Kirk Johnson yesterday encouraged me to keep going, to provide “something to read in normal circumstances,” though indeed the circumstances today are surely obscene. I’ll try.

 

Ж         Ж         Ж

 

Thinking first of Ken Irby & then of Paul Goodman & his relationship to the New American poets this past week sent me back to the second issue of the Evergreen Review, published in 1957. The issue was devoted, as the blue cover testifies, to the “San Francisco Scene.” Edited by Barney Rosset, mastermind of Grove Press, & Donald Allen (who probably did most of the work), the 160 page issue appeared almost simultaneously with Lawrence Ferlinghetti & Shig Murao’s trial for publishing Howl, but in advance of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and three full years ahead of Allen’s The New American Poetry, for which it was something of a dress rehearsal. A fair number of copies must have been printed, since one still finds copies floating about used book dealers – I saw one in Big Jar about a year ago & abebooks lists three currently available, two in the U.K. and one here, all under $50.

 

The issue contains contributions by 16 writers, plus eight photographs of writers by the great Harry Redl. Ten of the 16 will be included in the Allen anthology in 1960:

 

§         Brother Antoninus, O.P.

§         Robert Duncan

§         Lawrence Ferlinghetti

§         Michael McClure

§         Jack Spicer

§         James Broughton

§         Gary Snyder

§         Philip Whalen

§         Jack Kerouac

§         Allen Ginsberg

 

The four creative writers who won’t be included in the New American Poetry are every bit as intriguing as a list:

 

§         Kenneth Rexroth

§         Henry Miller

§         Josephine Miles

§         Michael Rumaker

 

According to Allen’s introduction to his later book, he excluded poets who were already firmly established, which presumably would have included Miles & Rexroth. Rumaker, only 25 in 1957, the same age as McClure, appears to have been seen strictly as a fictioneer, thus excluded along with Miller & Bill Burroughs when it came time for Allen to cobble together his epochal collection of verse.

 

While Rexroth writes the introduction to this issue, two other critics also appear. Ralph J. Gleason contributes an essay on the San Francisco jazz scene, while Dore Ashton, then the art critic for the New York Times, has a piece on the “San Francisco School,” notably Rothko, Still, Diebenkorn & Sam Francis, with a nod at the end toward David Park, Elmer Bischoff and the “return, four years ago, to figurative painting.”

 

Some of the individual contributions from the poets & novelists are worth noting as well:

 

§         Ginsberg’s Howl, Part I (a reprint from the City Lights Book)

§         “October in the Railroad Earth” by Kerouac

§         “This Place, Rumord  to Have Been Sodom” & the start of “The Structure of Rime” by Duncan

§         Seven pieces by Jack Spicer, including “Troy Poem,” “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy,” and “Berkeley in Time of Plague,” easily his most important publication in the 1950s, possibly the most important magazine appearance of his life

§         Selections from Coney Island of the Mind & the whole of “Dog Poem” by Ferlinghetti

§         Whalen’s “Homage to Robert Creeley”

 

That is a huge slice of the great writing of one decade to show up in the pages of a single issue of just one magazine. Just imagine: with the exception of Howl, all of those works came into print on the same day & in the same binding. American writing is a completely different animal by sunset.

 

The longest piece in the issue is Rumaker’s story, “The Desert.” Its 41 pages are the reason why one can’t usefully do the math of 16 contributors, 160 pages & expect an “average” of ten pages per writer.

 

Gleason, a polymath & San Francisco music critic since the  1940s* – his column for the San Francisco Chronicle was syndicated by over 60 newspapers nationally, and, in his spare time, he was a vice president at Fantasy Records, host of the TV series Jazz Casual, contributed to Ramparts (the radical antecedent of publications like Mother Jones, The American Prospect & In These Times), & cofounded Rolling Stone with Jann Wenner which Gleason was active in editing until his death in ’75 – alludes to Rexroth & Ferlinghetti reading poetry aloud to jazz. Gleason’s piece doesn’t quite do justice to the degree to which the “modern” SF jazz scene, centered around Dave Brubeck & Vince Guaraldi, came out of the colleges, with Brubeck studying under Darius Milhaud under the GI Bill at Mills while Guaraldi attended SF State. But it’s a decent portrait of a world that will soon be washed over as if by a tsunami by the likes of the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead & Big Brother.**

 

Ashton, whose article contrasts the “San Francisco School” with her own local “New York” one, could have written her piece without crossing the George Washington Bridge – her most direct observation comes from a letter by Hubert Crehan that Ashton quotes in full. Both imperious & slovenly written, a bad combination, Ashton’s “Eastern View of the San Francisco School” is most noteworthy in that, in addition to Rothko & Still, she pays attention to some relatively forgotten but wonderful painters, Ernest Briggs & Edward Dugmore. Ashton’s one small concession to her work appearing alongside poets is to mention Rimbaud & Baudelaire! One might assume that Ashton’s article is placed at the end as a counterweight to Rexroth’s introduction – Gleason’s piece comes roughly in the middle (immediately ahead of Redl’s photographs) – but I think the real reason is one of embarrassment. The thought of framing all this new writing with three essays, one on the poetry, one on the surrounding music scene, and one on the associated art world, must have seemed like a great idea. But why go to New York & invite someone who thinks she’s the Mikado?

 

Yet Rexroth’s introduction is nearly as strange – he declares right off the bat that the last thing he wants to write about again is the San Francisco poetry scene &, so, for the next four pages, he more or less doesn’t. When he finally begins to address the poets of the City, he begins with Everson, whom he never identifies directly as Brother Antoninus, although that’s how he appears in the issue (his given name does show up in parentheses in the contributor’s notes). Rexroth then follows with Philip Lamantia, a poet not even included in the issue! Then, in order, he deals with the three other poets he obviously believes to be “heavies”: Duncan, Ginsberg & Ferlinghetti. He closes with a paragraph about reading aloud to jazz & thus manages not to mention nine of the writers in the issue.

 

What I like about this “The San Francisco Scene,” which I’ve owned for years, is how it contextualizes the community at a particular moment in time – unlike the Allen anthology just three years hence, there is no division here between the San Francisco Renaissance, Black Mountain and the Beats, although all are represented in the issue. The presence of Rexroth, Miller & Miles offers an aggregate sense of the world into which these younger writers were just then asserting themselves, far from the trade publishing & art gallery-centric island of Manhattan. Given the fact that Rosset’s Grove Press was so New York & Europe focused – already the American publisher for much of Samuel Beckett – it is nonetheless hard today to imagine just how far Rosset & Allen had reached in this collection. For one thing, Grove’s Evergreen imprint had, in 1957, never published a book of poems by an American author – unless you count Lorca’s Poet in New York. Within a year, however, it would bring out both Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara & H.D.’s Selected Poems.

 

Also worth noting is who is not included here – Lamantia, as Rexroth so pointedly remarks; Bob Kaufman; Robin Blaser; Helen Adam; Lew Welch; Madeline Gleason***; Richard Duerden; Kirby Doyle; Bruce Boyd; Ebbe Borregaard; Peter Orlovsky; Ron Loewinsohn; John Wieners; David Meltzer – all but Kaufman turn up in the Allen anthology three years later & were extremely visible in the San Francisco writing community. Indeed, Wieners Hotel Wentley Poems is one of the classics of the City. Presumably George Stanley, Joanne Kyger & Harold Dull were too young in 1957 – one could argue about their absence from the anthology in 1960, especially in light of the presence of Boyd & Doyle. But Creeley was in San Francisco briefly in the 1950s, as was Zukofsky. Ruth Weiss was active. Kenneth Patchen was around, if mostly immobile. Weldon Kees had been dead less than two years. James Schevill, John Logan, Tom Parkinson were teaching locally. Mark Linenthal, formerly of Harvard, the prison camp at Auschwitz & the Paris of the post-war years, moved to town in 1948 with his wife Alice Adams.

 

So it’s a San Francisco scene that Allen & Rosset offered in Evergreen Review, tho by no means the only one available. It is, as I suggested, a rehearsal for the great anthology Allen will unleash in just three years. And while that book will help to propagate the myth of a San Francisco Renaissance, the “San Francisco Scene” of 1957 makes evident that if there was any renaissance, it was one of multiple impulses, with nothing approximating a literary movement.

 

Forty-six years later, I believe just three of the contributors to the magazine are still alive. Yet the world they shaped, and which Donald Allen helped them to frame through this magazine, as well as his later anthologies & books, transformed not just the face of poetry, but even its geography. Prior to Rexroth, after all, the San Francisco poetry tradition had consisted of little more than George Sterling, Joaquin Miller & Ina Coolbrith. The great myth of the reading at the Six Gallery was functionally just that – if you weren’t there (I was just ten at the time) all you could do was imagine. But Evergreen Review was tangible & portable. And until the Allen anthology showed in 1960, this was as close as you could get.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* In 1968, Gleason lifted the San Francisco Scene line from this issue of Evergreen Review for a book on the 1960s rock music scene.

 

** The relationship between poetry & jazz and poetry & rock is a study worth pursuing in its own right. Jazz was the most popular music in America up into World War 2, but as the bebop pioneers took jazz fully into late modernism, one generation of poets followed, while the context of jazz itself was suddenly marginalized by the arrival of rock & roll and music’s new relationship to the concept of style and the marketing of generational cohorts. One generation read aloud to or (more often) wrote to the sounds of jazz. The next generation would include Leonard Cohen, Laurie Anderson, Jim Carroll, Patti Smith & Jessica Hagedorn.  

 

*** Special thanks to Alan Brilliant, who just sent me Gleason’s Concerto for Bell and Telephone, published by Brilliant’s Unicorn Press in 1967.