Poets of the Cities: New York and San Francisco, 1950-1965 Page: 67
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of chance, the breadth of that Bay, perhaps, corresponding to some enlargement within
them - last margin of the continent, white clapboarded city of bridges that flung
themselves, more audaciously than all of Crane's imaginings, in the direction of the
Buddha-lands the Transcendentalists had been, themselves, an early bridge towards. It
was the place, the time. Natural to these poets, for whom the life of the poem was the man
breathing, was the urge to read in public-the wine-rich voice, the living people
listening, the sound of streets as an antiphonal, and sometimes the skirl of sax or stutter
of drum for punctuation.
At the Six Gallery, in late 1955, Allen Ginsberg got up, after others, and began,
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night-"
raising his Howl against the cautious murmur of the times, and despite the bewilderment
and outrage, it was clear (even to the New York Times) that something was happening:
the first audible rumble of an immense underground river that had been building in
volume and force for years. Whitman had said: "Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!", and suddenly through the literature's
doorless jambs the breath of whole men, writing, blew like a prairie wind.
It was as if the Indians were off the reservation, and the first instinct of the Cowboys of the
Media and the Academy was an attempt to corral them into a category, to stone them with
epithets or bury them in non sequiturs. Following fast: Partisan Review's "no-nothing
bohemians", Life Magazine's "only rebellion around", Kerouac's prose described as
"typing not writing", and countless other idiocies that seemed to ironically acknowledge,
by their very vehemence, the cultural wasteland in which these writers seemed so much
more vivid. Following faster: public readings as scandalous, thronged and disruptive as
protest-rallies; obscenity trials that were the start of the long dismantling of American
censorship laws; ugly and beautiful secrets about money, God, war and sex let out of the
psychic bag at last; and the discovery, as well, of the "great audiences" for which
Whitman had called so long ago. But following fastest of all, the new literature itself:
Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind, Olson's The Maximus Poems, Corso's Gasoline,
Kerouac's On the Road (and thereafter a steady flow of all the other books he had written
during his personal Diaspora), Levertov's Here and Now, Snyder's Riprap, Burrough's67
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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/m1/71/?rotate=0: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Museum of Art.