Poetry Can Change The World, Just Like

Poetry Is A Naked Woman, A Naked Man, And The Distance Between Them.

T.s. Eliot's Influence Was Enormous On My Generation. Much More Than Ezra Pound. I Actually Had To Put T.s. Eliot Books Out Of The House Because My Poetry Was So Influenced. Everything I Wrote Sounded Like Eliot.

I Arrived In San Francisco In January 1951. After The Second World War, The Population Was So Uprooted. Soldiers Came Back Home For Brief Periods And Took Off Again. So The Population Was Very Fluid, And Suddenly It Was As If The Continent Tilted West. The Whole Population Slid West. It Took 10 Years For America To Coalesce Into A New Culture. And The New Culture Happened In San Francisco, Not New York.

See It Was Like This When We Waltz Into This Place. A Couple Of Papish Cats Is Doing An Aztec Two-step And I Says Dad Let's Cut But Then This Dame Comes Up Behind Me See And Says You And Me Could Really Exist Wow I Says Only The Next Day She Has Bad Teeth And Really Hates Poetry.

I Certainly Was Surprised To Be Named Poet Laureate Of This Far-out City On The Left Side Of The World, And I Gratefully Accept, For As I Told The Mayor, "how Could I Refuse?" I'd Rather Be Poet Laureate Of San Francisco Than Anywhere Because This City Has Always Been A Poetic Center, A Frontier For Free Poetic Life, With Perhaps More Poets And More Poetry Readers Than Any City In The World.