Accompanied by a jazz combo, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti gives a reading in 1957 at the Cellar in San Francisco.
June 30, 2017. "SAN FRANCISCO — If they're starving, the best minds of this generation can order $19.50 lobster rolls at the former site of the Six Gallery in San Francisco. Today, it houses Tacko, where customers can pacify themselves by listening to Phil Collins or gazing at a wall map of Nantucket. Old framed copies of Yachting Magazine hang from the new walls. Slightly more than 60 years ago, the debut public reading of Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' consecrated this Marina District landmark. Now, you'll find a bronze commemorative in front of the nautical-themed restaurant that serves New England-meets-'Mexican-street-style' fusion to baying tech bros and yoga mom Yelpers. In previous incarnations, it was an auto-body shop, then an art gallery where anywhere from 25 to 150 people (the numbers fluctuate in every retelling) gathered on the night of Oct. 7, 1955, to hear poems read by Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia and Allen Ginsberg. Jack Kerouac was famously present, wine-drunk on Burgundy. 'Go! Go!' he kept shouting. The following morning, City Lights publisher and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti cabled Ginsberg: 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?' That evening's fallout led directly to the full flowering of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, the cultural revolution of the 1960s, mass liberations of sexuality and literature, and eventually, a James Franco film. Late last spring, I drove up the coast from Los Angeles in search of surviving members of the Beat Generation. ... More than a half-century after their emergence, the Beats still offer up wild style, a sense of freedom and wonder for the natural world almost unrivaled in postwar literature. But their work has perhaps been more misinterpreted than nearly any literary group in history — partially because there was no consistent ideology binding them. ..."
Washington Post (Audio)
amazon: The Beat Generation in San Francisco: A Literary Tour, Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac's City
Poets LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) and Diane di Prima sit together in 1960 in a booth at the Cedar Tavern in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. The following year, the pair would launch the Floating Bear, their mimeo magazine.
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