San Francisco Renaissance

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The San Francisco Renaissance is a literary movement of representatives of very different styles, which developed in San Francisco after the Second World War , took up intercultural stimuli, especially from Asia, and also had an impact on many genres and different areas of art and philosophy.

Beginnings

The poet Kenneth Rexroth is seen as the founding father of this renaissance. At times he belonged to the second generation of American modernism after Ezra Pound , the objectivist poets . The unorthodox socialist and supporter of the libertarian movement corresponded with fascism admirer Ezra Pound and with William Carlos Williams . Rexroth, who was featured in the canonical Objectivist Anthology , got into jazz, but also influenced by ancient Greek, Chinese and Japanese poetry and was one of the first American poets to seriously study the Chinese and Japanese languages ​​and genres such as Japanese haiku .

Madeline Gleason was often considered the "mother" of the San Francisco Renaissance. In the 1940s, Gleason and Rexroth were friends with a group of poets who studied at Berkeley , including Robert Duncan , Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser . Gleason and Duncan were particularly close and also rated each other's poems. Hence the San Francisco Renaissance is also known as the Berkeley Renaissance .

Start of movement

The movement was directed against the formalist and conventional mainstream of American poetry, which had fallen behind the achievements of the avant-garde , and against the repressive cultural climate of the US post-war era. It tied back to Walt Whitman and the European avant-garde as well as surrealism. In April 1947, Gleason organized the first Festival of Modern Poetry at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery on Gough Street . Spread over two evenings, they had two dozen poets, including Rexroth, Duncan and Spicer, to present themselves and their poems to an interested audience. It was the first of its kind in San Francisco. Rexroth was also the editor of a literary program on Radio KPFA , a listener-sponsored Berkeley station founded in 1949.

In the 1950s, Duncan and Robert Creeley spent extended periods of time teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, serving as a link between the avant-garde there and San Francisco. The poets from the city on the Pacific were able to publish their poems in Cid Cormans Origin and the Black Mountain Review . Spicer developed an interest in the cante jondo ("deep song", a variant of flamenco ) and was also in contact with deep image poets. In 1957 he held a seminar entitled Poetry as Magic at San Francisco State College . Charles Olson also had an influence on the movement, which formed a rather loose network . Another early representative was the anarchist, pacifist and later Dominican William Everson ( Brother Antoninus , also known as Beat Friar ). The San Francisco Renaissance merged with the writers of the Beat Generation after their most important representatives had moved from the east coast to San Francisco.

anthology

The New American Poetry 1945-1960 appeared in 1960 , in which, in addition to the representatives of the Black Mountain Group and the New York School, all important representatives of the movement were gathered in a separate section.

literature

  • Michael Davidson: The San Francisco renaissance. Poetics an community ad mid-century . CUP, Cambridge 1989. ISBN 0-521-25880-4 .
  • Lewis Ellingham, Kevin Killian: Poet be like god. Jack Spicer and the San Francisco renaissance . University Press of New England, Hanover 1998. ISBN 0-8195-5308-5 .
  • Warren French: The San Francisco Renaissance. 1955-1960 . Twayne Publ., Boston, Mas. 1991. ISBN 0-8057-7621-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Donal Allen (Ed.): The New American Anthology 1945-1960. Grove Press, New York 1960, reprinted 1999.