lawrence ferlinghetti pictures of the gone world

It was Rexroth who emceed the 1955 reading at San Francisco’s Six Gallery at which Allen Ginsberg first publicly read his long poem “Howl.” Among those in attendance were Ferlinghetti, who was a bit younger than Rexroth (born in 1905) but older than Ginsberg (1926) and the other readers on the bill with him (for the record: Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen).

Why there? Kenneth Rexroth, a poet who had as much as anyone to do with planting the flag of nonconformity in the Bay Area, opined that San Francisco “is the only city in the United States which was not settled overland by the westward-spreading puritanism” that emerged from New England “or by the Walter Scott fake-cavalier tradition of the South.” In any case, the city’s bohemian ways, its anarchic tendencies, helped foster the new cultural underground whose echoes were soon to be heard around the world.

Variants of that heady unrest occurred in many places around the world in the decades following the end of World War II, but its American version found its great home in San Francisco.

Lawrence ferlinghetti pictures of the gone world