Six Gallery reading
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The Six Gallery reading (also known as the Gallery Six reading or Six Angels in the Same Performance) was a poetry-reading ( or "-jamming"), which occurred at the Six Gallery of San Francisco on October 7, 1955. It was the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation and helped to herald the West Coast literary revolution that became known as the San Francisco Renaissance.
During the reading, five talented new poets who were known only within a close company of friends and other writers (such as Lionel Trilling and William Carlos Williams) presented some of their early works. The poets were introduced by Kenneth Rexroth, a San Francisco poet of an older generation who was a kind of literary father-figure for the younger poets and had helped to foment their burgeoning community through personal introductions at his weekly salon. The Six Gallery reading was a seminal early gathering of such now-famous writers as Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen. Lamantia read poems by his dead friend John Hoffman. McClure read "Point Lobos Animism" and "For the Death of 100 Whales". Snyder read "A Berry Feast". Whalen read "Plus Ca Change". Most famously, it was at this reading that Ginsberg first presented his famous poem "Howl". The large and exuberant audience included a totally drunken Jack Kerouac, who refused to read his own work but cheered the other poets on, shouting "Yeah! Go! Go!" during their performances. Still, Kerouac was able to recall much of what occurred at the reading, and wrote an account that he included in his novel The Dharma Bums.
(NOTE: Many sources have erroneously reported the date of the Six Gallery reading as October 13, but various documentary sources indicate the correct date as October 7.)
The gallery was a former auto repair shop; it is now a rug store.
