Poets of the Cities: New York and San Francisco, 1950-1965 Page: 66
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thought. Literature made by the whole man, writing. Rather remain silent than cheat the
language.
Ultimate origins, there. A flowering, possible.
4 HISTORIES
The dismal early 50's, which Nelson Algren best characterized by saying that if The Man
in the Grey Flannel Suit and Marjorie Morningstar were being married down the block he
wouldn't go the wedding, were "woodshed" years-a jazz musician's term for going off,
and getting out of sight, and honing his axe alone.
In New York, Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road, and couldn't get it published, and set off
back into America, freed by failure to write the books he himself would like to read.
Ferlinghetti migrated "overland" to San Francisco, going westward as Thoreau had long
ago divined the American intuitive direction, to eventually open City Lights Bookstore,
the Shakespeare and Company of its generation. Ginsberg gave up writing murderously-
compacted imitations of the Metaphysicals, and went to school to Williams, and then off
to Yucatan to brood on prosody and invite new visions. Ex-streetboy Corso's wanderjahr
took him to Harvard, Harvard-man Creeley's to Mallorca, and Snyder's to logging camps
and mountain-lookouts.
Poets were composing everywhere, most still unknown to each other, in that buried
isolation of soul in which U. S. artists have immemorially labored, deprived even of the
company of their fellow-exiles, with no place to publish in the Sewanee, Kenyon, Partisan
reviews of Academy America. So, a gradual budding of small presses and now-and-
again little magazines-Origin in Boston, Black Mountain Review in North Carolina, the
Pocket Poets Series in Frisco, and countless other fugitive blossoms appearing
stubbornly between the paving stones of the "official" literature. There was general
movement away from traditional centers, and re-alignment in chance locations where the
climate and vibrations were congenial, there to discover brother-scriveners also on the
move, writing the poems of actual, living-meat experience in Late Empire America, in our
own true speech, and in forms as organic and mysterious as the seed-become-tree. All
this ferment and innovation and creative flow not surfacing into the slumberous upper air
until mid-decade.
As propitiously as the conjunction of Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott and Melville in
the Massachusetts of a hundred years before (that first flowering of indigenous American
writing), an astounding spectrum of writers converged in San Francisco by the felicities66
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Poets of the Cities: New York and San Francisco , 1950-65 [Brochure] (Text)
Brochure from the exhibition, "Poets of the Cities: New York and San Francisco 1950–65," November 20–December 29, 1974, held at the Dallas Museum of Art.
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Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Poets of the Cities: New York and San Francisco, 1950-1965, book, 1974; [New York]. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth176526/m1/70/?rotate=270: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Museum of Art.