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SPEAKER 1: North Beach was a small, little community of a few hundred people living truly interracially, and not only interracially but inter-culturally. We had longshoreman students, doctors, housewives, everybody mixing in the bars and coffee shops and theaters and bookstores of the area. And the poetry just began to all come together.

And there are various strains. There were the folk singers coming in from the South, like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and that crowd. And there were the Black jazz musicians and some white jazz musicians.

SPEAKER 2: From New York.

SPEAKER 1: From New York. And there was Allen Ginsberg from New York, a Buddhist rabbi, you might say a Hindu rabbi, but basically a rabbi, in my opinion, with that strong Jewish rabbinical strain of who the-- I think the great thing that Ginsberg did was to bring poetry back to the streets and to restore his truly prophetic quality. He would stand on the street corners and read. He would get out there and he would interpret America. He rediscovered Whitman for a lot of us.

SPEAKER 2: How did people respond to him when he was out there on the streets of North Beach reading his poetry? What happened?

SPEAKER 1: Oh, it was marvelous. Almost every night there was a poetry reading in North Beach in a place called Fugazi Hall and a place called Garibaldi Hall and on street corners and up and down the streets. In my place, we had a reading every night for 2 and 1/2 years, every Saturday. And there were people lined up down the street.

There was a place called the place that had a thing called Blabbermouth Night where people would just get up and rant and rave. But some good poets would also read.

And then the folk singers started. The guitars started playing. We used to have on Sunday night, we fed about 300 people at our place. And everybody would bring their guitars.

And all these young guitarists came in and they met the poets and they met the folk singers and they met the jazz people. And we were playing poetry to jazz. Kenneth Patchen and Rexroth and those people were reading jazz. And with the combination of these four came the thing that it later emerged with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and so forth, really good poetry entering into music.

SPEAKER 2: Something that I think people see as a failure of The Beat Poets is that they started out and there they were in North Beach and there were all these people around. And then somehow along the way, people decided that failed and all The Beat Poets went off into the woods where nobody could follow them.

SPEAKER 1: Well, I think, first of all, that The Beat Poets were great American lovers. Their hero was Whitman. They wanted to embrace America. And they became characterized by the newspapers as being because of the Vietnam war, which don't forget the Vietnam war, they became characterized as anti-American.

And this was a wound that they bore because they were very torn. They loved-- I mean, the fact that Arlo Guthrie can come out of Woody Guthrie and that Bob Dylan can come out of Bobby Zimmerman here somewhere in the country, all these things were happening. These people were lovers of the country. And finally, what it amounted to is they were able to love the, quote, "country," the country side. But wherever they got within the political and social economic framework, in a tighter sense, they felt very rejected.

SPEAKER 2: Any stories that you remember about things that happened that seemed to typify the period or the people for you.

SPEAKER 1: Yeah, I remember a marvelous poet named Richard Gumbiner. And Gumbiner had an uncanny way of knocking on your door just when you were about to sit down to a big steak or something. He was always hungry and he was always-- if you heard a knock on the door just before you were serving the meal you up, that that's Gumbiner and there would be Gumbiner.

And he was really a marvelous poet. So just to illustrate the humor of things, Gumbiner desperately wanted to get to Mexico to see his brother, who was an archaeologist. And everybody was eager to see Gumbiner go for a while.

So we had a night at my place called Get Rid of Gumbiner Night. And all the poets came together, and they read poems about Gumbiner. My point is that most of the poems I wrote were around some humorous social event, and we wrote poetry to jazz and we danced Get Rid of Gumbiner things.

And Gumbiner was up there on a throne, and we presented him as the person we wanted to get rid of. And we raised all this money to send Gumbiner off to Mexico. And he had a wonderful time.

Gosh, I don't know what to say. It's just the atmosphere was one of people living on almost nothing, sharing everything they had. It was a very loving community. It was prepsychedelic in a way.

It was not heavily into grass. It was more into wine. Then it gradually went into psychedelics. It was sloppy, the battle fatigues and gray jeans and denims or whatever.

The people were very nice. I would call it a very conventional kind of thing. In a way, people were just awfully nice. And they just seemed to recognize that they didn't want to have anything more to do with dishwashers and big houses and lots of cars and smoke emission and all that stuff. They were ecologically very hip, very early.