ABSTRACT
The San Francisco Renaissance seemed to burst upon theAmerican scene in the 1950s like a tempest. Its defining characteristics-an intentional "provincialism," political and ecological awareness, a desire to broaden and democratize poetry's readership, and commitment to the performance or spoken aspect of poetry-had been developing over many years, however. It could be argued that "The Berkeley Renaissance" is a more appropriate designation since much of the activity revolved around poets associated with the University of California at Berkeley. As Edward Halsey Foster observes in Jack Spicer (1991), the movement was not really a renaissance: nothing was reborn, yet "the name seemed to call for manifestos and revolution, and indeed the poems and theories changed the direction of American poetry dramatically. "
