San Francisco Beat is an essential rememberance 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.

San Francisco Beat features major recent interviews with Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Hirschman, Joanne Kyger, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Jack Micheline, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen--as well as with David Meltzer himself.

Also included are David Meltzer's historic interviews with his poet friends Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Everson, and Lew Welch--an archive of the San Francisco Renaissance first published thirty years ago in The San Francisco Poets. Now San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets complements these important records of the time with follow-up interviews with the living or with friends of the missing.

Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

Diane 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)

Bibliographies

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: An Anthology of Ancient Texts, Songs, Prayers, and Stories, The Secret Garden: Anthology of the Classical Kabbalah, Reading Jazz, and Writing Jazz, among other collections. His agit-smut fictions include Orf, The Agency Trilogy, and Under. Meltzer read poetry at the Jazz Cellar in the 1950s and in the 1960s fronted the psychedelic band, Serpent Power. He taught writing in Vacaville Prison but these days David Meltzer teaches poetics at New College of California in San Francisco.