Poetry Is The Shadow Cast

Everything The Beats Stood For Was The Opposite Of The Dominant Culture Today.

They Were Looking For A Stable, But We Didn't Have One. In Fact, We Weren't Very Stable Ourselves.

Poetry Must Be Capable Of Answering The Challenge Of Apocalytpic Times, Even If This Means Sounding Apocaltypic.

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.

I'm Reading A Book About Romaine Brooks, A Wonderful Painter From Early In The Last Century.