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one | linda russo How You Want to Be Styled Philip Whalen in Correspondence with Joanne Kyger, 1959–1964 in the san francisco spring of 1959—just after “The San Francisco Scene” issue of the Evergreen Review shared editor Donald Allen’s view of a new generation of writers and just before his anthology The New American Poetry 1945–1960 would present a national portrait of the same—Joanne Kyger sat down to type a letter to Gary Snyder, then in Japan. Things, she informed him, were “quite hysterical with activity now with [Allen] Ginsberg and Don Allen here—Allen soliciting young boys and old poetry—everyone trying to get published.”1 Intentionally or not, this conflation of the two Allens portrays the male-centeredness of postwar poetic communities. It also hints at the contingency of literary communities and their self-constructed genealogies, and how these further extend to “trying to get published.” Whether Ginsberg is retrospectively soliciting “old poetry” (from Whitman or Blake, for example) to elicit a filial connection in his own poems or whether either or both men are vying for the attention of “young boys,” the suggestion is that poetic success(ion) and the male body work hand in hand.2 “Here,” for Kyger—then a twenty-four-year-old poet who in time would publish over fifteen books of uniquely styled Buddhist-inspired poems with a social acuity and a keen interest in capturing the immediate , phenomenal world—revolved around Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer and a community of writers for whom poem and social environment were inextricably linked. The rhetoric and poetics of this time and place “synthesized matters of art, politics, and social theory into lifestyle” facilitating “alternative forms of community” both set apart from and critical of conservative contemporary mores, and thus the so-called Spicer Circle fulfilled a need for a sense of community in a homo­ phobic society prior to gay liberation (Davidson, The San Francisco 22 | linda russo Renaissance 29, 28, hereinafter San Francisco). In this social climate, membership was, arguably, the problematic for women writers; these alternate literary formations nonetheless maintained contemporary American society’s gendered terms, taking shape as the “boy gang,” that is, “the social organization most true to the artist,” to use a phrase that came to Ginsberg (the story goes) in a dream (Johnson, 79, qtd. in San Francisco 176). In Duncan’s preferred metaphor, the “boy gang” could make room for significant women: “We were the champions of the boys’ team in poetry,” he declares, allowing that “Joanne Kyger could play on the team, but she was a girl” (qtd. in San Francisco 175–76).3 Even her nickname affectionately endowed to her by John Wieners, “Miss Kids” (Kyger referred to others as “kids” as a term of friendly affiliation ), reveals her to be a female version of the (male) “kids” in the gang, but also an “outsider” whose presence helps reinforce the boundary that was necessary to define the “insiders.” The intertwining of literary and (homo)sexual interests reinforced this boundary. What’s interesting here is not so much the acts of social boundarymaking that facilitated a specific sense of community, but the fact that the chosen metaphors with their emphasis on contemporaneity belie the radical historical project of such alternative kinships. It is helpful to view these social formations against the “naturalized bonds of family” as Lytle Shaw does in his analysis of the “nominal family” implicit in the poems of Frank O’Hara (Frank O’Hara 29). He sees in O’Hara’s naming of friends an attempt to “supplant” the biological family as site of the “transmission of culture” and to therefore present an alternative to “the filiative model” of the Great Tradition proposed by T. S. Eliot (Frank O’Hara 29).4 In O’Hara’s case, a fixed model of the family (parents and offspring) is unseated for a model based on the “local contingencies” of friendships and their shifting associations (Frank O’Hara 29). The articulation of gangs and teams of the San Francisco Renaissance similarly formed “nomimal families,” and this casting of literary formation as purely social enables a reconfiguration of literary genealogy—the transmission of poetic “culture” from one to another —along strictly male lines of inheritance; self-defined concepts of family not only heighten but necessitate homosocial relations which may seem to form “naturally,” just as boys “naturally” want to pal around How You Want to Be Styled | 23 with other boys. But these...

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