The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century

Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture

by Michael Davidson

The San Francisco Renaissance is the first overview of this major American literary movement. Michael Davidson recounts its emergence during the postwar period in the San Francisco Bay area as defined by poets such as Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan and William Everson, and then as it blossomed into the literary excitements associated with the Beat movement and with writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Individual chapters are devoted to major writers of the period and to their involvement with social and political change during the Cold War era. Davidson's penultimate chapter deals with the largely neglected context of women writers during this period, and the final chapter deals with poetry since 1965.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

264 pages, Hardcover

First published November 24, 1989

About the author

Born in Oakland, California on December 18, 1944, Michael Davidson attended San Francisco State University and continued his graduate degrees at The State University of New York at Buffalo. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla.

In addition to being a widely published poet and poetry editor (he is represented in the 2004 edition of Best American Poetry by a poem entitled "Bad Modernism"), Davidson is known for insightful literary criticism, his work in disability studies, and for the meticulous editing of the monumental George Oppen, New Collected Poems.

Reviews

[Charlie Deichman-Caswell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Comprehensive, and I’m gonna use this for my thesis.

[Joshua Buhs · Rating 2 out of 5]

Deflating. In two senses.

The first sense is what the author intended. The book--well, academic monograph--sets out to puncture the myth of the beats: that all San Francisco post-War writers were part of the beats, and that all those associated with the beats believed the same things. He roots his story in the so-called San Francisco Renaissance, a post-War movement among poets and writers mostly centered around Kenneth Rexroth, but also in Berkeley, Stanford, and, to an extent, the Monterey area.

After a brief overview, each chapter bores down into one or a few of the writers in question, Duncan and Spicer and Rexroth and Ginsburg and Snyder and McClure and Everson. He says that he is interested in more than just their ideas, but also in their lives and the communities that they founded. H makes a few remarks on these, mostly in terms of unavaoidable topics--Rexroth and Snyder's love of the outdoors, the overt homosexuality (and misogyny) of some of the Berkeley writers, and their engagement with religion. In terms of the last subject, he rescues the writers fromt he clai that they were religious dilettantes grabbing at whatever esoteric idea fit their fancy. No, he shows, they were deeply engaged with their chosen theologies: but they were sometimes different theologies. They all believed int he mystical, to some extent, but rooted it in different religious understandings.

For the most part, though, he dwells on reading their works to make clear that they came from their own different traditions--borrowing from other moderns and Romantics--and turned it to their own uses. So there was a core set of ideas, but not a unified movement.

He is also concerned with more theoretical issues. In his terms, he wants to historicize the inaugarating fictions of the beats. Yech, right? Yeah. Meaning, he wants to see why we have come to remember the beats as a unified group associated with the mystical (and mythical) San Francisco of the post-War years. He never really gets around to this.

I guess I cannot be too upset: the book is limited, yes, but it was an early essay into the subject. And so it subsequently paved the way for Richard Candida Smith's brilliant _Utopia and Dissent_. Kenneth Starr was also able to make use of some of these insights--and round them out--in his history of California.

But, the book is still deflating--in the second sense--because of what it almost promised. "If one were to write a comprehensive history of the San Francisco Renaissance," he says early on--page2!--"it would have to include the myth of the place itself: its colorful bohemian past, its political and social iconoclasm, its impressive physical setting. It would have to make some reference to earlier artistic movements like those in Bug Sur during the 1930s and in Berkeley during the 1940s. It would have to include the opening of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore in 1953 and the subsequent publication of City Lights Books. It would have to make reference to the 1957 issue of the Evergreen Review, the 'San Francisco issue,' which featured many writers of the period . . . It would have to include publication of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, its seizure on the New York docks, and its obscenity trial . . . It would have to include accounts of the North Beach scene, its bars and coffeehouses, its poetry and jazz sessions at The Cellar, its occasional conflicts with the local police. Obligatory reference to drugs, sex, and wild parties would probably enter into certain parts of the narrative."

Yes, yes, yes! Write that book. Not this narrow-viewed monograph.

Alas.

Until then, read Smith instead of this.

[Sarah Yasin]

I thought this was an anthology of poetry - silly me. I read the intro to Br. ANtoninus which was kind of hippy dippy but I was happy to see him included at all. I think it's kind of interesting that all the authors highlighted in the book are male.