Preface

Summary

This book owes a great deal to all of those well-intentioned English teachers who never said a word about the literary movement going on in San Francisco during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Their silence meant that as a student, growing up across the bay in Oakland, I had to learn about these events on my own through a kind of “vernacular pedagogy.” Such an education is created piecemeal out of popular mythology and hearsay and gains much of its impetus by the suppression of its subject matter. The vernacular pedagogy that led to the writing of this book began on a schoolbus sometime in 1959 when an older “bohemian” student loaned me a copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's translations of the French surrealist poet Jacques Prévert. It was a book in Ferlinghetti's Pocket Poet series published by City Lights Books. Not only had I never read poems like that (we were still trying to figure out why the horse did stop in the woods on a snowy evening), I had never seen books made like that. Its small format and stapled binding bespoke a portability intended for immediate access, a book one was meant to read while on the bus or standing in line. And there was something about the clandestine way that my friend handed the book to me that signaled secrecy and solidarity at the same time.