San Francisco Renaissance
Encyclopedia
The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

 activity centered on San Francisco and which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetic avant-garde. However, others (e.g., Alan Watts
Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York...

, Ralph J. Gleason
Ralph J. Gleason
Ralph Joseph Gleason was an influential American jazz and pop music critic. He contributed for many years to the San Francisco Chronicle, was a founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine, and cofounder of the Monterey Jazz Festival.-Biography:Gleason was born in New York City and attended Columbia...

) felt this renaissance was a broader phenomenon and should be seen as also encompassing visual and performing arts, philosophy, cross-cultural interests (particularly those that involved Asian cultures), and new social sensibilities.

First beginnings

The poet Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement...

 is generally considered to be the founding father of the renaissance. Rexroth was a prominent second generation modernist
Modernist poetry
Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist literature in the English language, but the dates of the term depend upon a number of factors, including the nation of origin, the particular school in question, and the biases of the critic setting the...

 poet who corresponded with Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

 and William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

 and was published in the Objectivist Anthology
Objectivist poets
The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, amongst others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams...

. He was amongst the first American poets to explore Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese poetry traditions such as haiku
Haiku
' , plural haiku, is a very short form of Japanese poetry typically characterised by three qualities:* The essence of haiku is "cutting"...

 and was also heavily influenced by jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

.

If Rexroth was the founding father, Madeline Gleason
Madeline Gleason
Madeline Gleason was a United States poet and dramatist. She is often credited with the founding of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University...

 was the founding mother. During the 1940s, both she and Rexroth befriended a group of younger Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

 poets consisting of Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan (poet)
Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...

, Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.-Life and work:...

 and Robin Blaser
Robin Blaser
Robin Francis Blaser was an author and poet in both the United States and Canada.-Personal background:Born in Denver, Colorado, Blaser grew up in Idaho, and came to Berkeley, California, in 1944. There he met Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, becoming a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance of...

. 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 the Lucien Labaudt Gallery, Gough Street. 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.

During the 1950s, Duncan and Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...

 both spent periods of time teaching at Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College, a school founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, was a new kind of college in the United States in which the study of art was seen to be central to a liberal arts education, and in which John Dewey's principles of education played a major role...

 and acted as links between the San Francisco poets and the Black Mountain poets
Black Mountain poets
The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College.-Background:...

. Many of the San Francisco writers began to publish in Cid Corman
Cid Corman
Cid Corman was an American poet, translator and editor, most notably of Origin, who was a key figure in the history of American poetry in the second half of the 20th century.-Early life and writing:...

's Origin and in the Black Mountain Review, the house journals of the Black Mountain group. Spicer's interest in the canto jondo also led to links with the deep image
Deep image
Deep image is a term coined by U.S. poets Jerome Rothenberg and Robert Kelly in the second issue of Trobar in 1961. They used it to describe poetry written by them and by Diane Wakoski and Clayton Eshleman....

 poets. In 1957, Spicer ran his seminar Poetry as Magic at San Francisco State College with Duncan as a participant.

Impact of the "New American Poetry"

Perhaps the crucial cultural document here was (and is) Donald Allen
Donald Allen
Donald Merriam Allen , influential editor, publisher, and translator of contemporary American literature. He is perhaps best known for his project The New American Poetry 1945-1960 , among the several important anthologies of contemporary American innovative writing he made available to the public...

's anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960
The New American Poetry 1945-1960
The New American Poetry 1945–1960 was a poetry anthology edited by Donald Allen, and published in 1960. It aimed to pick out the "third generation" of American modernist poets, and included quite a number of poems fresh from the little magazines of the late 1950s. In the longer term it attained a...

. In this assemblage, Allen had grouped some of the poets "San Francisco Renaissance", and as Marjorie Perloff
Marjorie Perloff
Marjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born U.S. poetry critic.Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. Faced with Nazi terror, her family emigrated in 1938 when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in Riverdale, New York...

 observes:
The Allen anthology was central to defining both the poetics and broader cultural dynamics of a particular historical moment now referred to as the San Francisco Renaissance. Though a particular "generation" had now been named (in large part because of the Allen anthology), today the debate continues as to the viability or use of the term San Francisco Renaissance as a "label" to define an entire era or generation.

Those who believe the term is accurate will argue on the one hand that indeed a "group" did forge a "renaissance": the impact on our historical consciousness was (and is) measurable. Therefore, for them, the use of the term is still verifiable. On the other hand, there are those who argue that the label San Francisco Renaissance is just that: a "label". As a label, therefore, it exists as a convenient and arbitrary "grouping" of something which remains (and even must remain) "unverifiable". Since the impact of such a broad phenomenon on our consciousness cannot be measured, such an impact has not even been recognized or articulated yet, much less addressed as problematic in itself.

Beyond defining itself as itself (i.e. such as defining some measurable impact on consciousness or on ourselves as human beings) critics of the term San Francisco Renaissance argue that beyond that particular use as a label (even if it helps to signal the arrival of a "new" phenomenon not accounted for on our consciousness), a word itself, as such, cannot act for us as an organizing principle. In other words, we are misguided if we do not recognize how this label fails us (beyond a certain usefulness as a label or "grouping") when it comes to truly measuring (much less accounting for) the impact of multiple, broad and dynamic social, political, and artistic changes in our consciousness.

Among those critical of terminology and among those who dare to question how and why it can impact consciousness, asking what that proposes for a definition of the human, perhaps Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet...

 has been most articulate:

Print

  • Allen, Donald M., ed. The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 (1960, reissued 1999); (University of California Press).
  • Ellingham, Lewis & Killian, Kevin. Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).
  • French, Warren G. "The San Francisco Poetry Renaissance 1955-1960" (Twayne, 1991). ISBN 0805776214
  • Davidson, Michael
    Michael Davidson (poet)
    Michael Davidson is an American poet.-Overview:Davidson has written eight books of poetry as well as numerous historical, cultural and critical works...

    . The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
  • Kerouac, Jack The Dharma Bums
    The Dharma Bums
    The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The semi-fictional accounts in the novel are based upon events that occurred years after the events of On the Road...

    , (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958). ISBN 0-14-004252-0
  • Snyder, Gary The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964-1979. (New York: New Directions, 1980). ISBN 0-8112-0761-7
  • Spicer, Jack The Collected Books of Jack Spicer
    The Collected Books of Jack Spicer
    The Collected Books of Jack Spicer first appeared in 1975, ten years after the death of Jack Spicer. It was "edited & with a commentary by Robin Blaser" and published in Santa Rosa, CA by Black Sparrow Press...

    . Edited and with commentary by Robin Blaser. (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1975).
  • Watts, Alan W. "Breakthrough" (chapter) in In My Own Way, (New York: Pantheon, 1972). ISBN 0-394-46911-9
  • Wagstaff, Christopher (ed). Madeline Gleason: Collected Poems 1919–1979 (has a very useful historical introduction)

Recordings and sound-files

  • Howls, Raps & Roars: Recordings from the San Francisco poetry renaissance (compilation) (Universal Music Group, 1963; Fantasy Records 1993).

Online

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