Print

Print


http://foundsf.org/index.php?title=Poetry_Readings/Reading_Poetry_in_the_San_Francisco_Bay_Area

"Shaping San Francisco", a website dedicated to recovering obscured, lost or erased stories, has kindly resurrected my history, involvement, etc. in a essay/history of Bay Area readings from 1958 to the late 1970's and the initial emergence of Language Poetry. (It was the lead essay of a large Momo's Press volume, The Poetry Reading: A Contemporary Compendium on Language & Performance, edited by myself and Ellen Zweig (1981, 350 pages). Contrary to the sometimes impression that there was a simple, some would say acrimonious segue from work by the Beats to LP, the late 60's and early 70's oversaw the rise of rich, and very publicly present array of poets and poetries emerging from multiple threads: Feminist, Gay, Black, Latino, Asian, politicaL  et al. In fact, I would suggest, the relationship or not between the hegemony of primarily white based Beat work, the emerging work by LP folks and these writers 'in between' will be much more vital to explore
 than ignore. It was certainly a vitally wild period in this neck of the woods. Rereading the essay, what I like about it best, is that it brings back a concrete sense of what it was like to live and write into and through what were historically, to put it mildly, challenging times. So much was unleashed. 

Stephen Vincent
www.stephenavincent.com