroth was a prominent second generation modernist poet who corresponded with Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and was published in the Objectivist Anthology. He was amongst the first American poets to explore Japanese poetry traditions such as haiku and was also heavily influenced by jazz.

If Rexroth was the founding father, Madeline Gleason was the founding mother. During the 1940s, both she and Rexroth befriended a group of younger Berkeley poets consisting of Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser. Gleason and Duncan were particularly close and read and criticized each other's work.

A movement emerges

In April 1947, Gleason organized the First Festival of Modern Poetry at Marcelle^{[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]} Labaudt's Lucien Labaudt^{[13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]} Gallery,^[27][28][29] 1407 Gough Street,^[30][31] San Francisco.^[32][33][34] Over the space of two evenings, she brought twelve poets, including Rexroth, Robert Duncan and Spicer, to an audience of young poets and poetry lovers. This was the first public recognition of the range of experimental poetic practice that was current in the city.^[35]

During the 1950s, Duncan and Robert Creeley both taught at Black Mountain College and acted as links between the San Francisco poets and the Black Mountain poets. Many of the San Francisco writers began to publish in Cid Corman's Origin and in the Black Mountain Review, the house journals of the Black Mountain group. Spicer's interest in the cante jondo also led to links with the deep image poets. In 1957, Spicer ran his seminar "Poetry as Magic" at San Francisco State College with Duncan as a participant.

The Beats

Around the same time that Duncan, Spicer and Blaser were at Berkeley, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch were attending Reed College in Portland, Oregon. These three, along with Kirby Doyle, a native San Franciscan, were to form the nucleus of the West Coast wing of the Beat Generation.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti had been studying for a doctorate at the Sorbonne and, while in Paris, met Kenneth Rexroth, who later persuaded him to go to San Francisco to experience the growing literary scene there. Between 1951 and 1953, Ferlinghetti taught French, wrote literary criticism, and painted. In 1953, he and a business partner established the City Lights Bookstore and started publishing as City Lights Press two years later.

Snyder and Whalen, along with Michael McClure, were among the poets who performed at the famous Six Gallery poetry reading that Kenneth Rexroth organized in San Francisco on October 13 (or October 7, sources vary), 1955. This reading signaled the full emergence of the San Francisco Renaissance into the public consciousness and helped establish the city's reputation as a center for countercultural activity that came to full flower during the hippie years of the 1960s. A short fictional account of this event forms the second chapter of Jack Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Bums. In the account, he describes Allen Ginsberg's famous reading of his poem "Howl". Kerouac and Ginsberg had attended the reading with some of their poet friends.

Legacy

The Bay Area-based philosopher and writer Alan Watts, in his autobiography, mentioned that by around 1960 or so “… something else was on the way, in religion, in music, in ethics and sexuality, in our attitudes to nature, and in our whole style of life.” He, in his autobiography (p 284) described characteristics of a “Clear School” of poetry on whose role he included “Alice Meynell, Walter de la Mare, Emily Dickenson, Kenneth Rexroth, Karl Shapiro, Jean Burden, and Eric Barker(to name a few).” Alan asserted that these poets, employ traditional rhythms and “ say what they have to say with an easy, natural clarity which avoids both clichés and obscure allusions or bizarre, far-fetched images.” (from Watts, In My Own Way).

Some of the songwriters of the upcoming rock-music generation of the mid-1960s and later read and appreciated writers like Kerouac, Snyder, McClure, Ferlinghetti, and Ginsberg (e.g., Bob Dylan, for one, has talked about this). Hence, given that much of the late-'60s wave of groundbreaking rock music developed within rock's famous San Francisco Sound, it seems very likely that the writers of the San Francisco Renaissance had an influence on the lyrics, both artistically and in terms of attitudes to living.

The "underground press" that developed in America and elsewhere in the 1960s had one of its most interesting and colorful examples in the San Francisco Oracle which reflected the hippie culture and other aspects of the counterculture. The Oracle gave much space to writings by Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, and other Beat writers, along with emerging younger writers.

Both Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure were featured on-stage in the rock-star jammed The Last Waltz, a documentary and concert film made by Martin Scorsese about The Band (who had an immense following in the late 1960s to mid 1970s) and a large number of their musical friends.

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