San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets
Interviews. SAN FRANCSCO BEAT: TALKING WITH THE POETS is an essential archive of the Bear Generation, as rich moment in a fortunate place. America, somnolent, conformist, and paranoid in the 1950s, was chaged forever by a handful of people who refused an existence of drudgery and enterprise, opting instead for a life of personal, spiritual, and artistic adventure. In these intimate, free-wheeling conversations, a baker's dozen of the poets of San Francisco talk about the scene then and now,...
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San Francisco Beat is an essential archive of the Beat Generation, a rich moment in a fortunate place. America-somnolent, conformist, and paranoid in the 1950s-was changed forever by a handful of people who refused an existence of drudgery and enterprise, opting instead for a life of personal, spiritual, and artistic adventure. In these intimate, free-wheeling conversations, a baker's dozen of the poets of San Francisco talk about the scene then and now, the traditions of poetry, and about anarchism, globalism, Zen, the Bomb, the Kabbalah, and the Internet.Thirty years ago, poet David Meltzer interviewed his poet friends for The San Francisco Poets. Now in San Francisco Beat he has combined these classic interviews with recent follow-up. San Francisco Beat features major new interviews with Philip Lamantia, Joanne Kyger, Gary Snyder, Jack Hirschman, Diane di Prima, Jack Micheline, Philip Whalen, and David Meltzer himself. David Meltzer is the author of many books of poetry, including Tens, The Name, Arrows: Selected Poetry 1957-1992, and No Eyes: Lester Young. He is the editor of Birth, The Secret Garden, Reading Jazz, and Writing Jazz, among other collections. His agit-smut fictions include The Agency Trilogy. Meltzer read poetry at the Jazz Cellar in the 1950s and in the 1960s fronted the band, Serpent Power. Meltzer teaches poetics at New College of California. Table of Contents/Interviewed AuthorsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsDiane di Prima (1999)William Everson (1971)Remembering Everson (1999)Lawrence Ferlinghetti I (1969)Lawrence Ferlinghetti II(1999)Jack Hirschman (1998)Joanne Kyger (1998)Philip Lamantia (1998)Michael McClure I (1971)Michael McClure II (1999)David Meltzer (1999)Jack Micheline (1994)Kenneth Rexroth (1971)Remembering Rexroth (1971)Gary Snyder (1999)Lew Welch (1971)Philip Whalen (1999)BibliographiesPrefaceNothing is hidden;As of oldAll is clear as daylight-Anonymous haiku, 16th centurySan Francisco Beat: Talking with the PoliceLA Times - Jonathan KirschThe Beats go on, as David Meltzer allows us to see by including the transcripts of 13 memorable and illuminating conversations wuth such members of the Beat generation as Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder and William Everson. All of the interviews are raw and edgy, full of ramblings and moments of rhetorical excess, yet are always intimate and illuminating.
PrefaceAcknowledgmentsDiane di Prima (1999)1William Everson (1971)22Remembering Everson (1999)61Lawrence Ferlinghetti I (1969)68Lawrence Ferlinghetti II (1999)96Jack Hirschman (1998)107Joanne Kyger (1998)122Philip Lamantia (1998)133Michael McClure I (1971)150Michael McClure II (1999)177David Meltzer (1999)188Jack Micheline (1994)216Kenneth Rexroth (1971)228Remembering Rexroth (1999)266Gary Snyder (1999)276Lew Welch (1971)294Philip Whalen (1999)325Bibliographies352
\ Jonathan KirschThe Beats go on, as David Meltzer allows us to see by including the transcripts of 13 memorable and illuminating conversations wuth such members of the Beat generation as Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder and William Everson. All of the interviews are raw and edgy, full of ramblings and moments of rhetorical excess, yet are always intimate and illuminating. \ — LA Times\ \ \ \ \ Ray GonzalezThirty years ago, David Meltzer interviewed key figure from the San Francisco Beat generation and published them in The San Francisco Poets, long out of print. This new edition reprints those classic interviews with Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Everson, and Lew Welch, along with recent conversations with Diane di Prima, Jack Hirschman, Joanne Kyger, Philip Lamantia, Jack Micheline, Gary Snyder. and Philip Whalen. Together these writers represent what is arguably the most important literary movement in post World War II American poetry. Insights by di Prima and Kyger on women Beat writers do away with long-held notions that only male writers were important to this West Coast renaissance. The Rexroth interview is timeless and shows what a visionary and prophet he was. \ — The Bloomsbury Review\ \ \ Library JournalMeltzer a poet who's maintained the edge he sharpened fighting conformity back in the heady days of the Beats, carries the battle forward in this engrossing volume of in-depth interviews with such fellow travelers as Gary Snyder and Phillip Whalen, who have thrived over the decades and become tremendously influencial poets and spirirual leaders. His 1969 encounters with the late great poets William Everson, Kenneth Rexroth, and Lew Welch capture the intensity and probity of that inspired time and are invaluable works of oral history, as are the striking juxtapositiond between Meltzer's past and present discussions with the still radical and thrilling Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure. Eloquent and knowledgeable, these poets and others...speak creatively and ardently about things that matter: poetry, music, war, capitalism, ecology, religion, philosophy..\ \ \ \ \ BooknewsSan Francisco poet Meltzer interviews colleagues such as Diane de Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen. The volume also reprints his interviews published 30 years ago in with Kenneth Rexroth, McClure, Ferlinghetti, Willam Everson, and Lew Welch. The result is a chronicle of the 1950s and 1960s beat scene there. It is not indexed. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsThe recusant Beats, like a whiff of cayenne, have a way of gaining your attention, and here they direct their monkey-wrenching, fortifying voices (in 13-part disharmony) at the microphone of poet Meltzer's tape recorder, conveying a whole lot of history and a bracing handful of ideas and opinions. Part of this collection was published 30 years ago as The San Francisco Poets, in which five poets (Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Everson, Michael McClure, and Lew Welch) gave vent to their disarming, discomfiting, disruptive dissent, all the while playful and alive to the vernacular. To this group have been added recent interviews with Diane di Prima, Jack Hirschman, Joanne Kyger, Philip Lamantia, Meltzer, Jack Micheline, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen-plus updates with Ferlinghetti and McClure. Meltzer (Poetics/New College of Calif.) emphasizes the poets' personal experiences and influences, which collectively is more incandescent than any of Joshua's light shows: Hemingway, Raphael Soyer, Cocteau, Surrealism, the San Francisco Libertarian Circle, anarchist youth groups, etc. Rexroth is decidedly the most confrontational, talking of music and war and homegrown American radicalism as if his hair was on fire, while Micheline is the rawest ("I lived my poems. More than some of these intellectual bastards"). Welch also speaks of the immediate, when as a cab driver he read some of his work to his colleagues: "Goddamn, Lewie," one said, "I don't know whether or not that is a poem, but that is the way it is to drive a cab." And Ferlinghetti, wonderfully, carries on from 1969 ("I have nothing to say. I haven't got my crystal spectacles on") to 1999 ("It's a technophiliacconsciousness that seems to be sweeping the world. And more than that, it's that huge all-engulfing corporate monoculture"). The Beats, Meltzer urges us to remember, thought more about life than about poetry. Just now, as we begin to slip into a national slumber somewhat akin to that of the Eisenhower years, it's exhilarating to have this squall line of Beats pass through our consciousness.\ \
