Gallery 6 reading poster

From City Lights Bookstore: 

On this day, 67 years ago, the Six Gallery reading took place on 3119 Fillmore St.
Philip Lamantia (reading the work of John Hoffman)
Michael McClure
Allen Ginsberg
Gary Snyder
Philip Whalen
Kenneth Rexroth was the MC

A momentous event in Western literature, 1955, this reading at Gallery 6 heralded in the birth of the Beat poets. Kenneth Rexroth would’ve been the most renown poet of his time, part of the San Francisco literary renaissance. The others were relatively new to poetry. The idea of Beat poets had not yet been coined.

My old boyfriend, John Oliver Simon, was one of the Six Gallery poets featured at a later reading. He had a framed poster on his living room wall. He considered it his most significant reading. I never thought to take a photo of it.

I knew everyone on this list, except for Lamantia. I only knew McClure in passing; Ginsberg and Rexroth were aloof. Snyder and Whalen were always kind, especially Philip. 

Also in attendance were Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published Howl after hearing it at the reading. And Neal Cassady was the doorman. One can assume that Jack Spicer was also there. And Robin Blazer. One could also speculate Robert Duncan was there too…. It was a small world. Gallery co-founder, Wally Hedrick lived in the San Geronimo Valley, where I grew up….

I have old negatives (I need to scan) of most of them….way back from when I was newly arrived to poetry. I was always documenting readings as no one else was…. We produced a new reading with Kenneth Rexroth and Michael McClure at Sonoma State, it was a stellar event. Ginsberg came to a friend’s memorial service in Santa Rosa which blew all our minds.

Rexroth, who wrote a weekly column, was a hiking buddy of my grandfather’s, at Devil’s Gulch. And his wife used to attend our church in Lagunitas. She kept the name long after Kenneth had divorced her.

Poet Kenneth Rexroth wrote some 700 columns (1960-67) for SF Examiner, he was known primarily as a political and cultural radical, and  even (somewhat misleadingly) as "the godfather of the Beat Generation." See my post on Rexroth columns, a synopsis of the reading from Verdant Press, and McClure’s reminiscences at UC Press post.