Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure: March 5, 1976

The Poetry Center presents Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure, iconic poets of the Beat movement on the West Coast, reading their work in the music-performance theater Knuth Hall, in the Creative Arts Building at San Francisco State University. The poets take turns, alternating for short sets at the microphone throughout the extensive program. McClure opens with a short poem from manuscript ("There's cruelty in every jewel...."), then turns the microphone over to Ferlinghetti, who opens by reading from Pictures of the Gone World (City Lights Pocket Poets No. 1, 1955). Each read from a range of poems, with McClure also reading from his play The Beard (Coyote Books, 1965; subsequently by Grove Press), from September Blackberries (New Directions, 1974), and his early "Peyote Poem."

Lewis MacAdams makes the introductions, after noting the presence in the audience of Ruth Witt-Diamant, founding director of The Poetry Center, and of Shigeyoshi "Shig" Murao, longtime bookseller at Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore and friend of the poets. Murao was famously arrested on obscenity charges in 1957 for selling copies of of Allen Ginsberg's Howl & Other Poems, a City Lights Pocket Poets publication, at the bookstore. Murao's role in the landmark obscenity case was excised from the 2001 film Howl, that starred James Franco as Ginsberg (cf. Patricia Wakida, Murao's biographer, in objection).