About this collection

The Poetry Center's 1960s collection represents the transition with the new decade from the era of founding director Ruth Witt-Diamant, with Robert Duncan her assistant, to the emergence of many younger poets destined to become prominent. Striking highlights are several symposia, e.g., James Baldwin on the role of the writer; memorials for Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, and Robinson Jeffers; LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and friends on his groundbreaking new work Blues People; a raucous panel on "Poetry and Censorship" (photo here) focused on Lenore Kandel's The Love Book and Michael McClure’s The Beard; and, on the eve of the historic 1968 Student Strike at San Francisco State, Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panther Party holding forth from the SF State campus "Speaker's Platform"—that site established due to early '60s Free Speech activism that preceded UC Berkeley’s more famed events. Poetry Center directors throughout the 1960s would be James Schevill, arrived from Brown University, assisted by Mark Linenthal, who became director for the second half of the decade. Photo: Mark Linenthal and audience at Poetry and Censorship event, November 23, 1966, SF State (courtesy Peter Linenthal).