The Beat Century — post 37 of 100. Madeline Gleason, Collected Poems (1999).
In April 1947 Madeline Gleason put twelve poets on a gallery stage over two evenings and inaugurated American poetry festivals — eight years before the Six Gallery reading everyone remembers.
Talisman House published Madeline Gleason’s Collected Poems: 1919–1979 in 1999, twenty years after her death, edited with a preface by Christopher Wagstaff and carrying a text by Robert Duncan. It is the only place the whole of her work can be read, and it exists because a small press decided that a foundational figure should not remain a rumour. Until it appeared, reading Gleason meant tracking down small-press volumes issued in editions of a few hundred copies across thirty-five years.
The claim is not modest and it holds up. In April 1947, Gleason organised the First Festival of Modern Poetry at Marcelle Labaudt’s Lucien Labaudt Gallery at 1407 Gough Street in San Francisco: twelve poets reading over two evenings. It has been described as the first poetry festival in the United States. Among those who read were Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, William Everson, Jack Spicer and Muriel Rukeyser. It has been called the first public recognition of the range of experimental poetic practice then current in the city — the moment a set of private practices became a visible field.
Eight Years Before the Six Gallery
The event that popular history treats as the origin of West Coast poetry is the Six Gallery reading of October 1955, where Ginsberg first performed Howl with Rexroth presiding. Gleason’s festival preceded it by eight and a half years, in the same city, with an overlapping cast, and it did the same structural work: it made a scattered set of writers visible to each other as a scene.
It was, by contemporary accounts, a tremendous success, drawing creative people from around the country to the city. What coalesced there was the San Francisco Renaissance — the West Coast movement aesthetically distinct from the Beats though continually confused with them — and Gleason laid its groundwork alongside Rexroth, Duncan, Everson and Spicer. The difference between 1947 and 1955 is not merely chronological. It is the difference between a scene forming and a scene being discovered by the press.
Who She Was
Gleason was born in Fargo, North Dakota, in January 1903, the only child of Catholic parents. After her mother’s death she moved to Portland, Oregon, worked in a bookstore and circulated her poems in manuscript. In 1934 she came to San Francisco to work on a California history project for the WPA Writers’ Project, and stayed. She was thirty-one when she arrived and would spend the remaining forty-five years of her life in the city.
The formative training was not literary. As a girl she toured the Midwest in vaudeville with a cousin, singing and tap-dancing. That apprenticeship is worth holding onto, because it explains something the poems and the festival have in common: Gleason understood a stage. She knew what it takes to hold a room, how long an audience will sit, and how a programme is paced — practical knowledge that no one else convening poets in 1947 San Francisco obviously possessed, and which is the difference between an evening of readings and an event people travel for.
She kept building the apparatus after 1947. She founded the San Francisco Poetry Guild, worked with the composer John Edmunds translating songs by Schubert, Schumann and Bach and organised song festivals with him, wrote plays, and taught creative writing at San Francisco State and privately for years. Rexroth is conventionally named the founding father of the San Francisco Renaissance; Gleason has an equal claim as its founding mother, and the two of them mentored the younger Berkeley poets — Duncan, Spicer, Blaser, Everson — through the 1940s, before there was a movement to be mentored into.
Her first collection, Poems, appeared in 1944 from the Grabhorn Press. The Metaphysical Needle followed in 1949, Concerto for Bell and Telephone in 1966, Selected Poems in 1973, Here Comes Everybody in 1975. She had roots in the Berkeley Renaissance and was associated early with Duncan and James Broughton. She partnered with Mary Geer for more than twenty-five years, moved to the Outer Mission in the late 1960s, and was still attending readings at lesbian venues through the 1970s. She died in April 1979.
The Anthology Evidence
One statistic settles the question of her standing among her contemporaries. Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945–1960 — the anthology that defined the postwar avant-garde and effectively drew the map still in use — included forty-four poets. Four were women. Gleason was one of them, alongside Helen Adam, Barbara Guest and Denise Levertov. Her inclusion was not a courtesy. Allen was building a case for a specific insurgent tradition, and he judged her central to it.
The company is instructive. Levertov and Guest have full scholarly literatures; Adam has been steadily recovered; Gleason has a single posthumous volume from a small press. Four women entered the canonical anthology on identical terms in 1960, and the subsequent forty years distributed attention among them unevenly enough that one of the four effectively left the record. Whatever produced that outcome, it was not Allen’s judgement, which is the one contemporaneous verdict available and which placed her inside the group.
Her editors and admirers have placed her among the principal poets in the history of women’s writing. Duncan, introducing the collected work, characterised her development as a movement from a passional poetry that took Yeats as its master toward an exuberant individual creation — a description of a poet who began inside a nineteenth-century inheritance and worked her way out of it over sixty years, which is precisely the span the Collected Poems covers.
The Shape of the Neglect
Gleason’s disappearance from the standard account follows a pattern this series keeps encountering. She was an organiser, and organisers are recorded as context rather than as authors. She championed men — Duncan, Spicer, Ginsberg — who became famous while she did not. She published with small presses in small editions. She was a lesbian in a movement whose sexual radicalism was narrated almost entirely through its men. And she died in 1979, before the reassessments that might have reached her in person.
There is a further mechanism, and it is more particular than general neglect: she became, to some extent, a casualty of the Renaissance’s own success. Once the poets she had convened became famous, the publishing attention that followed them concentrated rather than spread. A small press with limited capacity would take the Ginsberg or the Duncan, and the writers with lower profiles inside the same movement found placement harder than before the movement existed. The event Gleason built in 1947 helped create the conditions that, by the 1960s, made her own books difficult to publish.
The result is that the San Francisco Renaissance is usually dated to a reading she did not organise, in a room she was not in, eight years after she convened the event that made such rooms possible. The 1999 Collected Poems is the correction, and it is worth reading not as a historical document but as what it is — sixty years of a serious poet’s work, finally assembled in one place.
Reading the Collected Poems
The 1999 volume covers sixty years, and the span is the point. It opens with juvenilia from a young Catholic woman in the Pacific Northwest and closes with the loose, spoken, unornamented work of the 1970s. A reader can watch the entire arc of American poetic modernism pass through one sensibility in a single sitting.
What holds it together is a taste for the odd concrete detail and a refusal of the prophetic register that dominated the men around her. Where Duncan reached for myth and Spicer for the dictated voice, Gleason stayed with observation and a peculiar formal wit. That temperamental modesty is likely part of why she was forgotten, and it is also what makes the book pleasant to read straight through, which is not true of most collected poems. The volume’s very existence is an argument about who gets remembered and by whom.
In her works she created a transition from the passional poetry close to Yeats as a master to an exuberant individual creation.
Robert Duncan on Madeline Gleason
Where to go next
Read her next to Josephine Miles, another Bay Area woman who built the conditions for a movement that forgot to name her.
Previous: Bob Kaufman, Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness. Next: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pictures of the Gone World. One hundred books from the Beat Generation and the writers around them — the ones who got famous, the ones who got written out, and the ecological writing that grew out of the same soil. A new one every other day.
Sources
- Madeline Gleason — Wikipedia
- Madeline Gleason and the Poetry of San Francisco — San Francisco Bay Times
- About Madeline Gleason — Academy of American Poets
- Madeline Gleason Collected Poems: 1919-1979 — Talisman House edition record
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
