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Rexroth’s San Francisco
1975
The San Francisco Renaissance
The Beat Era
Haight-Ashbury and the Sixties
The New Rock Music
End of a Golden Age
Just as London under the buzz bombs enjoyed a literary renaissance and a
profound change of social relationships unparalleled since Queen Victoria
married the Prince Consort, so San Francisco during the War woke up from a long,
provincial sleep and became culturally a world capital. The reasons were
somewhat the same.
London was full of exiles and governments-in-exile from the Continent, and
attracted all sorts of radical intellectuals charged with hope for a new,
revolutionary Europe after this Last War for Democracy. At the same time,
hundreds of leading English intellectuals who had been pacifists before the war,
intensified rather than abandoned their pacifism. Many of them had become
pacifist anarchists, having become disillusioned with Communism during the
Moscow Trials and the Spanish Civil War. Poetry was published in a half dozen
languages. The theater suddenly became a moral critic as it had been in the days
of Shaw. English painting took a complete turn to what might be called Abstract
Romanticism, independently paralleling a development in America. The previous
generation of world-famous poets (always joined together as one creature, a
Siamese triplet known as Auden-Spender-Lewis) suddenly found themselves without
an audience under forty years old and were dismissed as members of the Stately
Home Weekend Soviets.
Something of the same thing happened in San Francisco. As early as 1939,
somnolent, out-of-date Bay Area industry began rapidly to change to an
industrial complex of the new technology — a complex that would soon almost
encircle the Bay. Highly trained civilian administrative and technical cadres
came with it, and soon military and naval personnel with similar training began
to arrive, as the buildup for Pacific war accelerated. This buildup was a
response to two possibilities. If America’s part of the war was fought mainly in
the European theater, San Francisco was safely far away. If war broke out with
Japan, San Francisco was Johnny-on-the-spot with America’s most easily protected
harbor. When Pearl Harbor did explode, Roosevelt got the war that interested him
most, and San Francisco became the capital of a world stretching from New
Zealand to Persia to the Aleutians — a refuge for whoever had been able to
escape from the countries overrun by the Japanese. [...]
The mountains of California began to be dotted with the concentration camps
for conscientious objectors. These were young men, mostly devoid of well-defined
ideology, who were simply opposed to war in any form (quite unlike the majority
of the Vietnam objectors). Many of them were beginning writers, artists and
actors. On their leaves, just like the G.I.’s, they came down to San Francisco
for their own variety of R. & R., where they met a similarly motivated young
generation of San Francisco intellectuals. These were mostly from the East and
had fled New York precisely because it was the literary marketplace and
stronghold of the Old Left and the Old Right.
By the end of the war San Francisco had become the center of an entirely new
cultural synthesis and out of the combined efforts of these two groups came:
three little theaters; a poetry center, as well as numerous smaller poetry
readings; and a Poet’s Follies which would soon have overtaken and surpassed the
famous Greenwich Village Follies of the ’20s if its inspirer and director, poet
Weldon Kees, had not had a nervous breakdown and jumped off the Bay Bridge.
Abstract Expressionism began at the California School of Fine Arts in its great
days under Douglas McAgy and swept the world.
By 1955, a large school of San Francisco poets who had rejected all
connections with the pre-War establishment was making its influence felt
throughout the world. Some of the most important were: Philip Lamantia, still in
his early twenties, but certainly the best of the third generation of
Surrealists anywhere in the world; William Everson (later Brother Antoninus);
Ferlinghetti, who had recently arrived from Paris; Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer
and the young people who began to show up from around the country — Lenore
Kandel, Michael McClure, Lew Welch, David Meltzer, Ron Loewinsohn and many
others. They remain to this day unknown to the San Francisco Establishment — the
people who support the opera, the symphony or A.C.T. (At a cultural conference,
Jack Shelley and I had to prevent San Francisco’s self-appointed cultural leader
from having Ferlinghetti arrested — he had simply wished to speak.) News of what
was happening in San Francisco was causing somersaults in Barcelona, Prague,
Warsaw and Moscow. At last, dim rumors penetrated the halls of Columbia
University, and two young Columbia delinquents arrived in San Francisco to “dig
the scene, man!” Ginsberg and Kerouac had arrived.
[February 1975]
Last time I ended my vest-pocket history of San Francisco’s Renaissance with
the arrival of Ginsberg and Kerouac. The next five years or so were known as
“The Beat Generation,” which was alleged to be a San Francisco product. It was
almost entirely the construction of Time and Life magazines. All
the cultural activities of the San Francisco Renaissance were already well under
way, and none of the writers or artists, many of whom had already gained
considerable fame, could be considered “beat.”
The poet Walter Lowenfels, an old friend of mine from the great days of
American Paris between the Wars, showed up in San Francisco (he is Jabberwohl
Cronstadt in Henry Miller’s Black Spring). Walter was indicted under the
Smith Act as a Communist and was touring the country speaking in his own defense
(he was subsequently acquitted). I asked him if he would like to give a poetry
reading. He was a leader of the older generation of Modernists, then unknown to
young writers and readers, and has since undergone a literary rebirth. He
agreed, and I tried to find a place. No one, including the San Francisco Poetry
Center, would touch him. I called the Six Gallery, a cooperative of six painters
who are now leading artists and members of the New Establishment themselves. Far
from Communists, indeed, they nevertheless agreed enthusiastically. Lowenfels
packed the place — to the amazement of the local Red bureaucrats. One of whom,
an aged anachronism of pseudo-proletarian literature, said to me in awe, “My
God, he has the youth!” “You bet,” I said.
A couple of weeks later the Six Gallery asked me to arrange another reading.
Most of the poets of the already well established San Francisco Renaissance
read. Ginsberg read Howl, and left a stunned audience, who realized they
had witnessed a drastic breakthrough of the crust of custom and the launching of
a literary epoch.
Ginsberg had been a conventional, witty poet; Kerouac, the author of a very
conventional first novel. Gregory Corso had published a book financed by the
smart alecks of the Harvard Advocate, who were under the impression that
they were committing a hoax. Bob Kaufman had just arrived in San Francisco.
William Burroughs was decaying somewhere south of the border. This is all the
Beat Generation of writers there ever was, and none of them were San Franciscans
or had ever lived in the City for more than a few months. Nevertheless, because
they fitted exactly the Luce publications’ stereotyped image of révoltés and
Bohemians, they were turned into celebrities overnight, and within the year had
become national and eventually international cult figures. Soon, all the high
school ice-cream parlors in Keokuk, Ocanomowoc and Cle Ellum were emptied of
their problem children, who had thumbed their way to North Beach and started
crops of sparse pubescent whiskers or clad their recently virginal thighs in
black stockings. They swarmed like bees or herring for perhaps two years, and
then they were gone. Herb Caen named them “beatniks” and soon flourishing crops
of them were appearing in London, Berlin (where they were called Gammler),
Tokyo and Moscow (where they were called stilyagi) where, to this day,
youngsters can be found reading translations of Kerouac’s On the Road
under the impression that it is still a New Testament.
Now the curious thing about all this furor is that, after the first five
writers, it produced nothing. Nothing at all in literature or the arts or
anything else. The far-out cultural developments of the period were quite
independent, for the obvious reason that any of the arts requires work, and
being a beatnik takes up all your time. The hippies and their leaders and
spokesmen in poetry, song and music did produce, but that’s a later story.
Meanwhile San Francisco’s own culture continued to mature and consolidate
itself. This growth extended from establishment to avant-garde activities: the
San Francisco Ballet, the Opera and the Actors’ Workshop (but not, alas, the
Symphony), a series of extremely creative little theaters (the best of which was
the Playhouse under the direction of Kermit Sheets), dozens of little magazines,
the Tape Music Center, considerable activity in films (although the leading
abstract filmmakers remained the Whitney brothers and the leading
representational fantasy artist the poet James Broughton), the revival of poetry
and jazz, and even a new kind of show business in the hungry i — what
Variety called “The Freak Gig, Frisco Style,” which they applied to me and
even to Peter, Paul and Mary when they first appeared.
There are all sorts of legends about the poetry and jazz revival. The facts
are these: Langston Hughes, Maxwell Bodenheim and I had recited poetry to jazz
at the Green Mask in Chicago in the ’20s, and the band had included people like
Teschemaker, Dave Tough, Bix Beiderbecke and others later to become world
famous. I had suggested reciting to Dave Brubeck, but the trouble with a
successful group is that they never stay still. They’re traveling all the time,
and poetry and jazz, to be any good (contrary to popular opinion), requires a
great deal of rehearsal. You have to have a house band. The Cellar in North
Beach was owned by two jazz musicians, so it was possible to work with a
permanent, resident group, and Ferlinghetti and I inaugurated a series of
jazz-poetry concerts. Soon, everybody was doing it. We were celebrities, with
our pictures in Life, and agents, and were “on the road” separately
making a great deal of money, playing to packed audiences, and were in great
danger of becoming cult figures. At the same time Kenneth Patchen, then living
in Palo Alto, was working with a group of his own who played a rather Brubeck-y
type of jazz full of classical reminiscences. It was very polished and competent
and except for Modesto, a great baritone sax player, very far from funky.
Being an entertainer is terribly hard work, and with the exception of about
five jazz rooms around the country in those days, night club owners were a very
low breed indeed — the off-scourings of the Mafia. I got out of it and so did
Ferlinghetti at about the time jazz-poetry became a craze. By that time, every
petty imitation beatnik was “blowing words” to pawn shop saxophones mended with
scotch tape — blowing weird, mistaken cross-fingerings through blubbered
embouchures in every Greenwich Village joint for nothing or at best a glass of
wine. And of course, the enthusiastic availability of the still swarming
black-stockinged high-school dropouts. The days of a grand a gig were gone. It
was time to quit. The curious thing is that abroad, poetry and jazz is still
popular and I could make a very good living at it.
[April 1975]
NOTE:
For more Rexroth discussion of the Beats, see
Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation.
Last month my vest-pocket history of the San Francisco Renaissance touched on
the ’50s and the Beat Era. To continue:
As the ’50s drew to a close, the City seemed to have achieved a cultural
synthesis on a very high level. It was unique in the country, had worldwide
influence — and promised a steady increase in quality and depth of values. The
six or seven little theaters were certainly the most interesting in the country;
they were widely differing, but each was radical in its approach to the art of
drama. One of them, the Actors’ Workshop, was grudgingly supported by the
younger members of the Establishment, who hoped it would become a civic
institution like the San Francisco Ballet.
Out of San Francisco had come postbop modernist musicians like Charles
Mingus. The painters who had studied under Clyfford Still and Rothko were
becoming known around the world as a second generation of Abstract
Expressionists and would soon themselves become an Establishment. The poets of
the San Francisco Renaissance were publishing with New York commercial
publishers, New Directions, Grove Press, and in Ferlinghetti’s Pocket Poets, and
were even beginning to show up in anthologies. During the following decade, they
would become subjects for innumerable doctoral theses. (Doctoral candidates with
tape recorders still show up to interview me on the average of once every three
weeks.)
The San Francisco Renaissance had become an industry like the Henry James
Industry, the D.H. Lawrence Industry, the Ezra Pound Industry. By 1960, in the
words of an M.C.A. agent, “Revolt is the hottest commodity on the Street,” the
“Street” being Madison Avenue and its extension, Hollywood Boulevard.
It certainly looked like a period of stabilization, moving steadily forward
to the day when white-whiskered portraits of Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti would
replace Longfellow and Whittier on the walls of the dusty corridors of
small-town grammar schools.
Suddenly, there occurred a new bouleversement or somersault. To
understand what happened, you have to understand a law that has operated in the
history of the arts since the end of the Modernist Epoch in 1929 — the Donkey’s
Tail Law of modern art history. From Manet to Mondrian, the development of
painting had been a natural growth out of the merging traditions of a world
civilization. If you wanted to see Picasso, or even Salvador Dali, all you had
to do was frequent the Louvre, and in a month you’d see both of them, carefully
studying a Tintoretto, an Egyptian bas relief or an African sculpture. Modern
painting was painters’ painting, highly skilled and deeply learned, but to the
public, as Khrushchev said, “It all looked as though it had been painted by a
donkey’s tail dipped in paint.”
In each generation, artists sprang up who accepted the public’s evaluation,
and approved of it, and being donkeys, they obediently turned their tails to the
canvas and created — until, by the last quarter of the century they had come to
dominate all the arts. Over ten years ago, I was in a symposium with one of
America’s “leading” painters, a professor at one of the universities of
California, who was famous for his portraits of hamburgers and ice cream cones.
He announced that he was going to Venice on some sort of grant. “That’s great,”
I said. “You’ll love the Tintorettos.” I discovered that he thought Tintoretto
was a dish like lasagna or tagliarini. Conversely, since he probably lives on
the subjects of his paintings, I could have told him that lasagna and tagliarini
were great Renaissance painters he shouldn’t miss.
Whatever the Beats may have thought of their work, it is a scathing portrayal
of a society in accelerated disintegration. The next generation would
enthusiastically embrace this portrayal as a “life style,” to use their own
slang. At the same time, two external factors intervened. The war in the
Indochinese peninsula, which had been going on for a hundred years, heated up.
The French were defeated and driven out, and the Americans were mad enough to
assume responsibility, and begin massive intervention, which would eventually
become the longest and most unpopular war fought by the United States. The
revolt of youth was as massive as the intervention, and escalated
proportionately. Eventually, it spread beyond the United States to the youth of
the world. The second outside factor, which in the final showdown would prove to
be closely related to the American presence in Indochina, was dope —
specifically heroin.
The sterile materialism and hypocrisy, especially sexual hypocrisy, of the
American Way of Life had alienated a large proportion of young people, who
turned to various forms of Indian and Far Eastern mysticism, voluntary poverty,
sexual freedom, and a kind of instinctive, inarticulate, idealistic anarchism.
It was a quest, not unlike Whitman’s, for the Community of Love — which, up to
the Civil War, had given promise of becoming the American way of life. Since
these young people had been raised in families and in a social context devoid of
all interiority, they hoped to blast their way into the locked vaults of their
own interior lives with chemicals.
For a short time, it seemed to work. The Haight-Ashbury became a dream world
of love children ruled over by Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, who bore a
remarkable resemblance to Ozma of Oz without any clothes on and with skyrockets
coming out of her head. Everybody went about trying to feed roses to policemen’s
horses which, not being goats, they don’t like.
I visited an old friend in Kyoto that year, who was fresh from a visit to the
States and participation in the first great love-in (called the Human Be-In) in
Golden Gate Park. He was then convinced that the revolution would come with a
combination of love and pharmacy. He’s not very musical. A local jazz critic
added rock to this revolution formula and agreed with the Beatles’
self-estimate, that they were more important than Jesus Christ, let alone Karl
Marx. My response to all this was “B.s. Wait till the Mafia takes over.”
At the very Be-In itself, there circulated amongst the crowd strange
characters from Los Angeles peddling at cut-rate prices, or even for free, a
wide assortment of powerful mental stimulants. During the course of a year,
speed replaced acid (LSD), and a kind of crazy anger — the anger of blown minds
— crept through the Haight-Ashbury. Suddenly one day, and lasting about a week,
there was a famine. You couldn’t connect anywhere, not even for marijuana. Then
there appeared on the streets, peddling the stuff like newspapers, dealers in
heroin, who for a short time were almost giving it away.
The Haight-Ashbury and out of it the worldwide hippie movement was certainly
a cultural phenomenon, but its affect on the arts except for music was minimal.
[May 1975]
In 1960 rock and roll was nothing new. In fact, it was coming to the end of
one of its greatest phases. In one of those classic statements (like “If you
have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know,” which seems to have been said
first by Fats Waller) someone once said, “Jazz is black music for white
audiences.” This idea goes back a long way, possibly to the King Oliver band,
and has been attributed to Louis Armstrong, but it sounds more like his
intellectual, classically-trained wife of those days, Lillian Hardin. (In
passing, it should be pointed out that the King Oliver Band did not
spontaneously blow sounds off the tops of their heads. Their music was written,
note for note, by Lillian Hardin and exhaustingly rehearsed.) The Sunset Cafe in
Chicago, where they became famous, was not a place for ordinary black people,
but a white gangster-owned and operated “black and tan” joint for black
celebrities and well-to-do drunken whites. So was the boxer Jack Johnson’s place
across State Street. So was the Cotton Club in New York, where Duke Ellington
reigned cool and oblivious to the disgustingly racist show numbers and jokes.
Black people and the very few hip whites went to places like the Fiume on State
Street in Chicago, where the owners were too poor to change the sign from that
of the previous tenant — an Italian spaghetti parlor.
Jazz records were already distinguishing themselves from race records, as
they were called, with stars like Georgia White and Cow Cow Davenport. Race
records changed names several times as the sensitivity of the race increased,
but they remained characterized by heavy rhythm, an insistent and relentless
sock; rather simple musical virtuosity that sometimes verged on plain antics;
scooped embouchure trumpet (that was often modeled on the very straightest white
performers like the vaudevillian soloist Del Steigers); and a relentless 2/4
beat, with an underlying shifting duple-triple rhythm modulated usually by the
piano (which after Jimmy Yancey, who came out of the black speakeasies and ran
one himself, came to be called boogie woogie); and almost exclusively blues
harmonies.
This situation changed little through all the years of my life. It began in
Congo Square in New Orleans, the South Side of Chicago, the Mississippi River
towns, the East Texas cities, and Kansas City — always in the ghettos, and most
important, always danced to — and it lasts to this day. Half the Motown list
could be played on the crank phonograph in the old Fiume and only puzzle people
a little, but the Modern Jazz Quartet has “come a long way from St. Louis.”
Swing was still danced to but bop was not, and after the bop revolution jazz
musicians detested “Rhythm and Blues,” “Rock and Roll,” “Roll and Bump.” Jazz
became chamber music, played in “clubs” which every year became more and more
expensive to audiences who, off the West Coast where their music was taken
seriously, were usually drunk, didn’t listen, talked at the top of their lungs,
and didn’t know a bass clef from a glockenspiel. Jazz played itself out of the
youth and priced itself out of the reach of ordinary people, while the Mafia ran
the clubs and forced heroin on the musicians who didn’t have the guts to resist.
Meanwhile, all over the country, following the massive immigration of blacks
into the northern war industries, black radio stations sprang up everywhere
playing rock and roll between “A Dollar Down and a Dollar a Day” (that’s a black
rock and roll song of the ’50s) commercials. White high school kids tuned in
because they wanted to dance, and eventually bought the records. The stars of
those days, Dinah Washington, Lloyd Price, Johnny Ace, all except Fats Domino,
are forgotten except by modern white rock and roll and folk rock stars. Bob
Dylan periodically mentions Johnny Ace, certainly as modernist a musician as
ever was Charlie Parker, and every rock group which is really with it owns large
collections of records and tapes of the genuine rock and roll groups which they
mine continuously. “Blue Suede Shoes” is a good example of an entire number
lifted bodily but with some of the old gizmo missing, and there are thousands of
others.
Among my friends in jazz everybody raised hell with the union when sent out
on a rock and roll gig — “That damn sock!” — and electric guitars were looked on
as instruments for the destruction of musical taste. Jazz guitar was Charlie
Christian or Barney Kessel. Jazz was supposed to be “like Bach.” In fact cool
jazz was like Debussy, and the principal influence on Los Angeles “Pacific jazz”
was Debussy’s “Sonata for flute, viola and harp.”
At this very moment young musicians were listening to what the kids were
listening to, and within a year, in concerts at the Longshoremen’s Hall and at
two clubs near Fillmore and Union Streets, a revolution comparable to Ginsberg’s
reading of Howl took place. Band music returned to the people with a
vengeance. If you couldn’t dance to the Jefferson Airplane you were a
paraplegic. Even so you rocked and rolled your wheelchair. In Liverpool the same
thing was going on. The Beatles are only one of many groups of very young men
who happened to come out on top. Soon the San Francisco sound and the
Liverpuddlean had swept the earth. It all took less than a year after the
appearance of the Airplane, the Sopwith Camel, the Grateful Dead, Big Brother
and the Holding Company, the Mamas and the Papas and all the rest, for the rock
revolution to be institutionalized by Bill Graham in the Fillmore Auditorium —
in a brave, legal defiance of the police.
Soon every little town in America had its resident rock group, most of them
about the age of high school seniors. Go back and play the records. Psychedelic
rock in its youth is still profoundly shaking music. Like all good things, it
couldn’t last. The combinations of the world are unstable by nature, said
Buddha. The last new band of that type I heard was a group of high school kids
from Antioch, Ohio — not Antioch College — called Mad River. The drummer gave a
three quarters of an hour solo that made Max Roach’s “History of the Black Race”
sound like keyboard exercises from the Anna Magdalena Bach Notebook.
That was six years ago. Fillmore West and East are long gone. The great
groups are dissolved, worn out, or coopted and commercialized like the Rolling
Stones. San Francisco is musically dormant but showing the first signs of a
renaissance of modern jazz, possibly stemming from the teaching and example and
hard work of John Handy, the City’s leading musician. For a while, we shook the
earth.
[June 1975]
NOTE:
For more extensive Rexroth discussion of the new rock music and the folk and
blues traditions that led up to it, see Subversive
Aspects of Popular Songs.
Unless I think of something very important that I’ve neglected, this column
should be the last of my little serial history of the San Francisco Renaissance.
I have written it because most all newer arrivals to the City know very little
about San Francisco’s special culture, so different from the rest of America.
You quickly discover that if you travel abroad and tell people where you’re
from. The world divides the United States into two parts — the USA and San
Francisco. The first elicits scowls; the second only smiles. There must be a
reason.
About ten years ago, however, signs began to appear that things were changing.
The City had been overwhelmingly Democratic in state and national politics but
Republican in its choice of mayors. It elected a mayor who during his years in
the House of Representatives may have done less than any congressman in the 20th
century. Broadway, which had been the cleanest and most reasonable entertainment
district in the country, with real alcohol in the drinks, and dozens of Italian,
French, and Basque family restaurants of the sort you’d find in a village in the
old country, was invaded by the — what shall we call it? — international
entertainment industry.
Topless and eventually bottomless joints owned by people from elsewhere
mushroomed all over the place. Prices doubled and quadrupled. Enrico’s three
businesses, the sidewalk cafe, Dante’s Billiard Parlor, and the hungry i, which
had made show business history for years, were subject to various harassments,
official and unofficial, with continuously rising bids to buy them out. The most
powerful clergymen in the neighborhood began to fulminate against the most
legitimate entertainment in the neighborhood — the Jazz Workshop (which was run
at a loss by a young lawyer who loved music) — as a place where white women
consorted with Negroes, as well as Enrico’s, and of all places, Finocchio’s, the
district’s most popular tourist stop. To anyone who had lived through Chicago it
was obvious what was happening. This invasion and its resulting corruption are
the principal cause of the change in North Beach and eventually in the entire
City.
At this very time the country’s two big foundations decided to stop
subsidizing small, independent cultural enterprises unless they were
academically sponsored; whereupon one cultural field man, who had just given a
speech advocating exactly the opposite, resigned. The Tape Music Center was
forced to move to Mills College. In one year the principal experimental theaters
of the City had all closed. The Actors’
Workshop’s directors and most of the
cast moved to Lincoln Center in New York, where they underwent a long, agonizing
flop. They were replaced by one of the most vital young directors in the country,
who so outraged his board that he quit in a year, to be replaced, after endless
wrangling, by A.C.T., an accurate reflection of the taste of the board.
The wild young men and women of the Six Gallery and the Dilexi had grown
older and when they succeeded to the art school and the art association, they
proved to be more conservative and more power hungry than the Impressionists and
American Scene Painters of two generations before — of course in a strictly
neo-Dadaist sense.
Dance did not succumb completely. There were many groups of many widely
differing styles but of equally widely differing skill and merit. The San
Francisco Ballet, however, was defeated in its long struggle to become a civic
institution, while on the other hand, Ann Halprin’s most far-out group became,
without her being aware of it, institutionalized.
In literature things were a little different. A large number of successful
novelists, and what are known in literary circles as “money writers,” migrated
to San Francisco or Marin County, but this they had always done throughout the
20th century, and their presence made little difference in the cultural life of
the City. However, it would seem that every high school senior who thought he or
she could write poetry hitchhiked to the Bay Area immediately upon graduation —
or flunking out. This was not all to the bad. If you’ve got enough milk some
cream is bound to rise to the top — unless the milk is homogenized.
Unfortunately the counterculture was busy homogenizing itself, so there was less
cream than might be expected.
The Twenties are supposed to be the time when little magazines of
experimental verse flourished. There are probably more such little magazines
being published in the Bay Area in recent years than were published in the
entire country and Paris-America in the decade of the Twenties. Are they in fact
magazines of “experiment and revolt”? With very few exceptions they are not.
They are conventional and conservative, but like the art school, conservative of
a convention — the convention of experiment and revolt.
Something had happened to the preceding generation who had broken the fetters
of the conventions before them. They had become the Establishment and they don’t
know it to this day. They had also become celebrities and cult figures. They
sold more books of poetry than were sold by all living poets between the wars
except for Robert Frost and Edna Millay. (Editions in those days numbered a
thousand copies or less.) They drew enormous audiences who dutifully absorbed
whatever they were given — except for those who walked out in anger. It is
unbelievable that Allen Ginsberg could force an audience in North Dakota, who
had traveled to hear him from all over the central Northwest, to chant
“Ah-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-” for three quarters of an hour followed by “singing” by
his friend Peter Orlovsky. This certainly defines a cult figure.
The Maharishi and Maharaji-Ji never had it better. Since telling an audience
what it wants to hear, and knows by heart already, is the opposite of poetry,
the quality of the verse written by these people, who only a little while ago
changed the course of world literature, has in most cases declined. Ferlinghetti
has held steady, as have younger people like McClure and Meltzer, but the only
two of the old group who provide any guidance towards a bridge to the future are
Snyder and Whalen.
A generation has passed and it is time for a generational revolt.
Unfortunately there are few signs of one except amongst those people who are
provided, for better or worse, with an extra-literary stimulus — the women’s
movement, militant blacks, Chicanos, Third Worlders, and even Gay
Liberationists, amongst whom, but sparsely, are to be found the bulk of the best
young writers today.
It was a Golden Age and great fun to have lived through, but that Golden Age
is out and it’s time to begin a new one.
[July 1975]
End of Rexroth’s San Francisco (columns from the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco
Magazine). Copyright
1960-1975 Kenneth Rexroth. Reproduced by permission of the Kenneth Rexroth
Trust.
Other Rexroth essays of related interest include
Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation,
Beginnings of a New Revolt,
The Making of the Counterculture, and
Subversive Aspects of Popular Songs.
[REXROTH ARCHIVE]
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