 Lawrence must love it, the city that tried to arrest him and put him in jail for publishing that book is now honoring him. I hope all the kids who marched yesterday know that story. I was reading his biography coming over on Bard and thinking about the fact that he was orphaned so young and had really a scary childhood being shunted from one relative to another. And that story was quite similar to the story of Kenneth Rexroth's childhood in South Bend, Indiana, who was also orphaned and lost his parents. And both of them ended up, they survived in their imaginations. And they ended up in San Francisco and they gave the gift of this culture to us. So here's Lawrence on the city. I was going to read his poem about making peace with Ezra Pound, but I thought San Francisco should be our theme. The Green Street Mortuary Marching Band marches right down Green Street and turns into Columbus Avenue where all the cafe sitters at the sidewalk cafe table sit talking and laughing and looking right through it as if it happened every day in little old wooden North Beach San Francisco but at the same time feeling thrilled by the stirring sound of the gallant marching band as if it were celebrating life and never heard of death. And right behind it comes the open hearse with the closed casket and the big frame picture under glass propped up showing the patriarch who had just croaked. And now all seven members of the Green Street Mortuary Marching Band with the faded gold braid on their beat up captain's hats raise their bent axes and start blowing all more or less together and out comes onward Christian soldier like you never heard, like you heard it once upon a time only much slower with a deadbeat. And now you see all the relatives behind the closed glass windows with the long black cars and their faces are all shiny like they've been weeping with washcloths and all super serious like as if the bottom had just dropped out of their private markets. And there's the widow all in weeds and the sister with the bent frame and the mad brother who never got through school and Uncle Louis with the wig and there they all are assembled together and facing each other maybe for the first time but their masks and public faces are all in place as they face outward behind the traveling corpse up ahead and umpa goes the band very slow and the trombones and the tuba and the trumpets and the big bass drum and the corpse hears nothing or any or everything and it's glorious autumn day in Old North Beach if only he could have lived to see it only we wouldn't have had the band who half an hour later came can be seen straggling back silent along the sidewalks looking like hungover broken down Irish bartenders dying for a drink or a last hurrah. So while I was thinking about those guys in this city thought of another magical poem, San Francisco poem. This is Kenneth Rex Roth in 1940 on a Christmas Eve in San Francisco when it snowed in Golden Gate Park and it's called Lida Hidden for the old story of Lida and the Swan. Christmas Eve, unseasonably cold I walk in Golden Gate Park the winter twilight thickens the park grows dusky before the usual hour the sky sinks close to the shadowy trees and sky and trees mingle in receding plains of vagueness the wet pebbles on the path wear little frills of ice like minute transparent fungus suddenly the air is full of snowflakes cold white downy feathers do not seem to come from the sky but crystallize out of the air the snow is unendurably beautiful falling in the breathless lake floating in the yellow rushes I cannot feel the motion of the air but it makes a sound in the rushes and the snow falling through the weaving blades makes another sound I stand still breathing as gently as I can and listen to these two sounds and watch the web of frail wavering motion until it is almost night I walk back along the lake path pure white with the new snow far out into the dusk the unmoving water is drinking the snow out of the thicket of winter cattails almost at my feet thundering and stamping his wings a huge white swan plunges away he breaks out of the tangle and floats suspended on gloom only his invisible black feet move in the cold water he flots away into the dark until he is a white blur like a face lost in the night and then he is gone all the world is quiet and motionless except for the fall and whisper of snow there is nothing but night and the snow and the odor of frosty water another gorgeous thing so then I was thinking about the stories of the city the legacy of those guys and it reminded me of a beautiful little essay written for a volume published by Bancroft Library Honoring Lawrence years ago it's Joanne Keiger having Rester having just arrived with a new bachelor's degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara and hits San Francisco I would say to Joanne and to Gary how come you all knew each other how did that happen and she said there were very few freaks when I arrived in San Francisco in the early spring of 1957 I had lived in Santa Barbara for the previous eight years finishing school at the University of California everyone said oh you should have been here last year it was really happening it's all over now but I was 23 years old and the present seemed happening enough for me the San Francisco Renaissance was dramatically in the air at the place a tiny but famous writer's bar at 1546 Grant Avenue in North Beach run by a former Black Mountain College student Leo Cracourian I met many kindred souls my own age beer was 25 cents a glass Black Mountain College one of its students traveled from North Carolina to gather around Robert Duncan who had taught there a Jack Spicer an old friend from San Francisco and Berkeley among this group were John Wieners Joe Dunn, Eby Burregard Michael Ruhmaker, Harvey Harmon and the painters Tom Field and Paul Alexander joining the group were George Stanley from San Francisco, Harold and Dora Dahl these are all the photographs of Chris's Ron Lowenson from San Francisco and the Philippines an informal writing group both penetrating and scurrilous met on Sunday afternoons with Duncan and Spicer Spicer was very anti-beat feeling that the movement was fueled by a need for publicity when Joe Dunn founded the White Rabbit Press at Spicer's suggestion to publish writers who interested him and they decided to refuse to let city lights distribute their books that was what I wanted to bring you to this wonderful moment when the poetry wars are happening and White Rabbit Press is refusing to deal with city lights press so here is a piece of mine about photography and San Francisco it's called the harbor at Seattle this is 20 years after Joanne arrives in Berkeley they used to meet one night a week at a place on top of Telegraph Hill to explicate Pound's cantos Peter who was a scholar and Linda who could recite many of the parts of the poem that envision paradise and Bob who wanted to understand the energy and surprise of its music and Bill who knew Greek and could tell them that Diasy whose terraces were the color of stars was a city in Asia Minor mentioned by Herodotus and that winter when Bill had locked his front door and shot himself in the heart with one barrel of the 12 gauge browning over and under the others remembered the summer nights after a long session of work when they would climb down the steep stairs that negotiated the cliff where the hill faced the waterfront to go somewhere to get a drink and talk the city was all lights at that hour and the air smelled of coffee and the bay in San Francisco coffee is a family business and a profitable one so that members of the families are often on the society pages of the newspaper which is why Linda remembered the wife of one of the great coffee merchants who had also killed herself it was a memory from childhood from those first glimpses of the newspaper the first glimpses of the newspaper gives of the shape of the adult world and it mixed now with her memory of the odor of coffee and the salt air and Peter recalled that the new museum of modern art had a photograph of that woman by minor white they had all seen it she had bobbed hair purple pebbles and padded shoulders and her skin was perfectly clear looking directly into the camera she doesn't seem happy but she seems confident and it's as if minor white understood that her elegance because it was a matter of style was historical because behind her was an old barn which is the real subject of the picture the grain of its wood planking was so focused that it seems alive grays and blacks in a river and complex pattern of the nation the back of telegraph hill was not always so steep at the time of the earthquake building materials were scarce so coastal ships made a good thing of hauling lumber down from the northwest but the economy was paralyzed there were no goods to take back north so they dynamited the site and used the blasted rock for ballast and then in port again they dumped the San Francisco rock in the water to take on more lumber and that was how they built the harbor in Seattle thank you very much