"San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets is an essential archive of the Beat Generation, a rich moment is a fortunate place. America, somnolent, conformist, and paranoid in the 1950s, was changed forever by a handful of people who refused an existence of drudgery and enterprise, opting instead for a life of personal, spiritual, and artistic adventure. In these intimate, free-wheeling conversations, a baker's dozen of the poets of San Francisco talk about, the scene then and now, the traditions of poetry, and about anarchism, globalism, Zen, the Bomb, the Kabbalah, and the Internet. "--BOOK JACKET.