“Those to Whom Interesting Things Happen”: William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Lew Welch, and Joanne Kyger, and the Genome of San Francisco Renaissance Poetry

This article examines the “genome” of the influence William Carlos Williams’s poetry has had in terms of its vernacular speech-based aesthetics on the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. The influence of Williams’s work on Kenneth Rexroth, Lew Welch, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Joanne Kyger are examined. This article argues that Williams’s influence becomes a fixture in the evolution of Bay Area poets and poetics after the San Francisco Renaissance and ascendancy of Beat Poetry, through its continuation into the decades of the 1970s and 1980s.