San Francisco in Literature

Dozens of poets are the focus of my San Francisco interest; most notably, Robert Duncan (Passages 18: The Torso is my all-time favorite poem and deserves to be read by every gay man, woman, and person of good intent), Diane di Prima (whose RANT is on the posters in my home), Ronald Johnson, poet and critic Jack Spicer, poet and filmmaker James Broughton [for setting "Wondrous the Merge" in San Francisco's Beck's Motor Lodge], and poet and little guy Harold Norse. Duncan, who died of natural causes in 1985, and di Prima, who is alive and well in San Francisco, helped found the M. A. in Poetics program at New College of California on Valencia St. Spicer, a friend of Duncan and key figure in the SF Literary Renasissance of the mid-century, died at an early age.

Harold Norse lives in the Mission, just like me. Poems like Norse's Your Crooked Beauty kept my eyes on the prize when there was little other encouragement for me in the early-mid-80s and helped to forge my sense of myself as "gay" and as a "poet/writer". Troubles with other young men, troubles coming out. Attempts to find the way with some courage, so that a blunt might open.

I met Jack Micheline many times in the neighborhood before he died (don't think he liked me..hehe..). I saw him read at Adobe Books in August 1997, a truly memorable evening. The memorial held in his honor on Guerrero Street/SF was a privilege to attend. The thrill of such doings is to me terrific and erotic in the deepest sense.

A Brief Literary Canon

Theophilus North by Thornton Wilder

The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty

The Geography of the Imagination by Guy Davenport

Moby Dick by Herman Melville; Call Me Ishmael by Charles Olson

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, particularly the Calamus section, and the consummate These, I, Singing in Spring, where the ritual of manly love is articulated

Bending the Bow and Roots & Branches by Robert Duncan

The Cantos by Ezra Pound; although start with The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner

The Unforeseen Wilderness by Wendell Berry, Ralph Meatyard

Cities of the Red Night, Place of the Dead Roads, and The Western Lands by William S. Burroughs

The Secret Lore of Gardening: Erotic Initmacy Between Men, by Graham Jackson

Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar