San Francisco Renaissance

• 1. Introduction

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  The San Francisco Renaissance was not a single event, a single school, or even a single art form. On the evening of the 7th of October 1955, at a small gallery in San Francisco, a poet stood up and read a poem called "Howl" aloud to a crowd that had gathered to hear experimental verse. That night, as Jack Kerouac watched from the audience and Allen Ginsberg read, something cracked open in American culture. But the Renaissance had been building for nearly a decade before that evening. Who built it? How did a handful of poets in one city reshape American literary life? And why does the question of what to call it still divide critics today?

• 2. The Founders

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  Kenneth Rexroth came to the movement as a second-generation modernist who had corresponded with both Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and appeared in the Objectivist Anthology. He was among the first American poets to seriously engage Japanese poetic traditions like haiku, and jazz ran through his sensibilities as well. If Rexroth is the founding father of the San Francisco Renaissance, the poet Madeline Gleason holds the title of founding mother. During the 1940s, the two of them befriended a younger group of Berkeley poets that included Robert Duncan and William Everson. Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser joined that circle in the late 1940s. Gleason and Duncan were particularly close, reading each other's work and offering criticism in both directions. Lawrence Ferlinghetti arrived in the city by a different route: he had been studying for a doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he met Rexroth, who persuaded him to come to San Francisco and see the literary scene for himself. Between 1951 and 1953, Ferlinghetti taught French, wrote literary criticism, and painted, before founding City Lights Bookstore in 1953 with a business partner and launching City Lights Press two years after that.

• 3. The First Public Gathering

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  In April 1947, Madeline Gleason organized the First Festival of Modern Poetry at Marcelle Labaudt's Lucien Labaudt Gallery, located at 1407 Gough Street in San Francisco. Over two evenings, she brought twelve poets before an audience of young poets and poetry lovers. Rexroth, Robert Duncan, and Spicer were among those who performed. This was the first public moment at which the breadth of experimental poetic practice alive in the city became visible in a single place. The event did not announce a movement with a name or a manifesto. It simply put the poets in the same room as the people who wanted to hear them, and that was enough to mark something new.

• 4. Connections and Crossings

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  Duncan and the poet Robert Creeley both taught at Black Mountain College during the 1950s, and that arrangement created a living bridge between the San Francisco writers and the separate Black Mountain movement. Many San Francisco poets began publishing in Cid Corman's journal Origin and in the Black Mountain Review. Spicer's fascination with the cante jondo, the deep song tradition from flamenco, drew connections to the deep image poets as well. In 1957, Spicer ran a seminar at San Francisco State College titled "Poetry as Magic," with Duncan as a participant. Meanwhile, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch had come to the scene from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and all three traced their early influences back to Rexroth. In the early 1950s, the three gravitated to the San Francisco area, where Spicer exercised an influence over Whalen and Welch specifically. Kirby Doyle, a native San Franciscan, and Bob Kaufman, originally from New Orleans, were more naturally connected to the Beat current that was arriving around the same time.

• 5. Six Gallery and the Public Break

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  Snyder and Whalen, together with Michael McClure, were among the readers at the Six Gallery poetry reading that Rexroth organized in San Francisco on the 7th of October 1955. Kerouac and Ginsberg had come with a group of poet friends, and Ginsberg read "Howl" that night. Kerouac later wrote a short fictional account of the event in the second chapter of his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums. That reading marked the moment when the San Francisco Renaissance moved from a circle of writers who knew each other into something that public consciousness could recognize. The city's reputation as a center for countercultural activity that had been forming through years of readings and small publications now had a public origin story that would carry forward into the hippie years of the 1960s.

• 6. The Naming Problem

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  Donald Allen's anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960 became, as the critic Marjorie Perloff observed, the central document for defining both the poetics and broader cultural dynamics of what people now call the San Francisco Renaissance. Allen grouped certain poets under that label, and in doing so, gave a name to a generation. But the name itself became a problem. Alan Watts and Ralph J. Gleason both argued that the Renaissance was a far broader phenomenon than poetry alone, one that encompassed visual and performing arts, philosophy, cross-cultural interests with Asian cultures, and new social sensibilities. Critics of the term have argued that calling it a "San Francisco Renaissance" is simply a convenient grouping, a label rather than a description. They contend that the label cannot account for the full range of social, political, and artistic changes involved, and that treating it as an organizing principle gives the word more power than it can honestly hold.

• 7. Reach and Afterlife

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  Alan Watts, the Bay Area philosopher and writer, wrote in his autobiography that by around 1960 he could sense that something else was arriving in religion, music, ethics, sexuality, and "our whole style of life." Watts described a "Clear School" of poetry whose roll included Alice Meynell, Walter de la Mare, Emily Dickinson, Kenneth Rexroth, Karl Shapiro, Jean Burden, and Eric Barker, among others. He praised their use of traditional rhythms and what he called an easy, natural clarity that avoided clichés and obscure images alike. Rock songwriters of the mid-1960s and later read writers like Kerouac, Snyder, McClure, Ferlinghetti, and Ginsberg; Bob Dylan has spoken about this. Given that much of the groundbreaking rock music of the late 1960s developed within the San Francisco Sound, those literary influences may have traveled deeper into the culture than critics of the label have been willing to credit. The San Francisco Oracle, one of the most distinctive papers of the underground press that emerged in America in the 1960s, gave substantial space to Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, and other writers from the movement. And in 1978, both Ferlinghetti and McClure appeared on stage in The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese's documentary and concert film about The Band's farewell 1976 concert.