The San Francisco Poets

by David Meltzer

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Poetry

339 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

David Meltzer was a poet associated with both the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance. A pioneer of jazz poetry readings, Meltzer also formed a psychedelic folk-rock group. He performed with the music and poetry review, "Rockpile." He edited many anthologies, including San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets (City Lights, 2001), and published 11 erotic novels. He taught for many years in the poetics program at New College of California.

Reviews

[Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read most of this lengthy book over the past couple months. While I enjoyed the interviews with Ferlinghetti and Rexroth, I was surprised to find that Lew Welch's interview (and poems) stuck with me the most. I was vaguely aware of him because of Kerouac; now I want to read more about and by him.

Brautigan's section was too brief to be very meaningful, and I didn't really care too much for the interviews with Everson or McClure. Still, this is a worthwhile book to check out, an interesting time capsule of West Coast poetry from the late '60s/early '70s.

[Owen Goldin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating trip back in time, well worthy of a reprint.

It's 1969 in San Francisco. Rock and roll has replaced poetry as the main art form of youth rebellion, and the beat poets, still pretty young, know it. Kerouac excepted, they embrace the change. But they see the violence and self-delusion on the ascent, they are wary of being co-opted.

Terrific frank free ranging interviews, with short selections of poetry. Rexroth comes of the best, a sage who has been around the pike, and knows what poetry is. William Everson, who really blew me away when I heard him read in the late 70s, comes off less will -- writing about being egoless but the interview is all me me me. Interesting to hear his story of shedding the persona of Brother Antoninus so soon after it happened, though. Ferlinghetti comes off as he always does -- as a second tier Ginsburg (and that's still really good). Lew Welch was a revelation to me -- terrific poet, wonderful story teller, a real visionary. So sad to read that he met his end so soon after this interview. Michael McClure (who, with LF, is still going strong) comes off here as a total bullshitter. Half baked existentialism and ersatz spirituality of the worst kind. Brautigan a man of few words, a cipher.

[Jesse Field · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fun book, a set of interviews with six Americans of a time that feels near, and yet so long gone. I found this at a bookshop in Bangkok, in 2016, and it sat on my shelf for four years before I got to it. Which proves, sometimes we really do get to things, and we just have to take our time and find the right moment.

These guys are real Hemingway types, serious craftsmen and progressive activists, their poetry and their politics mixed, heady with the rankness of the mature male, as Cheever might have put it. “Poetry became my old lady,” snaps Richard Brautigan. Rexroth writes like Hemingway, oriental where the other man was latin-loving: “You were a girl of satin and gauze / Now you are my mountain and waterfall companion.” Ferlinghetti, no-nonsense bookstore owner and publisher, resides at the forgotten entrepreneurial overlap of socialism and libertarianism, in opposing public funding for the arts: “You have to make it on your own without any help. At any point you can tell them to go fuck themselves.” William Everton, sometime Brother Antoninus, is D.H. Lawrence via Whitman, masculine epiphany of the feminine: “the other self — the he or she or the it whom you adore — is your collective self.” Lew Welch, like a rap MC, casually disses Auden and Eliot, praises Blake, and writes his lines after red wine:

I saw myself
A ring of bone
In the clear stream
Of all of it

And vowed
Always to be open to it
That all of it
Might flow throug

And then heard
“Ring of bone” where
ring is what a
Bell does.

And Michael McClure, with his primal screams born of long, exhausting meditations with gurus:

IT IS THE SURGE OF LIFE
THE SURGE! THE SURGE! THE SURGE!
I SEEK
TO VIEW....

None of these men seems terribly easy to get along with. They are professional discomforters, transcendent in their art and yet paradoxically as competitive as any contestant on Chopped. Rexroth, their elder, says they wanted to connect American poetry back with the world. Which remains a noble goal. Certainly I am stirred by their words, these artistic grandfathers, with a sense of American possibility that must remain alive today, even if it was stronger in 1968, or even 1938, than it is today.

[Harrison Williams · Rating 2 out of 5]

I try to always have a book of poetry on my nightstand for bedtime reading. This, however, was a tough read. In the vein of the beat poets of the 1950s and 1960s, this book features 6 poets of that era all tied in some way to San Francisco. I was not familiar with any of these poets, but in my view, their esoteric poetry has not stood the test of time -- at best understood by me as a snapshot in time when these poets envisioned a world to be that simply has not come to pass. A couple of the interviews are enlightening and hold some interest, but barely

[Ben Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did a lot of skimming in this book. I looked at the cover and expected to find pages of poems. I opened the book and found very little poems. The majority of the book is more of an interview. It talks about the editor David Meltzer interviewing Poets from the city of San Francisco. Throughout the book, the main talk of the poets is government affairs. They discuss how the government would fund unnecessary things, and overlook more important matters such as poverty and other related things.
I mainly read the arguments. The Poets argued very strong points and had some pretty interesting ideas to back them up with. Toward the end of the book there are some political poems which I enjoyed reading.
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in politics.