San Francisco Renaissance
In April 1947, Gleason organised the First Festival of Modern Poetry at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery, Gough Street. Gleason had roots in the Berkeley Renaissance, and so could provide the framework for an initial (and sanctioned) gathering of voices who inspired a generation.
In the space of two evenings, with twelve poets, including William Everson, Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, Madeline Gleason read and performed for an audience of young poets and poetry lovers. This was the beginning of another movement, at least in the public's eye, that would coalesce in San Francisco on October 7, 1955—at the Six Gallery on Fillmore Street—with Allen Ginsberg's Howl, a Reading that has gone down in history as the moment of conception of the Beat movement.
Read more about this topic: Madeline Gleason
Famous quotes containing the words san francisco, san, francisco and/or renaissance:
“San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilledor would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? Did we anticipate the ways in which, vivid and continuous, they would unsuit us for the business of daily life? Or should our notion of daily life itself be transformed?”
—Edmund White (b. 1940)
“the San Marco Library,
Whence turbulent Italy should draw
Delight in Art whose end is peace,
In logic and in natural law
By sucking at the dugs of Greece.”
—William Butler Yeats (18651939)
“Mr. Wiggam, I want you to change the policy of The Clarion. I want you to write a story I should have written myself long ago. I want you to tell the people of San Francisco that no city can exist without law and order. Write a story about that flag, write about what verifies and brings a promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There are some people in this town who dont seem to know that. Let The Clarion tell them.”
—Ben Hecht (18931964)
“People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. Its a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but its the togetherness of modern technology.”
—J.G. (James Graham)