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San Francisco RenaissanceThe term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centred around that city and which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetic avant-garde. However, others (e.g., Ralph J. Gleason, Alan Watts) 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 is generally considered to be the founding father of the renaissance. Rexroth was a prominent 2nd 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 (poet), Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser. Gleason and Duncan were particularly close and read and criticised each other's work. A movement emerges In April 1947, Gleason organised the First Festival of Modern Poetry at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery, Gough Street. Over the space of two evenings, twelve poets, including Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan (poet) and Jack 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 both spent periods of time teaching 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 canto jondo also led to links with the deep image poets. In 1957, Spicer ran his seminal 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 together. these three were to form the nucleus of the West Coast wing of the Beat generation. In 1953, Lawrence Ferlinghetti established the City Lights Bookstore and started publishing from City Lights Press two years later. Snyder and Whalen were among the poets who performed at the famous poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 13 (or October 7, sources vary), 1955. This reading say the full emergence of the San Francisco Renaissance into the public consciousness and helped establish the city's reputation as a centre 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 1959 novel The Dharma Bums. References Print - Wagstaff, Christopher (ed). Madeline Gleason: Collected Poems 19191979 (has a very useful historical introduction)
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