Short answers, pulled from the story.
The San Francisco Renaissance was a wave of experimental poetic activity centered on San Francisco that brought the city to prominence as a hub of the American poetry avant-garde in the 1950s. Critics and writers such as Alan Watts also argued it extended beyond poetry to encompass visual and performing arts, philosophy, and cross-cultural interests, particularly with Asian cultures.
Kenneth Rexroth is considered the founding father of the San Francisco Renaissance, and Madeline Gleason is regarded as its founding mother. During the 1940s, both befriended a younger group of Berkeley poets including Robert Duncan, William Everson, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser.
The First Festival of Modern Poetry was organized by Madeline Gleason in April 1947 at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery at 1407 Gough Street in San Francisco. Over two evenings, twelve poets including Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, and Jack Spicer performed before an audience of young poets and poetry lovers.
Kenneth Rexroth organized the Six Gallery poetry reading in San Francisco on the 7th of October 1955, where Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, and Allen Ginsberg performed. Ginsberg read his poem "Howl" that night, and Jack Kerouac later wrote a fictional account of the event in the second chapter of his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums.
Donald Allen's anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960 grouped certain poets under the label "San Francisco Renaissance" and became, as critic Marjorie Perloff observed, the central document for defining both the poetics and broader cultural dynamics of the movement. The anthology gave a name to the generation, though debate over the usefulness and accuracy of that label has continued ever since.
Rock songwriters of the mid-1960s and later, including Bob Dylan, read and appreciated writers associated with the San Francisco Renaissance such as Kerouac, Snyder, McClure, Ferlinghetti, and Ginsberg. The San Francisco Oracle, a notable underground paper of the 1960s, gave significant space to many of those writers, and both Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure appeared on stage in Martin Scorsese's 1978 documentary The Last Waltz.