1.
Poetry
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Poetry has a long history, dating back to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Early poems evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Sanskrit Vedas, Zoroastrian Gathas, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ancient attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotles Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy. Later attempts concentrated on such as repetition, verse form and rhyme. From the mid-20th century, poetry has sometimes been more generally regarded as a creative act employing language. Poetry uses forms and conventions to suggest differential interpretation to words, devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony and other elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly figures of such as metaphor, simile and metonymy create a resonance between otherwise disparate images—a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm. Some poetry types are specific to cultures and genres and respond to characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. Much modern poetry reflects a critique of poetic tradition, playing with and testing, among other things, in todays increasingly globalized world, poets often adapt forms, styles and techniques from diverse cultures and languages. Some scholars believe that the art of poetry may predate literacy, others, however, suggest that poetry did not necessarily predate writing. The oldest surviving poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes from the 3rd millennium BCE in Sumer. An example of Egyptian epic poetry is The Story of Sinuhe, other forms of poetry developed directly from folk songs. The earliest entries in the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, the efforts of ancient thinkers to determine what makes poetry distinctive as a form, and what distinguishes good poetry from bad, resulted in poetics—the study of the aesthetics of poetry. Some ancient societies, such as Chinas through her Shijing, developed canons of poetic works that had ritual as well as aesthetic importance, Classical thinkers employed classification as a way to define and assess the quality of poetry. Later aestheticians identified three major genres, epic poetry, lyric poetry, and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry, Aristotles work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age, as well as in Europe during the Renaissance. English Romantic poet John Keats termed this escape from logic Negative Capability and this romantic approach views form as a key element of successful poetry because form is abstract and distinct from the underlying notional logic
2.
San Francisco
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San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. It is the birthplace of the United Nations, the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought rapid growth, making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time. San Francisco became a consolidated city-county in 1856, after three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. In World War II, San Francisco was a port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater. Politically, the city votes strongly along liberal Democratic Party lines, San Francisco is also the headquarters of five major banking institutions and various other companies such as Levi Strauss & Co. Dolby, Airbnb, Weebly, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Yelp, Pinterest, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, Mozilla, Wikimedia Foundation, as of 2016, San Francisco is ranked high on world liveability rankings. The earliest archaeological evidence of habitation of the territory of the city of San Francisco dates to 3000 BC. Upon independence from Spain in 1821, the became part of Mexico. Under Mexican rule, the system gradually ended, and its lands became privatized. In 1835, Englishman William Richardson erected the first independent homestead, together with Alcalde Francisco de Haro, he laid out a street plan for the expanded settlement, and the town, named Yerba Buena, began to attract American settlers. Commodore John D. Sloat claimed California for the United States on July 7,1846, during the Mexican–American War, montgomery arrived to claim Yerba Buena two days later. Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco on January 30 of the next year, despite its attractive location as a port and naval base, San Francisco was still a small settlement with inhospitable geography. The California Gold Rush brought a flood of treasure seekers, with their sourdough bread in tow, prospectors accumulated in San Francisco over rival Benicia, raising the population from 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 by December 1849. The promise of fabulous riches was so strong that crews on arriving vessels deserted and rushed off to the gold fields, leaving behind a forest of masts in San Francisco harbor. Some of these approximately 500 abandoned ships were used at times as storeships, saloons and hotels, many were left to rot, by 1851 the harbor was extended out into the bay by wharves while buildings were erected on piles among the ships. By 1870 Yerba Buena Cove had been filled to create new land, buried ships are occasionally exposed when foundations are dug for new buildings. California was quickly granted statehood in 1850 and the U. S. military built Fort Point at the Golden Gate, silver discoveries, including the Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1859, further drove rapid population growth. With hordes of fortune seekers streaming through the city, lawlessness was common, and the Barbary Coast section of town gained notoriety as a haven for criminals, prostitution, entrepreneurs sought to capitalize on the wealth generated by the Gold Rush
3.
American poetry
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Unsurprisingly, most of the early colonists work relied on contemporary British models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, a distinctive American idiom began to emerge, the history of American poetry is not easy to know. The received narrative of Modernism proposes that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were perhaps the most influential modernist English-language poets in the period during World War I. But this narrative leaves out African American and women poets who were published, by the 1960s, the young poets of the British Poetry Revival looked to their American contemporaries and predecessors as models for the kind of poetry they wanted to write. There are 14 such writers whom we might on that basis call American poets, early examples include a 1616 testimonial poem on the sterling warlike character of Captain John Smith and Rev. One of the first recorded poets of the British colonies was Anne Bradstreet, the poems she published during her lifetime address religious and political themes. She also wrote tender evocations of home, family life and of her love for her husband, edward Taylor wrote poems expounding Puritan virtues in a highly wrought metaphysical style that can be seen as typical of the early colonial period. This narrow focus on the Puritan ethic was, understandably, the dominant note of most of the written in the colonies during the 17th. Of course, being a Puritan minister as well as a poet, a distinctly American lyric voice of the colonial period was Phillis Wheatley, a slave whose book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in 1773. She was one of the poets of her day, at least in the colonies. The 18th century saw an emphasis on America itself as fit subject matter for its poets. The work of Rebecca Hammond Lard, although old, still apply to life in todays world. She writes about nature, not only the nature of environment, on the whole, the development of poetry in the American colonies mirrors the development of the colonies themselves. The early poetry is dominated by the need to preserve the integrity of the Puritan ideals that created the settlement in the first place, as the colonists grew in confidence, the poetry they wrote increasingly reflected their drive towards independence. This shift in subject matter was not reflected in the mode of writing which tended to be conservative and this can be seen as a product of the physical remove at which American poets operated from the center of English-language poetic developments in London. The first significant poet of the independent United States was William Cullen Bryant, whose contribution was to write rhapsodic poems on the grandeur of prairies. Formed the Fireside Poets were a group of 19th-century American poets from New England, the poets primary subjects were the domestic life, mythology, and politics of the United States, in which several of the poets were directly involved. Other notable poets to emerge in the early and middle 19th century include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Sidney Lanier, and James Whitcomb Riley
4.
Alan Watts
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Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938, pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a masters degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. In Psychotherapy East and West, Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and he considered Nature, Man and Woman to be, from a literary point of view — the best book I have ever written. He also explored human consciousness, in the essay The New Alchemy, towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais. Many of his books are now available in digital format and many of his recorded talks, according to the critic Erik Davis, his writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity. Watts was born to middle class parents in the village of Chislehurst, Kent, in 1915, living at 3 Holbrook Lane, which was subsequently lived in by author John Hemming-Clark in the early 2000s. Watts father, Laurence Wilson Watts, was a representative for the London office of the Michelin Tyre Company, his mother, Emily Mary Watts, was a housewife whose father had been a missionary. With modest financial means, they chose to live in surroundings and Alan. Probably because of the influence of his mothers family the Buchans. But it mixed with Alans own interests in storybook fables and romantic tales of the mysterious Far East, Watts also later wrote of a mystical dream he experienced while ill with a fever as a child. During this time he was influenced by Far Eastern landscape paintings, the few Chinese paintings Watts was able to see in England riveted him, and he wrote I was aesthetically fascinated with a certain clarity, transparency, and spaciousness in Chinese and Japanese art. These works of art emphasized the relationship of man in nature, a theme that stood fast throughout his life. See, for instance, the last chapter in The Way of Zen, by his own assessment, Watts was imaginative, headstrong, and talkative. He was sent to boarding schools from early years and it was not long afterward that Watts felt forced to decide between the Anglican Christianity he had been exposed to and the Buddhism he had read about in various libraries, including Croshaws. He chose Buddhism, and sought membership in the London Buddhist Lodge, which had established by Theosophists. Watts became the secretary at 16. The young Watts explored several styles of meditation during these years, Watts attended The Kings School, Canterbury next door to Canterbury Cathedral
5.
Ralph J. Gleason
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Ralph Joseph Gleason was an American jazz and popular music critic. He contributed for many years to the San Francisco Chronicle, was an editor of Rolling Stone magazine. A pioneering rock critic, he helped the San Francisco Chronicle transition into the rock era, Gleason was born in New York City and graduated from Columbia University in 1938. During World War II he worked for the Office of War Information, in 1947, he moved to San Francisco and began contributing to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1950, initiating the first regular coverage of jazz and pop music in the mainstream US media. Gleason was the first critic to review folk, pop, and jazz concerts with the same attention and he interviewed such luminaries as Frank Sinatra, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, and Fats Domino. Gleason was one of the first critics to perceive the importance of Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan and his liner notes for the 1959 Sinatra album No One Cares and later for the 1970 Davis album Bitches Brew set the standard for the form. In the later 1960s, Gleason was a respected commentator and he chose to write supportively of the better cut of the Bay Area rock bands, such as Jefferson Airplane. However, Gleason was sometimes criticized for minimizing the importance of or simply ignoring acts from Los Angeles, but others judged that he was making a valid distinction between works of creative vitality and music business product. In any case, Gleason was a key contributor to the growth and range of San Francisco regions vibrant music scene of the 1960s and after. Gleason was an editor to Ramparts, a prominent leftist magazine based in San Francisco. With Jann Wenner, another Ramparts staffer, Gleason founded the music magazine, Rolling Stone. For ten years, he wrote syndicated weekly columns on jazz and pop music. For twelve years, he was an editor and critic for the leading jazz publication. The series ran from 1961 to 1968 and he also produced a two-hour documentary on Duke Ellington, which was twice nominated for an Emmy. Gleasons name shows up in tribute on Red Garlands Ralph J. Gleason Blues from the 1958 recording Red Garland Quartet, Gleasons lasting legacy, however, is his work with Rolling Stone. His name, alongside that of Hunter S. Thompson, still remains on the masthead today. An Anthology of Jazz, Peter Davies Pub, the Jefferson Airplane and the San Francisco Sound, Ballantine Books Celebrating the Duke and Louie, Bessie, Billie, Bird, Carmen, Miles, Dizzy & Others, Atlantic-Little, Brown. ISBN 0-306-80645-2 Conversations in Jazz, The Ralph J. Gleason Interviews and this generation is producing poets who write songs, and never before in the sixty-year history of American popular music has this been true
6.
Kenneth Rexroth
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Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth was an American poet, translator and critical essayist. He is regarded as a figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet and he was among the first poets in the United States to explore traditional Japanese poetic forms such as haiku. He was also a reader of Chinese literature. Rexroth had two daughters, Mary and Katharine, by his wife, Marthe Larsen. Rexroth was born Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth in South Bend, Indiana, the son of Charles Rexroth, a pharmaceuticals salesman and his childhood was troubled by his fathers alcoholism and his mothers chronic illness. Rexroth was homeschooled by his mother, and by age four he was reading widely in the Classics and his mother died in 1916 and his father in 1919, after which he went to live with his aunt in Chicago and enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago. He spent his years as an art student and soda jerk. In 1923–1924 he was imprisoned during a raid on a Near North Side bar that he frequented and he lived in a decrepit jail cell under the care of four black cellmates until his legal guardian could bail him out. He moved to Greenwich Village and attended The New School for a while before dropping out to live as a postulant in Holy Cross Monastery, the lifestyle of meditation, silence and artistic creation suited him, and he later recalled it as the happiest time of his life. However, he felt strongly that he did not have a vocation there and he considered staying on in Paris, but an American friend urged him not to become just another expatriate and he returned home. After meeting his first wife, he moved to San Francisco, Rexroth viewed love for another person as a sacramental act that could connect one with a transcendent, universal awareness. Rexroth married Andrée Dutcher in 1927, a commercial artist and painter from Chicago and he claimed to have fallen in love with her at first sight when he saw her in the doorway of the apartment building he was renting. He encouraged Dutcher to pursue painting, and she gave him feedback on his writing. The two shared many interests and what Rexroth described as a perfect relationship and their marriage deteriorated, however, and the couple was divorced near Rexroths 35th birthday. Andrée died of complications from epilepsy shortly after, in 1940 and her death triggered great sadness in Rexroth, who wrote a number of elegiac poems in her honor. Within a year of Andrées death, Rexroth married the nurse and they opened up their home to weekly literary discussions, anti-war protesters, and Japanese-American convalescents avoiding internment. In 1949, Rexroth traveled to Europe with Marthe Larsen, the two were married in Aix-en-Provence despite Rexroth still being legally married to Marie
7.
Ezra Pound
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Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, and a major figure in the early modernist movement. His contribution to poetry began with his development of Imagism, a movement derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and his best-known works include Ripostes, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and the unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos. This included arranging for the publication in 1915 of Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound lost faith in England and blamed the war on usury and international capitalism. Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, while in custody in Italy, Pound had begun work on sections of The Cantos. These were published as The Pisan Cantos, for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress, triggering enormous controversy. Largely due to a campaign by his writers, he was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958. Hemingway wrote, The best of Pounds writing—and it is in the Cantos—will last as long as there is any literature, Pound was born in a small, two-story house in Hailey, Idaho Territory, the only child of Homer Loomis Pound and Isabel Weston. His father had worked in Hailey since 1883 as registrar of the General Land Office, both parents ancestors had emigrated from England in the 17th century. On his mothers side, Pound was descended from William Wadsworth, the Wadsworths married into the Westons of New York. Harding Weston and Mary Parker were the parents of Isabel Weston, harding apparently spent most of his life without work, with his brother, Ezra Weston, and his brothers wife, Frances, looking after Mary and Isabels needs. On his fathers side, the immigrant ancestor was John Pound, a Quaker, Ezras grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound, was a Republican Congressman from northwest Wisconsin who had made and lost a fortune in the lumber business. Thaddeuss son Homer, Pounds father, worked for Thaddeus in the lumber business, Homer and Isabel married the following year, and Homer built a home in Hailey. Isabel was unhappy in Hailey and took Ezra with her to New York in 1887, Homer followed them, and in 1889 he found a job as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint. The family moved to Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, and in 1893 bought a house in Wyncote. Between 1897 and 1900 Pound attended Cheltenham Military Academy, sometimes as a boarder, the boys wore Civil War-style uniforms and besides Latin were taught English, history, arithmetic, marksmanship, military drilling and the importance of submitting to authority. After the academy he may have attended Cheltenham Township High School for one year and it was at Pennsylvania in 1901 that Pound met Hilda Doolittle, his first serious romance, according to Pound scholar Ira Nadel. In 1911 she followed Pound to London and became involved in developing the Imagism movement, Pound was seeing two other women at the same time—Viola Baxter and Mary Moore—later dedicating a book of poetry, Personae, to the latter. He asked Moore to marry him too, but she turned him down and his parents and Frances Weston took Pound on another three-month European tour in 1902, after which he transferred, in 1903, to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, possibly because of poor grades
8.
William Carlos Williams
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William Carlos Williams was a Puerto Rican-American poet closely associated with modernism and imagism. His work has an affinity with painting, in which he had a lifelong interest. In addition to his writing, Williams had a career as a physician practicing both pediatrics and general medicine. He was affiliated with what was known as Passaic General Hospital in Passaic, New Jersey. The hospital, which is now known as St. Marys General Hospital, Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. His grandmother, an Englishwoman deserted by her husband, had come to the United States with her son, remarried and her son, Williamss father, married a Puerto Rican woman of French Basque and Dutch Jewish descent. Williams received his primary and secondary education in Rutherford until 1897, upon leaving University of Pennsylvania, Williams did internships at both French Hospital and Childs Hospital in New York before going to Leipzig for advanced study of pediatrics. He published his first book, Poems, in 1909, Williams married Florence Herman in 1912, after he returned from Germany. They moved into a house in Rutherford, New Jersey, which was their home for many years. Shortly afterward, his book of poems, The Tempers, was published by a London press through the help of his friend Ezra Pound. Around 1914, Williams had his first son, William E. Williams, followed by his son, Paul H. Williams. His first son would grow up to follow Williams in becoming a doctor, although his primary occupation was as a family doctor, Williams had a successful literary career as a poet. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories, plays, novels, essays. He practiced medicine by day and wrote at night, in 1920, Williams was sharply criticized by many of his peers when he published one of his most experimental books, Kora in Hell, Improvisations. Pound called the work incoherent and H. D. thought the book was flippant. Three years later, Williams published one of his books of poetry, Spring and All. However, in 1922, the year it was published, the appearance of T. S. Eliots The Waste Land became a literary sensation and overshadowed Williamss very different brand of poetic Modernism. In his Autobiography, Williams would later write, I felt at once that The Waste Land had set me back twenty years, instead, Williams preferred colloquial American English
9.
Japan
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Japan is a sovereign island nation in Eastern Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies off the eastern coast of the Asia Mainland and stretches from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea, the kanji that make up Japans name mean sun origin. 日 can be read as ni and means sun while 本 can be read as hon, or pon, Japan is often referred to by the famous epithet Land of the Rising Sun in reference to its Japanese name. Japan is an archipelago consisting of about 6,852 islands. The four largest are Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku, the country is divided into 47 prefectures in eight regions. Hokkaido being the northernmost prefecture and Okinawa being the southernmost one, the population of 127 million is the worlds tenth largest. Japanese people make up 98. 5% of Japans total population, approximately 9.1 million people live in the city of Tokyo, the capital of Japan. Archaeological research indicates that Japan was inhabited as early as the Upper Paleolithic period, the first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other regions, mainly China, followed by periods of isolation, from the 12th century until 1868, Japan was ruled by successive feudal military shoguns who ruled in the name of the Emperor. Japan entered into a period of isolation in the early 17th century. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan is a member of the UN, the OECD, the G7, the G8, the country has the worlds third-largest economy by nominal GDP and the worlds fourth-largest economy by purchasing power parity. It is also the worlds fourth-largest exporter and fourth-largest importer, although Japan has officially renounced its right to declare war, it maintains a modern military with the worlds eighth-largest military budget, used for self-defense and peacekeeping roles. Japan is a country with a very high standard of living. Its population enjoys the highest life expectancy and the third lowest infant mortality rate in the world, in ancient China, Japan was called Wo 倭. It was mentioned in the third century Chinese historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms in the section for the Wei kingdom, Wa became disliked because it has the connotation of the character 矮, meaning dwarf. The 倭 kanji has been replaced with the homophone Wa, meaning harmony, the Japanese word for Japan is 日本, which is pronounced Nippon or Nihon and literally means the origin of the sun. The earliest record of the name Nihon appears in the Chinese historical records of the Tang dynasty, at the start of the seventh century, a delegation from Japan introduced their country as Nihon
10.
Haiku
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Haiku listen is a very short form of Japanese poetry. It is typically characterised by 3 qualities, The essence of haiku is cutting, traditional haiku consist of 17 on, in three phrases of 5,7, and 5 on respectively. A kigo, usually drawn from a saijiki, an extensive, there is a common, although relatively recent, perception that the images juxtaposed must be directly observed everyday objects or occurrences. In Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a vertical line while haiku in English often appear in three lines to parallel the three phrases of Japanese haiku. Previously called hokku, haiku was given its current name by the Japanese writer Masaoka Shiki at the end of the 19th century, in Japanese haiku a kireji, or cutting word, typically appears at the end of one of the verses three phrases. A kireji fills a role analogous to a caesura in classical western poetry or to a volta in sonnets. The fundamental aesthetic quality of both hokku and haiku is that it is sufficient, independent of context, and will bear consideration as a complete work. The kireji lends the verse structural support, allowing it to stand as an independent poem, the kireji in the Bashō examples old pond and the wind of Mt Fuji are both ya. Neither the remaining Bashō example nor the Issa example contain a kireji although they do both balance a fragment in the first five on against a phrase in the remaining 12 on. In comparison with English verse typically characterized by syllabic meter, Japanese verse counts sound units known as on or morae, traditional haiku consist of 17 on, in three phrases of five, seven and five on respectively. Among contemporary poems teikei haiku continue to use the 5-7-5 pattern while jiyuritsu haiku do not, one of the examples below illustrates that traditional haiku masters were not always constrained by the 5-7-5 pattern. Although the word on is sometimes translated as syllable, one on is counted for a short syllable and this is illustrated by the Issa haiku below, which contains 17 on but only 15 syllables. Conversely, some sounds, such as kyo may look like two syllables to English speakers but are in fact a single on in Japanese, the word onji is sometimes used in referring to Japanese sound units in English although this word is no longer current in Japanese. In Japanese, each on corresponds to a character and hence ji is also sometimes used as the count unit. In 1973, the Haiku Society of America noted that the norm for writers of haiku in English was to use 17 syllables, some translators of Japanese poetry have noted that about 12 syllables in English approximate the duration of 17 Japanese on. Kigo are often in the form of metonyms and can be difficult for those who lack Japanese cultural references to spot, the Bashō examples below include kawazu, frog implying spring, and shigure, a rain shower in late autumn or early winter. Kigo are not always included in non-Japanese haiku or by writers of Japanese free-form haiku. Hokku is the opening stanza of an orthodox collaborative linked poem, or renga, by the time of Matsuo Bashō, the hokku had begun to appear as an independent poem, and was also incorporated in haibun, and haiga
11.
Jazz
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Jazz is a music genre that originated amongst African Americans in New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in Blues and Ragtime. Since the 1920s jazz age, jazz has become recognized as a form of musical expression. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms, Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music. Although the foundation of jazz is deeply rooted within the Black experience of the United States, different cultures have contributed their own experience, intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as one of Americas original art forms. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures, New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass-band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930s, heavily arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging musicians music which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed in the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments. In the early 1980s, a form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful. Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Latin, the question of the origin of the word jazz has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. It is believed to be related to jasm, a term dating back to 1860 meaning pep. The use of the word in a context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Its first documented use in a context in New Orleans was in a November 14,1916 Times-Picayune article about jas bands. In an interview with NPR, musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of the slang connotations of the term, saying, When Broadway picked it up. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, the American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century. Jazz has proved to be difficult to define, since it encompasses such a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, in the opinion of Robert Christgau, most of us would say that inventing meaning while letting loose is the essence and promise of jazz. As Duke Ellington, one of jazzs most famous figures, said, although jazz is considered highly difficult to define, at least in part because it contains so many varied subgenres, improvisation is consistently regarded as being one of its key elements
12.
Madeline Gleason
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Madeline Gleason was a United States poet and dramatist. She was, with Helen Adam, Barbara Guest, and Denise Levertov, one of four women whose work was included in Donald Allens landmark anthology. Gleason was born in Fargo, North Dakota and was the child of Catholic parents. She attended the Catholic parish school, where she was viewed as something of a problem child and she and a cousin toured the Midwest, singing and tap-dancing in vaudeville shows. When her mother died, she and her father moved to Portland, Oregon and she published a series of articles on poetry and poets in a local newspaper. In 1934, Gleason moved to San Francisco, California to work on a history of California for the WPA Writers Project, two years later, a sequence of her poems was published in Poetry. For a number of years, she worked with the composer John Edmunds, translating songs by Schumann, Schubert, the pair also organised song festivals. Her first book, Poems, was published in 1944, by this time she had moved to Phoenix, Arizona because of the war, but she soon returned to San Francisco and took up a job with a brokerage firm. In April 1947, Gleason organised the First Festival of Modern Poetry at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery, Gleason had roots in the Berkeley Renaissance, and so could provide the framework for an initial gathering of voices who inspired a generation. Gleasons second book, The Metaphysical Needle appeared in 1949 but her third, Concerto for Bell, the Beat poets she had helped promote had become so successful that it was hard for less high-profile poets to find publishers. However, she continued to give readings and taught writing classes. In 1973, her Selected Poems was published, followed in 1975 by Here Comes Everybody, New, Gleason continued writing right up to her death. Her Collected Poems was published in 1999, print Davidson, Michael. The San Francisco Renaissance, Poetics and Community at Mid-Century. Poet Be Like God, Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, Gleason, Madeline, Collected Poems 1919–1979, ed. Christopher Wagstaff. Including a Foreword, this provides a very useful historical introduction. Ron Silliman on Madeline Gleasons post-Yeatsian poetics if you reach back prior to the modernism of Pound you would find common ground writes Ron Silliman on his weblog
13.
University of California, Berkeley
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The University of California, Berkeley, is a public research university located in Berkeley, California. In 1960s, UC Berkeley was particularly noted for the Free Speech Movement as well as the Anti-Vietnam War Movement led by its students. S, Department of Energy, and is home to many world-renowned research institutes and organizations including Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and Space Sciences Laboratory. Faculty member J. R. Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, Lawrence Livermore Lab also discovered or co-discovered six chemical elements. The Academic Ranking of World Universities also ranks the University of California, Berkeley, third in the world overall, in 1866, the private College of California purchased the land comprising the current Berkeley campus. Ten faculty members and almost 40 students made up the new University of California when it opened in Oakland in 1869, billings was a trustee of the College of California and suggested that the college be named in honor of the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley. In 1870, Henry Durant, the founder of the College of California, with the completion of North and South Halls in 1873, the university relocated to its Berkeley location with 167 male and 22 female students and held its first classes. In 1905, the University Farm was established near Sacramento, ultimately becoming the University of California, by the 1920s, the number of campus buildings had grown substantially, and included twenty structures designed by architect John Galen Howard. Robert Gordon Sproul served as president from 1930 to 1958, by 1942, the American Council on Education ranked UC Berkeley second only to Harvard University in the number of distinguished departments. During World War II, following Glenn Seaborgs then-secret discovery of plutonium, UC Berkeley physics professor J. Robert Oppenheimer was named scientific head of the Manhattan Project in 1942. Along with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley is now a partner in managing two other labs, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, originally, military training was compulsory for male undergraduates, and Berkeley housed an armory for that purpose. In 1917, Berkeleys ROTC program was established, and its School of Military Aeronautics trained future pilots, including Jimmy Doolittle, both Robert McNamara and Frederick C. Weyand graduated from UC Berkeleys ROTC program, earning B. A. degrees in 1937 and 1938, in 1926, future fleet admiral Chester W. Nimitz established the first Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps unit at Berkeley. The Board of Regents ended compulsory military training at Berkeley in 1962, during the McCarthy era in 1949, the Board of Regents adopted an anti-communist loyalty oath. A number of faculty members objected and were dismissed, ten years passed before they were reinstated with back pay, in 1952, the University of California became an entity separate from the Berkeley campus. Each campus was given autonomy and its own Chancellor. Then-president Sproul assumed presidency of the entire University of California system, Berkeley gained a reputation for student activism in the 1960s with the Free Speech Movement of 1964 and opposition to the Vietnam War. In the highly publicized Peoples Park protest in 1969, students and the school conflicted over use of a plot of land, then governor of California Ronald Reagan called the Berkeley campus a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants. Modern students at Berkeley are less active, with a greater percentage of moderates and conservatives
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Robert Duncan (poet)
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Robert Edward Duncan was an American poet and a devotee 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 traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry. Duncan saw his work as emerging especially from the tradition of Pound, Williams, Duncan was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. Not only a poet, but also an intellectual, Duncans presence was felt across many facets of popular culture. Duncan was born in Oakland, California, as Edward Howard Duncan Jr and his mother, Marguerite Pearl Duncan, had died in childbirth and his father was unable to afford him, so in 1920 he was adopted by Edwin and Minnehaha Symmes, a family of devout Theosophists. They renamed him Robert Edward Symmes, it was only after a discharge from the army in 1941 that he formed the composite of his previous names. The Symmeses had begun planning for the childs arrival long prior to his adoption and he grew up surrounded by the occult in one form or another, he was well aware of the circumstances of his fated birth and adoption and his parents carefully interpreted his dreams. The family adopted a child, Barbara Eleanor Symmes, in 1920. She was born one year minus one day after Duncan, on January 6,1920 and she also was selected under circumstances similar to that of her brother, her presence was expected to bring good karma into the family. At age three, Duncan was injured in an accident on the snow that resulted in his becoming cross-eyed, one image to the right and above the other. Point to the one that is really there, after the death of his adopted father in 1936, Duncan started studying at the University of California, Berkeley. He began writing poems inspired in part by his left wing politics and his friends and influences included Mary and Lilli Fabilli, Virginia Admiral, and Pauline Kael, among others. He thrived as storyteller, poet, and fledgling bohemian, in 1938, he briefly attended Black Mountain College, but left after a dispute with faculty over the Spanish Civil War. While living in Philadelphia, Duncan had his first recorded homosexual relationship with an instructor he had first met in Berkeley, in 1941 Duncan was drafted and declared his homosexuality to get discharged. In 1943, he had his first heterosexual relationship, which ended in a short, in 1944 Duncan had a relationship with the abstract expressionist painter Robert De Niro Sr. Duncans name figures prominently in the history of pre-Stonewall gay culture. In 1944, Duncan wrote the landmark essay The Homosexual in Society, the essay, in which Duncan compared the plight of homosexuals with that of African Americans and Jews, was published in Dwight Macdonalds journal politics. Duncans essay is considered a treatise on the experience of homosexuals in American society given its appearance a full decade before any organized gay rights movement. In 1951 Duncan met the artist Jess Collins and began a collaboration, Duncan returned to San Francisco in 1945 and was befriended by Helen Adam, Madeline Gleason, and Kenneth Rexroth
15.
Jack Spicer
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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, Spicer was born in Los Angeles, where he later graduated from Fairfax High School in 1942, and attended the University of Redlands from 1943-45. The three, who were all gay, also educated younger poets in their circle about their queer genealogy, Rimbaud, Lorca, Spicers poetry of this period is collected in One Night Stand and Other Poems. His Imaginary Elegies, later collected in Donald Allens The New American Poetry 1945-1960 anthology, were written around this time. In 1954, he co-founded the Six Gallery in San Francisco, in 1955, Spicer moved to New York City and then to Boston, where he worked for a time in the Rare Book Room of Boston Public Library. Blaser was also in Boston at this time, and the pair made contact with a number of poets, including John Wieners, Stephen Jonas. Spicer returned to San Francisco in 1956 and started working on After Lorca and this book represented a major change in direction for two reasons. Firstly, he came to the conclusion that stand-alone poems were unsatisfactory, in fact, he wrote to Blaser that all my stuff from the past looks foul to me. Secondly, in writing After Lorca, he began to practice what he called poetry as dictation and his interest in the work of Federico García Lorca, especially as it involved the cante jondo ideal, also brought him near the poetics of the deep image group. The Troilus referred to was Spicers then unpublished play of that name, the play finally appeared in print in 2004, edited by Aaron Kunin, in issue 3 of No - A Journal of the Arts. In 1957, Spicer ran a workshop called Poetry as Magic at San Francisco State College, which was attended by Duncan, Helen Adam, James Broughton, Joe Dunn, Jack Gilbert, and George Stanley. He also participated in, and sometimes hosted, Blabbermouth Night at a bar called The Place. This was a kind of contest of improvised poetry and encouraged Spicers view of poetry as being dictated to the poet, as such, Spicer is acknowledged as a precursor and early inspiration for the Language poets. However, many working poets today list Spicer in their succession of precedent figures, Spicer died as a result of his alcoholism. Since the posthumous publication of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, his popularity and influence has steadily risen, affecting poetry throughout the United States, Canada, in 1994, The Tower of Babel, Jack Spicers Detective Novel was published. A collected works entitled My Vocabulary Did This to Me, The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer was published by Wesleyan University Press in November 2008, a collection of critical essays entitled After Spicer, Critical Essays was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2011. The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, black Sparrow Press,1975 A Book Of Correspondences For Jack Spicer. Edited By David Levi Strauss and Benjamin Hollander, San Francisco, A Journal of Acts,1987, Diaman, N. A
16.
Robin Blaser
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Robin Francis Blaser was an author and poet in both the United States and Canada. Born in Denver, Colorado, Blaser grew up in Idaho, there he met Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, becoming a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and early 1960s. He moved to Canada in 1966, joining the faculty of Simon Fraser University, after taking early retirement in the 1980s and he lived in the Kitsilano neighborhood of Vancouver, British Columbia. In June 1995, for Blasers 70th birthday, a conference was held in Vancouver to pay tribute to his contribution to Canadian poetry, Blaser was also well known as the editor of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, which includes Blasers essay, The Practice of Outside. The 1993 publication The Holy Forest represents his collected poems to that date, in 2006, Blaser received a special Lifetime Recognition Award given by the trustees of the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry, which also awards the annual Griffin Poetry Prize. Blaser won the Prize itself in 2008
17.
Robert Creeley
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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 schools and he was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry, in 1991, he joined colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf, and Dennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program at Buffalo. Creeley lived in Waldoboro, Maine, Buffalo, New York, and Providence, Rhode Island and he was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts and grew up in Acton and he and his sister, Helen, were raised by their mother. At the age of two, he lost his left eye and he attended the Holderness School in New Hampshire. In 1943, he entered Harvard University, but left to serve in the American Field Service in Burma and he returned to Harvard in 1946, but eventually earned his BA from Black Mountain College in 1955, teaching some courses there as well. When Black Mountain closed in 1957, Creeley moved to San Francisco and he later met and befriended Jackson Pollock in the Cedar Tavern in New York City. He was a chicken farmer briefly in Littleton, New Hampshire before becoming a teacher in 1949. The story goes that he wrote to Cid Corman, whose show he heard on the farm, and Corman had him read on the show. From 1951 to 1955, Creeley and his wife, Ann and they went there at the encouragement of their friends, British writer Martin Seymour-Smith and his wife, Janet. There they started Divers Press and published works by Paul Blackburn, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Creeley wrote about half of his published prose while living on the island, including a short-story collection, The Gold Diggers, and a novel, The Island. He said that Martin and Janet Seymour-Smith are represented by Artie, during 1954 and 1955, Creeley traveled back and forth between Mallorca and his teaching position at Black Mountain College. He also saw to the printing of issues of Origin and Black Mountain Review on Mallorca. In 1960, Creeley earned an MA from the University of New Mexico and he began his academic career by teaching at the prestigious Albuquerque Academy starting in 1958 until about 1960 or 1961. In 1957, he met Bobbie Louise Hawkins, they lived together, common law marriage, until 1975 and he dedicated his book For Love to Bobbie. Creeley read at the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Festival and at the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference, afterward, he wandered about a bit before settling into the English faculty of “Black Mountain II” at the University at Buffalo in 1967. He would stay at this post until 2003, when he received a post at Brown University, from 1990 to 2003, he lived with his family in Black Rock, in a converted firehouse at the corner of Amherst and East Streets
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Black Mountain College
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Many of the schools students and faculty were influential in the arts or other fields, or went on to become influential. Although notable even during its life, the school closed in 1957 after only 24 years. The history and legacy of Black Mountain College are preserved and extended through Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, in downtown Asheville, NC. The schools Lake Eden campus, used from 1941 to 1957, is now part of Camp Rockmont, a camp for boys. Buckminster Fuller met student Kenneth Snelson at Black Mountain, and the result was their first geodesic dome, Merce Cunningham formed his dance company, not a haphazardly conceived venture, Black Mountain College was a consciously directed liberal arts school that grew out of the progressive education movement. In its day it was an educational experiment for the artists. Bennington College was founded the year before Black Mountain College based on the same philosophy, for the first eight years, the college rented the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly buildings south of Black Mountain, North Carolina. In 1941, it moved across the valley to its own campus at Lake Eden where it remained until its closing in 1956, a number of the original structures are still in use as lodgings or administrative facilities. The college suspended classes by court order in 1957 and this was due to debts not sustained by the decreased number of students. In 1962, the books were finally closed, with all debts covered. The college was featured in the Nicholas Sparks novel, The Longest Ride and 2015 movie, richards, Alexander Schawinsky, Ben Shahn, Arthur Siegel, Aaron Siskind, Theodoros Stamos, Robert C. Turner, Jack Tworkov, Peter Voulkos, Emerson Woelffer, Stefan Wolpe, guest lecturers included Albert Einstein, Clement Greenberg, Bernard Rudofsky, Richard Lippold, and William Carlos Williams. The college ran summer institutes from 1944 until its closing in 1956 and it was however influential to the founding of the Free University of New York. Various avant-garde poets were drawn to the school through the years, most notably Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Jonathan Williams, Ed Dorn and Robert Creeley. Black Mountain College is the subject of the museum exhibition Leap Before You Look, Black Mountain College 1933-1957, the show was curated by Helen Molesworth with Ruth Erickson. The story of BMC is woven through interviews with students, professors and modern scholars with archival footage, produced and directed by Judith Pearlman, Cliofilm
19.
San Francisco State College
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1899 – Founded as San Francisco State Normal School. 1901 – First graduating class 1906 – The 1906 earthquake and fire forces the school to relocate from Nob Hill to a new campus at Buchanan and Haight Streets. 1966 – Beginning of the era of protests led by student organizations including the Black Students Union, Third World Liberation Front. The protests against college policies and off-campus issues such as the Vietnam War included sit-ins, rallies, marches, teach-ins, the protests were marked by counter-protests and widespread charges of corruption and election fraud in the student newspaper. 1968 – A lengthy student strike erupted that developed into an important event in the history of the U. S. in the late 1960s. The strike was led by the Black Student Union and the Third World Liberation Front and this became a major news event for weeks in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. At one point, University president S. I. Hayakawa famously pulled the out of the speakers on top of a van at a student rally. During the course of the strike, large numbers of police drawn from many jurisdictions occupied the campus, SF State is on the semester system. The university awards degrees in 115 areas of specialization, masters degrees in 97. SFSU ranks 18th among the top 20 undergraduate schools whose alumni go on to be admitted to the State Bar, the Cinema department, in the College of Liberal & Creative Arts, was named one of the nations top film schools by Entertainment Weekly in 2000. The university is accredited by the Accrediting Commission for Senior Colleges and Universities, the College of Business is accredited by The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. The college of engineering is accredited by the ABET except the computer engineering program, San Francisco State was ranked the 24th top college in the United States by Payscale and CollegeNets Social Mobility Index college rankings. Among Western Universities, of which there are 112, San Francisco State was ranked 10th in terms of diversity by USNWR. Furthermore, U. S. News & World Report ranks San Francisco State as 8th nationally in the number of transfer students, San Francisco State Universitys joint physical therapy masters program with UCSF is consistently ranked among the top 20 in the country. The Philosophical Gourmet Report lists San Francisco State University as one of the top eight universities to earn a terminal MA in philosophy, SFSU is listed as having one of the nations top film schools by Entertainment Weekly having produced countless leading filmmakers. The Universitys College of Extended Learning offers the only American Bar Association-approved paralegal studies program in San Francisco, SFSU was one of the first California State University campuses to offer a doctorate of education. It was also instrumental in the establishment of the International University Of Kyrgyzstan, the University is the only one in California to offer a bachelors degree in technical and professional writing. In 1968, what was then the longest student strike in the nations history resulted in establishment of a College of Ethnic Studies and increased recruiting, in 2002 there was much tension between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students
20.
James Broughton
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James Broughton was an American poet and poetic filmmaker. He was part of the San Francisco Renaissance, a precursor to the Beat poets and he was an early bard of the Radical Faeries as well as a member of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, serving the community as Sister Sermonetta. Born to wealthy parents in Modesto, California, Broughton lost his early to the 1918 influenza epidemic. He spent his childhood in San Francisco and attended Stanford University until just before his class graduated in 1935, in 1945, he won the Alden Award given by the Stanford Dramatists Alliance for his original screenplay Summer Fury. But a more persistent sound, a kind of whirring whistle, I stood up in my crib and looked into the backyard. Over a neighbor’s palm tree a pulsing headlamp came whistling directly toward me, when it had whirled right up to my window, out of its radiance stepped a naked boy. He was at least three years older than I but he looked all ages at once and he had no wings, but I knew he was angel-sent, his laughing beauty illuminated the night and his melodious voice enraptured my ears…. If I followed the game enough, I could be a useful spokesman for Big Joy. In the book, Broughton remarks on his affairs with both men and women. Among his male lovers was gay activist Harry Hay and he briefly lived with the film critic Pauline Kael and they had a daughter, Gina, who was born in 1948. Broughton is the subject of the 2012 award-winning documentary film, Big Joy, ultimately I have learned more about poetry / from music and magic than from literature, he wrote. Cinema saved me from suicide when I was 32 by revealing to me a wondrous reality and this theme carried him through his 85 years. It was as important to live poetically as to write poems, suzanna’s theatrical background and personality made for a great playmate, they had two children. And they built a community among the creative spirits of Alan Watts, Michael McClure, Anna Halprin. In 1967’s summer of love, Broughton made a film, The Bed and it rekindled Broughton’s filmmaking and led to more tributes to the human body, the eternal child, the eternal return, the eternal moment, and the eternal feminine. These eternalities praised the beauty of humans, the surprises of soul, indeed, Broughton repeatedly explored the temple of the human body – the Godbody – as a taproot for healing and peace, both for the individual and society. He developed a following, especially among students at the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2004, Singer wrote of their relationship and collaboration in White Crane
21.
Helen Adam
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Helen Adam was a Scottish poet, collagist and photographer who was part of a literary movement contemporaneous to the Beat Generation that occurred in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s. Though often associated with the Beat poets, she would more accurately be considered one of the predecessors of the Beat Generation, from Kristin Prevallet, In a dark forest, a woman in a white strapless evening gown is stiffly toppling into the arms of a gigantic tarantula. One of her arms is nestled comfortably between the strong, hairy forearms, and she appears comfortable with the monstrosity that is cuddling her. In another scene two bats are attached to the sleeve of an elegant ladys gown, dangling as if a part of her ensemble, the society debutantes around her appear to be oblivious to the grotesque attachment. The lady does have a slightly uncomfortable expression on her face, rather, she is worried that her private passions will be discovered by the outside world. She reassures herself, perhaps no one will notice them, as in all of the collages of Helen Adam, the true desires of women are fulfilled not by mortal men, but by highly charged encounters with unhuman beings. Born in Scotland in 1909, Adam primarily wrote supernatural ballads which tell of fatal romances, darkly sadistic sexual affairs, jealous lovers and her collages arise from these ballads, and animate what she called her lethal women. Jesss collages are a myriad of images, fitted like pieces of a puzzle which come together to form one visionary grande-collage, when compared to Jesss collages, Adams are strikingly simple. They combine two images—a beautiful man or woman, and a creature, Adam was a precocious poet, her first book, The Elfin Pedlar, was published in 1923, when the poet was fourteen years old. That book was in the Victorian genre of light verse about fairies and her early books were well known and widely reviewed, the composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford set selections from The Elfin Pedlar to orchestral music, and performed them widely. Adam attended Edinburgh University for two years, after leaving Edinburgh University she worked as a journalist in London. In 1939 she moved to the United States and eventually moved to San Francisco, in San Francisco she worked with such influential poets as Allen Ginsberg and Robert Duncan. One of the oldest of the poets in the San Francisco Renaissance, she worked closely with Duncan, Jess, Madeline Gleason and she also encouraged many of the Beat poets as they began to explore performance and writing as an art form. Helen Adam and her sister collaborated on an opera entitled San Franciscos Burning which was published in 1963 and reissued in 1985 with score by Al Carmines. A collection of her poems was collected in a work titled Selected Poems and she was one of only four women whose work was included in Donald Allens landmark anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960. Her life was a subject of a film directed by experimental film maker Rosa von Praunheim. Her papers are held at University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, I am young in the old city, My heart dead in my breast. I hear the bells in the sky crying, Every being is blest, in Amsterdam, that old city, Alone at a window I stand, A spangled garter my only clothing, A candle flame in my hand
22.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born on March 24,1919 in Bronxville and his mother, Albertine Mendes-Monsanto was of French/Portuguese Sephardic heritage. The Mendes-Monsanto family is the family which the Monsanto Chemical company is named for and his father, Carlo Ferlinghetti, was born in Chiari, a small town in the province of Brescia, Italy on March 14,1872. He immigrated to the United States in 1894, was naturalized in 1896, although he used Ferling for his earliest published work, Ferlinghetti reverted to the original Italian Ferlinghetti in 1955, when publishing his first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone World. Ferlinghettis father died six months before he was born, and his mother was committed to an asylum shortly after his birth. He was raised by his French aunt Emily, the wife of Ludovico Monsanto, an uncle of his mother from the Virgin Islands. Emily took Ferlinghetti to Strasbourg, France, where they lived during his first five years of his life, after their return to the U. S. Ferlinghetti was placed in an orphanage in Chappaqua, New York while Emily looked for employment. They resided at the Plashbourne Estate, in 1926, Ferlinghetti was left in the care of the Bislands. He later attended schools including Riverdale Country School, Bronxville Public School. During these years, Ferlinghetti became an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America and he attended the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where he earned a B. A. in journalism in 1941. His entry to the world of journalism was writing sports for The Daily Tar Heel and this experience gave him a love of the sea, a theme that runs through much of his poetry. Next, Ferlinghetti was assigned to the Ambrose Lightship outside New York harbor, in 1943 and 1944, he served as an officer on three U. S. Navy subchasers used as convoy escorts. As commander of the submarine chaser USS SC1308, he was at the Normandy invasion as part of the screen around the beaches. After VE Day, the Navy transferred him to the Pacific Theater, Six weeks after the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, he visited the ruins of the city, an experience that turned him into a lifelong pacifist. After the war, he worked briefly in the mailroom at Time magazine, bill then enabled him to enroll in the graduate school of Columbia University. Among his professors there were Babette Deutsch, Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, and American novelists Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. He earned a degree in English literature in 1947 with a thesis on John Ruskin. From Columbia, he went to Paris to continue his studies and his two theses were on the city as a symbol in modern poetry and on the nature of Gothic
23.
Kirby Doyle
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Kirby Doyle, born Stanton Doyle, was an American poet. He was featured in the New American Poetry anthology, with the third generation of American modernist poets. He was one of the San Francisco Renaissance poets who laid the groundwork for Beat poetry in San Francisco, Doyle was born in San Francisco, California. A United States Army veteran, Doyle was pursuing art and culinary studies at San Francisco State University when he published poems in the schools literary magazine. This led to his association with Robert Duncan, Lew Welch, but Doyle stressed the directness of the spoken word over formal poetry. In the late 1950s, Doyle wrote Sapphobones, a collection of playful and evocative love poems and his work appeared alongside that of Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Allen Ginsberg in the Spring,1958 issue of Chicago Review, which was devoted to San Francisco Renaissance writers. Several of his poems were published on broadsheets by the Communication Company, although his work maintained the directness of colloquial speech, it could also be lyrical and rhapsodic. He was a Romantic at heart and he adored the works of John Keats, Emily Dickinson and the great projective verse of Charles Olson. Doyle was a mainstay of the North Beach literary scene in San Francisco from the late seventies until his incarceration in Laguna Honda hospital for dementia, prior to that he had lived for long stretches of time on communes near Mount Tamalpais. The poet Michael McClure said of him, He was a handsome and he was an original Beat, loose-jointed, with a great laugh. Sapphobones Ode to John Garfield Angel Faint Happiness Bastard, the Collected Poems of Kirby Doyle After Olson The Questlock, Gymnopaean of A. Tisa Walden Howls, Raps & Roars, Recordings from the San Francisco poetry renaissance. Click HERE to listen to Doyle read Angel Faint from this compilation, remembrances of Kirby Doyle by McClure, Peter Coyote, Tisa Walden, Philomene Long and John Thomas, and Claude Hayward. Kirby Doyle, remembrance of Doyle by Jack Foley Ode to John Garfield, special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Library
24.
Philip Lamantia
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Philip Lamantia was an American poet and lecturer. Lamantias visionary poems are ecstatic, terror-filled, and erotic, exploring the world of dreams. The poet was born in San Francisco to Sicilian immigrants and raised in that citys Excelsior neighborhood and his poetry was first published in the magazine View in 1943, when he was fifteen and in the final issue of the Surrealist magazine VVV the following year. In 1944 he dropped out of Balboa High School to pursue poetry in New York City and he returned to the Bay Area in 1945 and his first book, Erotic Poems, was published a year later. He was on the bill at San Franciscos Six Gallery on October 7,1955, at this event Lamantia chose to read the poems of John Hoffman, a friend who had recently died. Hoffmans poetry collection Journey to the End was published by City Lights in 2008, bound together with Lamantias own Tau, Tau remained unpublished during Lamantias lifetime. Cosmogonic amplifiers erase minumumedSignatures of daimoniacal configuration Whose greater space passed into future, Fire unlocking by saturation Eye of the sterilized Tau. The poet spent time with native peoples in the United States and Mexico in the 1950s, in later life, he embraced Catholicism, the religion of his childhood, and wrote many poems on Catholic themes. Erotic Poems Ekstasis Narcotica Destroyed Works Touch of the Marvelous Selected Poems 1943–1966 Charles Bukowski, Harold Norse, Philip Lamantia, Penguin Modern Poets, No.13. Blood of the Air Touch of the Marvelous -- A New Edition Becoming Visible Meadowlark West Bed of Sphinxes, New and Selected Poems, 1943–1993 Tau, edited by Garrett Caples The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia. Edited with an introduction by Garrett Caples, Andrew Joron, and Nancy Joyce Peters Nancy Joyce Peters, in, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol.16, 330–336. Steven Frattali, Hypodermic Light, The Poetry of Philip Lamantia and the Question of Surrealism
25.
Lew Welch
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Lewis Barrett Lew Welch, Jr. was an American poet associated with the Beat generation literary movement. Welch published and performed widely during the 1960s and he taught a poetry workshop as part of the University of California Extension in San Francisco from 1965 to 1970. He is believed to have committed suicide, after leaving a note on May 23,1971, Welch was born in Phoenix, Arizona and moved with his mother and sister to California in 1929. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1944 but never saw active service and he worked for a period before attending Stockton Junior College, where he developed an interest in the works of Gertrude Stein. In 1948, Welch moved to Portland, Oregon to attend Reed College, there he roomed with poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen. Welch decided to become a writer after reading Gertrude Steins long story Melanctha, Welch wrote his thesis on Stein and published poems in student magazines. William Carlos Williams visited the college and met the three poets and he admired Welchs early poems and tried to get his Stein thesis published. After college, Welch moved to New York City, where he worked writing copy in the advertising industry, Welch was said to have come up with the advertising slogan, Raid Kills Bugs Dead, but others have questioned this claim. During this time, Welch started to display emotional and mental problems and he then went to the University of Chicago, where he studied philosophy and English. In Chicago, he joined the department of Montgomery Ward. He was working there at the time of the poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco that launched what was to become known as the San Francisco Renaissance. Wanting to get back to poetry, Welch applied for a transfer to Montgomery Wards Oakland headquarters, after the return to California, he started to get involved in the San Francisco literary scene. He soon gave up advertising and earned a living driving a cab while devoting time to writing. He became a participant in Beat culture, living at various times with Snyder. In 1960, poet Lenore Kandel met Welch and Snyder, who introduced her to people in the Beat movement. Jack Kerouac based his character Dave Wain in his novel Big Sur on Welch, in 1968, Welch signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Welch had a relationship with Polish refugee Magda Cregg. He acted as the stepfather to her son Hugh Anthony Cregg, III, on May 23,1971, Welch walked out of poet Gary Snyders house in the mountains of California, leaving behind a suicide note
26.
Ron Silliman
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Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and he is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a poem, The Alphabet. He has now begun writing a new poem, Universe, the first section of which appears to be called Revelator, in the 1960s, Silliman attended Merritt College, San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, but left without attaining a degree. He lived in the San Francisco Bay area for more than 40 years, Silliman has worked as a political organizer, a lobbyist, an ethnographer, a newspaper editor, a director of development, and as the executive editor of the Socialist Review. Silliman worked as a market analyst in the industry before retiring at the end of 2011. Silliman classifies his poetry as part of a lifework, which he calls Ketjak Ketjak is also the name of the first poem of The Age of Huts. If and when completed, the work will consist of The Age of Huts, Tjanting, The Alphabet. In 1995 Silliman moved to Chester County, Pennsylvania, where he resides with his wife Krishna, although he has come to be associated with the Language poets for most of his career, Silliman came of age under the sign of Donald Allens New American Poetry. Regarding the latter publication, hes said that it is, unquestionably the most influential single anthology of the last century, it’s a great book, an epoch-making one in many ways. Silliman was first published in Berkeley in 1965, in the 1960s he was published by journals associated with what he calls the School of Quietude, such as Poetry Northwest, TriQuarterly, Southern Review and Poetry. Silliman thought that such early acceptance was less a recognition of his skills than a lack of standards or rigor characteristic of that literary tendency, he began looking for alternatives. Some of these alternatives were initiated through various editing projects that he took part in, one of the more influential projects was Sillimans newsletter called Tottels, that was one of the early venues for Language Poetry. He says that The Dwelling Place, an article on nine poets published in Alcheringa, was his first attempt to write about language poetry. In 1976 and 1977, he co-curated a reading series with Tom Mandel, at the Grand Piano, nearly three decades later, some of the poets who took part in this series were still collaborating on a work based on these readings. This collaboration became part of what was called an experiment in collective autobiography, when the project was completed, it consisted of 10 volumes in all. The other nine writers included were Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, rom 1976 to 1979 the authors took part in a reading and performance series. The writing project, begun in 1998, was undertaken as a collaboration, first via an interactive web site
27.
Gary Snyder
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Gary Snyder is an American man of letters. Perhaps best known as a poet, he is also an essayist, lecturer and he has been described as the poet laureate of Deep Ecology. Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award and his work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. Snyder has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese, for many years, Snyder served as a faculty member at the University of California, Davis, and he also served for a time on the California Arts Council. Gary Sherman Snyder was born in San Francisco, California to Harold, Snyder is of German, Scots-Irish, and English ancestry. His family, impoverished by the Great Depression, moved to King County, Washington, there they tended dairy cows, kept laying hens, had a small orchard, and made cedar-wood shingles. At the age of seven, Snyder was laid up for four months by an accident, at the end of four months, I had read more than most kids do by the time theyre eighteen. In 1942, following his parents divorce, Snyder moved to Portland, Oregon with his mother and his younger sister and their mother, Lois Snyder Hennessy, worked during this period as a reporter for The Oregonian. One of Garys boyhood jobs was as a copy boy. Also, during his teen years, he attended Lincoln High School, worked as a camp counselor, climbing remained an interest of his, especially during his twenties and thirties. In 1947, he started attending Reed College on a scholarship, here he met, and for a time, roomed with the education author Carl Proujan and Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. At Reed, Snyder published his first poems in a student journal and he also spent the summer of 1948 working as a seaman. He joined the now defunct Marine Cooks and Stewards union to get this job, Snyder married Alison Gass in 1950, they separated after seven months, and divorced in 1952. While attending Reed, Snyder did folklore research on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon and he graduated with a dual degree in anthropology and literature in 1951. He spent the following few summers working as a timber scaler at Warm Springs and this experience formed the basis for some of his earliest published poems, later collected in the book The Back Country. He also encountered the ideas of Buddhism and, through its arts. He went to Indiana University with a fellowship to study anthropology. He left after a semester to return to San Francisco
28.
Philip Whalen
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Philip Glenn Whalen was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation. Born in Portland, Oregon, Whalen grew up in The Dalles from age four until he returned to Portland in 1941 and he served in the US Army Air Forces during World War II. He attended Reed College on the GI Bill, there, he met Gary Snyder and Lew Welch, and graduated with a BA in 1951. He read at the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955 that marked the launch of the West Coast Beats into the public eye and he appears, in barely fictionalized form, as the character Warren Coughlin in Jack Kerouacs The Dharma Bums, which includes an account of that reading. In Big Sur he is called Ben Fagan, whalens poetry was featured in Donald Allens anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960. Whalens first interest in Eastern religions centered on Vedanta, upon release from the army in 1946, he visited the Vedanta Society in Portland, but did not pursue this very far, because of the expense of attending their countryside ashram. Tibetan Buddhism also attracted him, but he found it unnecessarily complicated, in 1952, Gary Snyder lent him books on Zen by D. T. Suzuki. With Snyder, Whalen attended a group at the Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist Church in Berkeley. Ultimately, Zen became his chosen path, Whalen spent 1966 and 1967 in Kyoto, Japan, assisted by a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a job teaching English. There, he practiced zazen daily, and wrote some forty poems and he moved into the San Francisco Zen Center and became a student of Zentatsu Richard Baker in 1972. The following year, he became a monk and he became head monk of Dharma Sangha, in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1984. In 1987, he received transmission from Baker, and in 1991, the Calendar, a Book of Poems. Reed College, thesis, Portland, Ore.1951, totem Press/Corinth Books, New York 1960 Monday in the Evening,21, VII,61. Coyotes Journal, Eugene, Oregon 1965 Highgrade, Doodles, Poems, coyotes Journal, San Francisco 1966 On Bears Head. Harcourt, Brace & World/Coyote, New York 1969 Scenes of Life at the Capital, maya, San Francisco 1970 Enough Said, Fluctuat Nec Mergitur, Poems 1974-1979. Grey Fox Press, San Francisco 1980, grey Fox Press, San Francisco 1983 Canoeing up Cabarga Creek, Buddhist Poems 1955-1986. Overtime, Selected Poems by Philip Whalen, the Collected Poems of Philip Whalen. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Connecticut 2007, both the Collected and Selected Poems were edited by Michael Rothenberg
29.
Reed College
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Reed College is a private liberal arts college in southeast Portland in the U. S. state of Oregon. Reed is known for its mandatory freshman humanities program, required senior-year thesis, the college has many prominent alumni, including over 90 Fulbright Scholars,67 Watson Fellows,3 MacArthur Fellows, and 32 Rhodes Scholars—the second-highest number of any liberal arts college. The Reed Institute was founded in 1908, and held its first classes in 1911, Reed is named for Oregon pioneers Simeon Gannett Reed and Amanda Reed. Simeon was an entrepreneur in trade on the Columbia River, Reeds first president was William Trufant Foster, a former professor at Bates College and Bowdoin College in Maine. The college has a reputation for political liberalism, according to sociologist Burton Clark, Reed is one of the most unusual institutions of higher learning in the United States, featuring a traditional liberal arts and natural sciences curriculum. It requires freshmen to take Humanities 110, an introduction to the Classics, covering ancient Greece and Rome as well as the Bible. Its program in the sciences is likewise unusual with its TRIGA research reactor making it the school in the United States to have a nuclear reactor operated entirely by undergraduates. Upon completion of the thesis, students must also pass an oral exam that may encompass questions not only about the thesis. Reed maintains a 10,1 student-to-faculty ratio, and its small classes emphasize a style where the teacher often acts as a mediator for discussion rather than a lecturer. While large lecture-style classes exist, Reed emphasizes its smaller lab, although letter grades are given to students, grades are de-emphasized at Reed and focus is placed on a narrative evaluation. Unsatisfactory grades are reported directly to the student and the students adviser, papers and exams are generally returned to students with lengthy comments but without grades affixed. Many Reed students graduate without knowing their cumulative GPA or their grades in individual classes. Reed also claims to have experienced very little grade inflation over the years, noting, for example, although Reed does not award Latin honors to graduates, it confers several awards for academic achievement at commencement, including naming students to Phi Beta Kappa. Reed has no fraternities or sororities and few NCAA sports teams although physical education classes are required for graduation, Reed also has several intercollegiate athletic clubs, most notably the Rugby, Ultimate Frisbee, and Soccer teams. Reeds ethical code is known as The Honor Principle, while inspired by traditional honor systems, Reeds Honor Principle differs from these in that it is a guide for ethical standards themselves and not just their enforcement. Under the Honor Principle, there are no codified rules governing behavior, rather, the onus is on students individually and as a community to define which behaviors are acceptable and which are not. Discrete cases of grievance, known as Honor Cases, are adjudicated by a Judicial Board of twelve full-time students, there is also an Honor Council of students, faculty, and staff who educate the community on the Honor Principle and mediate conflict between individuals. Reed categorizes its academic program into five Divisions and the Humanities program, the formal chronological cleavage between the graduate and the undergraduate attitude of mind
30.
Beat Generation
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The Beat Generation is a literary movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s, Allen Ginsbergs Howl, William S. Burroughss Naked Lunch and Jack Kerouacs On the Road are among the best known examples of Beat literature. Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that helped to liberalize publishing in the United States. The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, later, in the mid-1950s, the central figures ended up together in San Francisco where they met and became friends of figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. In the 1960s, elements of the expanding Beat movement were incorporated into the hippie, Neal Cassady, the driver for Ken Keseys bus Further, was the primary bridge between these two generations. Allen Ginsbergs work also became an element of early 1960s hippie culture. Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase Beat Generation in 1948 to characterize a perceived underground, the name arose in a conversation with writer John Clellon Holmes. Kerouac allows that it was street hustler Herbert Huncke who originally used the phrase beat, the origins of the Beat Generation can be traced to Columbia University and the meeting of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Hal Chase and others. Jack Kerouac attended Columbia on a football scholarship, though the beats are usually regarded as anti-academic, many of their ideas were formed in response to professors like Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. Classmates Carr and Ginsberg discussed the need for a New Vision, to counteract what they perceived as their teachers conservative, Burroughs had an interest in criminal behavior and got involved in dealing stolen goods and narcotics. He was soon addicted to opiates, Burroughs guide to the criminal underworld was small-time criminal and drug-addict Herbert Huncke. The Beats were drawn to Huncke, who started to write himself. The police attempted to pull Ginsberg over while he was driving with Huncke, Ginsberg crashed the car while trying to flee and escaped on foot, but left incriminating notebooks behind. He was given the option to plead insanity to avoid a term, and was committed for 90 days to Bellevue Hospital. Carl Solomon was arguably more eccentric than psychotic, a fan of Antonin Artaud, he indulged in self-consciously crazy behavior, like throwing potato salad at a college lecturer on Dadaism. Solomon was given shock treatments at Bellevue, this one of the main themes of Ginsbergs Howl. Solomon later became the contact who agreed to publish Burroughs first novel Junky in 1953. Beat writers and artists flocked to Greenwich Village in New York City in the late 1950s because of low rent, folksongs, readings and discussions often took place in Washington Square Park
31.
City Lights Bookstore
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City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture and it was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin. Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsbergs influential collection Howl, Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an historic landmark. City Lights is located at 261 Columbus Avenue, on the nexus of North Beach, City Lights was the inspiration of Peter D. Martin, who relocated from New York City to San Francisco in the 1940s to teach sociology. A year later, Martin used the name to establish the first all-paperback bookstore in the U. S. at the time an audacious idea. The site was a storefront in the triangular Artigues Building located at 261 Columbus Avenue. Built on the ruins of a building destroyed in the fire following the 1906 earthquake. City Lights originally shared the building with a number of other shops and it gradually gained more space whenever one of the other shops became vacant, and eventually occupied the entire building. In 1953, as Ferlinghetti was walking past the Artigues Building and he introduced himself as a contributor to Martins magazine City Lights, and told him he had always wanted a bookstore. Before long he and Martin agreed to a partnership, soon after they opened they hired Shig Murao as a clerk. Murao worked without pay for the first few weeks, but eventually became manager of the store and was a key element in creating the feel of City Lights. In 1955, Martin sold his share of the business to Ferlinghetti for $1000, moved to New York, in the late 1960s, Ferlinghetti hired Joseph Wolberg, former philosophy professor at SUNY Buffalo, to manage the bookstore. Wolberg is credited with organizing the once chaotically messy shelves and for convincing a cheap Ferlinghetti to install anti-shoplifting metal detectors, through his connection to city lights, Wolberg produced records for beat poets such as Charles Bukowski and Shel Silverstein. In 1971, Ferlinghetti persuaded Nancy Peters – who was working at the Library of Congress – to join in a project with him and this was a period of persecution, and FBI infiltration of those presses. In 1984, the business was in a crisis and Peters became a co-owner of it. Ferlinghetti credits her for the subsequent survival and growing success of the business, in 1999, with Ferlinghetti, she bought the building they worked in. The landmark designation mandates the preservation of certain features of the building
32.
Michael McClure
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Michael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and is immortalized as Pat McLear in Kerouacs Big Sur and his poetry is heavily infused with an awareness of nature, especially in the animal consciousness that often lies dormant in mankind. Not only an awareness of nature, but the poems are organized in an organic fashion, continuing with his appreciation of natures purity. Stan Brakhage, friend of McClure, stated in Chicago Review that, McClure always and he invents a form for the cellular messages of his, a form which will feel as if it were organic on the page, and he sticks with it across his life. McClure has since published eight books of plays and four collections of essays, including essays on Bob Dylan and his fourteen books of poetry include Jaguar Skies, Dark Brown, Huge Dreams, Rebel Lions, Rain Mirror and Plum Stones. McClure famously read selections of his Ghost Tantra poetry series to the lions in the San Francisco Zoo. His work as a novelist includes the autobiographical The Mad Cub, barry Miles famously referred to McClure as the Prince of the San Francisco Scene. McClure would later court controversy as a playwright with his play The Beard, other plays include Josephine The Mouse Singer and VKTMS. He had a run as playwright-in-residence with San Franciscos Magic Theatre where his operetta Minnie Mouse. McClure was a friend of The Doors lead singer Jim Morrison and is generally acknowledged as having been responsible for promoting Morrison as a poet. McClure performed spoken word poetry concerts with Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek up until Rays death, McClure is the author of the Afterword in Jerry Hopkinss and Danny Sugermans seminal Doors biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive. McClure has also released CDs of his work with minimalist composer Terry Riley, mcClures journalism has been featured in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He has received awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Obie Award for Best Play, an NEA grant, the Alfred Jarry Award. In addition, he was inducted into the San Francisco State University Alumni Hall of Fame in 2014, McClure is still active as a poet, essayist and playwright and lives with his second wife, Amy, in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has one daughter from his first marriage to Joanna McClure and they are attracted to each other, but their egos get in the way. She mocks his masculinity, and he tells her she is envious of his beauty and this battle diminishes as they realize that since they are alone together they are free to shuck their burdening facades, and give in to what they’re truly feeling. The torrent of their unleashed passions leads to a scene of great controversy. McLure says that he was inspired to write the play by a vision that came to him of a poster advertising a match between Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid
33.
Six Gallery reading
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The Six Gallery reading was an important poetry event that took place on Friday, October 7,1955, at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco. Peter Forakis created the poster for the reading, lamantia read poems by his dead friend John Hoffman. McClure read Point Lobos Animism and For the Death of 100 Whales, Snyder, A Berry Feast, most famously, it was at this reading that Allen Ginsberg first presented his poem Howl. Hedrick, a painter and veteran of the Korean War, approached Ginsberg in the summer of 1955, but once he’d written a rough draft of Howl, he changed his “fucking mind, ” as he put it. The large and excited audience included a drunken Jack Kerouac, who refused to read his own work but cheered the other poets on, shouting Yeah. Still, Kerouac was able to much of what occurred at the reading. Also in attendance was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who telegrammed Ginsberg the following day offering to publish his work, neal Cassady passed around the wine jug and a collection plate. Also there was Ann Charters, then a UC Berkeley college student and it was on this night that Charters first met Kerouac, the subject of her best known work, the biography Kerouac. Before its association with art and poetry, it was a repair shop. It houses a store called Silkroute International, whose rugs and pillows spill onto the sidewalk, the Gallerys 3119 address no longer exists, but a podium and plaque commemorating the 50th anniversary of the reading of Howl stand on the sidewalk in front of a restaurant at 3115 Fillmore. The black flower boxes are there, without exuberant geraniums. Drunk Poetry Fans and the First Reading of ‘Howl’, Time magazine, literary Kicks, Six Gallery About Howl in Performance Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Oral history interview with Wally Hedrick,1974 June 10-24
34.
Counterculture of the 1960s
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Many key movements related to these issues were born or advanced within the counterculture of the 1960s. This embracing of creativity is particularly notable in the works of British Invasion bands such as the Beatles, in addition to the trendsetting Beatles, many other creative artists, authors, and thinkers, within and across many disciplines, helped define the counterculture movement. Several factors distinguished the counterculture of the 1960s from the movements of previous eras. Post-war affluence allowed many of the generation to move beyond a focus on the provision of the material necessities of life that had preoccupied their Depression-era parents. The counterculture era essentially commenced in earnest with the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, poor outcomes from some of these activities set the stage for disillusionment with, and distrust of, post-war governments. In the US, President Dwight D, the Partial Test Ban Treaty divided the establishment within the US along political and military lines. In the UK, the Profumo Affair also involved establishment leaders being caught in deception, leading to disillusionment and serving as a catalyst for liberal activism. The Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world to the brink of war in October 1962, was largely fomented by duplicitous speech. The assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, many social issues fueled the growth of the larger counterculture movement. On college and university campuses, student activists fought for the right to exercise their constitutional rights, especially freedom of speech. The availability of new and more effective forms of control was a key underpinning of the sexual revolution. With this change in attitude, by the 1990s the ratio of children out of wedlock rose from 5% to 25% for Whites. The end of censorship resulted in a reformation of the western film industry. Communes, collectives, and intentional communities regained popularity during this era, Some of these self-sustaining communities have been credited with the birth and propagation of the international Green Movement. The emergence of an interest in expanded spiritual consciousness, yoga, occult practices, in 1957, 69% of US residents polled by Gallup said religion was increasing in influence. By the late 1960s, polls indicated less than 20% still held that belief, the Generation Gap, or the inevitable perceived divide in worldview between the old and young, was perhaps never greater than during the counterculture era. Ultimately, practical and comfortable casual apparel, namely updated forms of T-shirts, many began to live largely clandestine lives because of their choice to use such drugs and substances, fearing retribution from their governments. The confrontations between college students and law enforcement officials became one of the hallmarks of the era, many younger people began to show deep distrust of police, and terms such as fuzz and pig as derogatory epithets for police reappeared, and became key words within the counterculture lexicon
35.
Hippie
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The word hippie came from hipster and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into New York Citys Greenwich Village and San Franciscos Haight-Ashbury district. The term hippie was first popularized in San Francisco by Herb Caen, the origins of the terms hip and hep are uncertain. By the 1940s, both had become part of African American jive slang and meant sophisticated, currently fashionable, fully up-to-date, the Beats adopted the term hip, and early hippies inherited the language and countercultural values of the Beat Generation. In the United Kingdom in 1970, many gathered at the gigantic Isle of Wight Festival with a crowd of around 400,000 people, in later years, mobile peace convoys of New Age travelers made summer pilgrimages to free music festivals at Stonehenge and elsewhere. In Australia, hippies gathered at Nimbin for the 1973 Aquarius Festival, piedra Roja Festival, a major hippie event in Chile, was held in 1970. Hippie fashion and values had an effect on culture, influencing popular music, television, film, literature. Since the 1960s, many aspects of culture have been assimilated by mainstream society. The religious and cultural diversity espoused by the hippies has gained widespread acceptance, lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, the principal American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, argues that the terms hipster and hippie derive from the word hip, whose origins are unknown. The term hipster was coined by Harry Gibson in 1944, by the 1940s, the terms hip, hep and hepcat were popular in Harlem jazz slang, although hep eventually came to denote an inferior status to hip. In Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, New York City, young counterculture advocates were named hips because they were considered in the know or cool, as opposed to being square. In the April 27,1961 issue of The Village Voice, An open letter to JFK & Fidel Castro, Norman Mailer utilizes the term hippies, in questioning JFKs behavior. In a 1961 essay, Kenneth Rexroth used both the hipster and hippies to refer to young people participating in black American or Beatnik nightlife. According to Malcolm Xs 1964 autobiography, the hippie in 1940s Harlem had been used to describe a specific type of white man who acted more Negro than Negroes. Andrew Loog Oldham refers to all the Chicago hippies, seemingly in reference to black musicians, in his rear sleeve notes to the 1965 LP The Rolling Stones. The word hippie was also used in reference to Philadelphia in at least two songs in 1963, South Street by The Orlons, and You Cant Sit Down by The Dovells. In both songs, the term is applied to residents of Philadelphias South Street, in that article, Fallon wrote about the Blue Unicorn Cafe, using the term hippie to refer to the new generation of beatniks who had moved from North Beach into the Haight-Ashbury district. New York Times editor and usage writer Theodore M. Bernstein said the paper changed the spelling from hippy to hippie to avoid the ambiguous description of clothing as hippy fashions. Even the counterculture of the Ancient Greeks, espoused by philosophers like Diogenes of Sinope and the Cynics were also early forms of hippie culture
36.
Jack Kerouac
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Jack Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac is recognized for his method of spontaneous prose. Thematically, his work covers such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty. He became a celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement. In 1969, aged 47, Kerouac died from bleeding due to long-term alcohol abuse. Since his death, Kerouacs literary prestige has grown, and several previously unseen works have been published, Jack Kerouac was born on March 12,1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French Canadian parents, Léo-Alcide Kéroack and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque. There is some confusion surrounding his name, partly because of variations on the spelling of Kerouac and his reason for that statement seems to be linked to an old family legend that the Kerouacs had descended from Baron François Louis Alexandre Lebris de Kerouac. Kerouacs baptism certificate lists his name simply as Jean Louis Kirouac, Kerouacs father Leo had been born into a family of potato farmers in the village of Saint-Hubert-de-Rivière-du-Loup, Quebec. Jack also had stories on the etymology of his surname, usually tracing it to Irish, Breton. In one interview he claimed it was from the name of the Cornish language, another version was that the Kerouacs had come to Cornwall from Ireland before the time of Christ and the name meant language of the house. In still another interview he said it was an Irish word for language of the water, Kerouac, derived from Kervoach, is the name of a town in Brittany in Lanmeur, near Morlaix. Jack Kerouac later referred to 34 Beaulieu Street as sad Beaulieu, the Kerouac family was living there in 1926 when Jacks older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever, aged nine. This deeply affected four-year-old Jack, who would say that Gerard followed him in life as a guardian angel. This is the Gerard of Kerouacs novel Visions of Gerard and he had one other sibling, an older sister named Caroline. Kerouac was referred to as Ti Jean or little John around the house during his childhood, Kerouac spoke French until he learned English at age six, he did not speak English confidently until his late teens. He was a child who was devoted to his mother. She was a devout Catholic, who instilled this deep faith into both her sons, Kerouac would later say that his mother was the only woman he ever loved. After Gerard died, his mother sought solace in her faith, while his father abandoned it, wallowing in drinking, gambling, and smoking
37.
The Dharma Bums
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The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The basis for the novels semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road, the protagonists search for a Buddhist context to his experiences recurrs throughout the story. The book had a significant influence on the Hippie counterculture of the 1960s, the character Japhy drives Ray Smiths story, whose penchant for simplicity and Zen Buddhism influenced Kerouac on the eve of the sudden and unpredicted success of On the Road. The novel concludes with a change in style, with Kerouac working alone as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak. These elements place The Dharma Bums at a critical junction foreshadowing the consciousness-probing works of authors in the 1960s such as Timothy Leary. One episode in the book features Smith, Ryder, and Henry Morley climbing Matterhorn Peak in California and it relates Kerouacs introduction to this type of mountaineering and inspired him to spend the following summer as a fire lookout for the United States Forest Service on Desolation Peak in Washington. The novel also gives an account of the legendary 1955 Six Gallery reading, at the event, other authors including Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen also performed. Kerouac often based his characters on friends and family. Because of the objections of my early publishers I was not allowed to use the same names in each work. As John Suiter stated in a review, Dont read Kerouac when youre too young, read him as you join that long death march called steady employment. Look back to all the people you knew, those people who went here and there and they doped and boozed in desperate self medication. He knows people with Odd Knowledge and they have plumbed the breadth and depth of human existence. They get laid in the era before The Pill, and then it occurs to you. None of your old pals will ever be quite what he once was in your memory, and youll know Kerouac for what he was. And you know that amidst all the lies, he told the truth, the truth with a little t. He wanted to fool you, but he couldnt and it wasnt in him, he hadnt the talent for it. He had only enough to tell you the way he had wanted it to be, how he wanted it to be when he looked back on it. But confided to Philip Whalen, I do wish Jack had taken more trouble to smooth out dialogues, later, Snyder chided Kerouac for the books misogynistic interpretation of Buddhism
38.
Allen Ginsberg
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Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet of Jewish origin, and one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture that soon would follow. He was one of many influential American writers of his known as the Beat Generation. Ginsberg is best known for his poem Howl, in which he denounced what he saw as the forces of capitalism. In 1956, Howl was seized by San Francisco police and US Customs. S, Howl reflected Ginsbergs own homosexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner. Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that Howl was not obscene, adding, Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who studied Eastern religious disciplines extensively. He lived modestly, buying his clothing in stores and residing in downscale apartments in New York’s East Village. One of his most influential teachers was the Tibetan Buddhist the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa, at Trungpas urging, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman started The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics there in 1974. Ginsberg took part in decades of non-violent political protest against everything from the Vietnam War to the War on Drugs and his collection The Fall of America shared the annual U. S. National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. In 1979 he received the National Arts Club gold medal and was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts, Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings, Poems 1986–1992. Ginsberg was born into a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, as a young teenager, Ginsberg began to write letters to The New York Times about political issues, such as World War II and workers rights. While in high school, Ginsberg began reading Walt Whitman, inspired by his teachers passionate reading, in 1945, he joined the Merchant Marines to earn money to continue his education at Columbia. Ginsberg has stated that he considered the required freshman seminar to be his favorite course while at Columbia University and its subject was The Great Books and was taught by Lionel Trilling. According to The Poetry Foundation, Ginsberg spent several months in an institution after he pleaded insanity during a hearing. He was allegedly being prosecuted for harboring stolen goods in his dorm room and it was noted that the stolen property was not his, but belonged to an acquaintance. Ginsberg referred to his parents, in a 1985 interview, as old-fashioned delicatessen philosophers and his father Louis Ginsberg was a published poet and a high school teacher. Ginsbergs mother, Naomi Livergant Ginsberg, was affected by an illness that was never properly diagnosed. She was also a member of the Communist Party and took Ginsberg. Ginsberg later said that his mother made up stories that all went something like, The good king rode forth from his castle, saw the suffering workers
39.
Howl
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Howl is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1955, published as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems, and dedicated to Carl Solomon. Ginsberg began work on Howl as early as 1954, in the Paul Blackburn Tape Archive at the University of California, San Diego, Ginsberg can be heard reading early drafts of his poem to his fellow writing associates. Howl is considered to be one of the works of American literature. It came to be associated with the group of known as the Beat Generation. There is no foundation to the myth that Howl was written as a performance piece and this myth was perpetrated by Ferlinghetti as part of the defenses case during the poems obscenity trial. Upon the poems release, Ferlinghetti and the manager, Shigeyoshi Murao, were charged with disseminating obscene literature. On October 3,1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene, Allen Ginsberg wrote drafts of the poem Howl in mid-1954 to 1955, purportedly at a coffeehouse known today as the Caffe Mediterraneum in Berkeley, California. Many factors went into the creation of the poem, a short time before the composition of Howl, Ginsbergs therapist, Dr. Philip Hicks, encouraged him to quit his job and pursue poetry full-time. He experimented with a syntactic subversion of meaning called parataxis in the poem Dream Record, June 8,1955 about the death of Joan Vollmer, a technique that would become central in Howl. Ginsberg showed this poem to Kenneth Rexroth, who criticized it as too stilted and academic, Rexroth encouraged Ginsberg to free his voice, Ginsberg took this advice and attempted to write a poem with no restrictions. He was under the influence of William Carlos Williams and Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg began the poem in the triadic form he took from Williams but, in the middle of typing the poem. Ginsberg would experiment with this form in many later poems. The first draft contained what would later become Part I and Part III, Ginsberg admitted later this sympathy for Solomon was connected to bottled-up guilt and sympathy for his mothers schizophrenia, an issue he was not yet ready to address directly. I never asked him, and he never offered, Orlovsky told them, poets do it all the time. The Dedication by Ginsberg states he took the title from Kerouac, the poem was first performed at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7,1955. The reading was conceived by Wally Hedrick—a painter and co-founder of the Six—who approached Ginsberg in mid-1955, but once hed written a rough draft of Howl, he changed his fucking mind, as he put it. Further evidence that this was not performance art but poetry—a written piece that Ginsberg would not and has not ever described as anything, Ginsberg was ultimately responsible for inviting the readers and writing the invitation
40.
Bob Dylan
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Bob Dylan is an American songwriter, singer, painter, and writer. He has been influential in music and culture for more than five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when his songs chronicled social unrest, early songs such as Blowin in the Wind and The Times They Are a-Changin became anthems for the Civil Rights Movement and anti-war movement. Leaving behind his initial base in the American folk music revival, his six-minute single Like a Rolling Stone, recorded in 1965, Dylans lyrics incorporate a wide range of political, social, philosophical, and literary influences. They defied existing pop music conventions and appealed to the burgeoning counterculture, initially inspired by the performances of Little Richard and the songwriting of Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, and Hank Williams, Dylan has amplified and personalized musical genres. Dylan performs with guitar, keyboards, and harmonica, backed by a changing lineup of musicians, he has toured steadily since the late 1980s on what has been dubbed the Never Ending Tour. His accomplishments as a recording artist and performer have been central to his career, since 1994, Dylan has published seven books of drawings and paintings, and his work has been exhibited in major art galleries. As a musician, Dylan has sold more than 100 million records and he has also received numerous awards including eleven Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and an Academy Award. Dylan has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Minnesota Music Hall of Fame, Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and Songwriters Hall of Fame. The Pulitzer Prize jury in 2008 awarded him a citation for his profound impact on popular music and American culture. In May 2012, Dylan received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, in 2016, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition. Bob Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in St. Marys Hospital on May 24,1941, in Duluth, Minnesota and he has a younger brother, David. Dylans paternal grandparents, Zigman and Anna Zimmerman, emigrated from Odessa, in the Russian Empire and his maternal grandparents, Ben and Florence Stone, were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in the United States in 1902. Dylans father, Abram Zimmerman – an electric-appliance shop owner – and mother, Beatrice Beatty Stone, were part of a small, close-knit Jewish community. They lived in Duluth until Robert was six, when his father had polio and the returned to his mothers hometown, Hibbing. In his early years he listened to the radio—first to blues and country stations from Shreveport, Louisiana, and later and he formed several bands while attending Hibbing High School. In the Golden Chords, he performed covers of songs by Little Richard and their performance of Danny & the Juniors Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay at their high school talent show was so loud that the principal cut the microphone. In 1959, his high school yearbook carried the caption Robert Zimmerman, the same year, as Elston Gunnn, he performed two dates with Bobby Vee, playing piano and clapping
41.
Rock music
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It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by blues, rhythm and blues and country music. Rock music also drew strongly on a number of genres such as electric blues and folk. Musically, rock has centered on the guitar, usually as part of a rock group with electric bass guitar. Typically, rock is song-based music usually with a 4/4 time signature using a verse-chorus form, like pop music, lyrics often stress romantic love but also address a wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political in emphasis. Punk was an influence into the 1980s on the subsequent development of subgenres, including new wave, post-punk. From the 1990s alternative rock began to rock music and break through into the mainstream in the form of grunge, Britpop. Similarly, 1970s punk culture spawned the visually distinctive goth and emo subcultures and this trio of instruments has often been complemented by the inclusion of other instruments, particularly keyboards such as the piano, Hammond organ and synthesizers. The basic rock instrumentation was adapted from the blues band instrumentation. A group of musicians performing rock music is termed a rock band or rock group, Rock music is traditionally built on a foundation of simple unsyncopated rhythms in a 4/4 meter, with a repetitive snare drum back beat on beats two and four. Melodies are often derived from older musical modes, including the Dorian and Mixolydian, harmonies range from the common triad to parallel fourths and fifths and dissonant harmonic progressions. Critics have stressed the eclecticism and stylistic diversity of rock, because of its complex history and tendency to borrow from other musical and cultural forms, it has been argued that it is impossible to bind rock music to a rigidly delineated musical definition. These themes were inherited from a variety of sources, including the Tin Pan Alley pop tradition, folk music and rhythm, as a result, it has been seen as articulating the concerns of this group in both style and lyrics. Christgau, writing in 1972, said in spite of some exceptions, rock and roll usually implies an identification of male sexuality, according to Simon Frith rock was something more than pop, something more than rock and roll. Rock musicians combined an emphasis on skill and technique with the concept of art as artistic expression, original. The foundations of music are in rock and roll, which originated in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Its immediate origins lay in a melding of various musical genres of the time, including rhythm and blues and gospel music, with country. In 1951, Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey Alan Freed began playing rhythm and blues music for a multi-racial audience, debate surrounds which record should be considered the first rock and roll record. Other artists with rock and roll hits included Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis
