Poetry Is Eternal Graffiti Written In The

I Certainly Was Surprised To Be Named Poet Laureate Of This Far-out City On The Left Side Of The World, And I Gratefully Accept, For As I Told The Mayor, "how Could I Refuse?" I'd Rather Be Poet Laureate Of San Francisco Than Anywhere Because This City Has Always Been A Poetic Center, A Frontier For Free Poetic Life, With Perhaps More Poets And More Poetry Readers Than Any City In The World.

The World Is A Beautiful Place To Be Born Into If You Don't Mind Some People Dying All The Time Or Maybe Only Starving Some Of The Time Which Isn't Half So Bad If It Isn't You.

A Lot Of Manuscripts That Come In, You Wonder By What Outrageous Fantasy The Author Believes That This Should Be Pressed Into Print.

We Have Seen The Best Minds Of Our Generation Destroyed By Boredom At Poetry Readings.

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.