Everything The Beats Stood For

Paperbacks Weren't Considered Real Books In The Book Trade. Up Till Then It Was Just Murder Mysteries, Potboilers, 25-cent Pocket Books Sold In Newsstands. When The New York Publishers Started Publishing Quality Paperbacks, There Was No Place To Buy Them.

If You Would Be A Poet, Write Living Newspapers. Be A Reporter From Outer Space, Filing Dispatches To Some Supreme Managing Editor Who Believes In Full Disclosure And Has A Low Tolerance For Bullshit.

Poetry Is A Naked Woman, A Naked Man, And The Distance Between Them.

I Certainly Was Surprised To Be Named Poet Laureate Of This Far-out City On The Left Side Of The World, And I Gratefully Accept, For As I Told The Mayor, "how Could I Refuse?" I'd Rather Be Poet Laureate Of San Francisco Than Anywhere Because This City Has Always Been A Poetic Center, A Frontier For Free Poetic Life, With Perhaps More Poets And More Poetry Readers Than Any City In The World.

I Arrived In San Francisco In January 1951. After The Second World War, The Population Was So Uprooted. Soldiers Came Back Home For Brief Periods And Took Off Again. So The Population Was Very Fluid, And Suddenly It Was As If The Continent Tilted West. The Whole Population Slid West. It Took 10 Years For America To Coalesce Into A New Culture. And The New Culture Happened In San Francisco, Not New York.