Join us for a special film screening and Q&A with Vincent Katz, Oliver Katz, Steve Dickison, and more.

Golden Gate: An Oral History of Bay Area Poetics (2026, directed by Oliver Katz & Vincent Katz) is an hour-long documentary chronicling the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene in the second half of the twentieth century, featuring new interviews with Bill Berkson, Andrei Codrescu, Norma Cole, Diane di Prima, Steve Dickison, Kevin Killian, Joanne Kyger, David Levi Strauss, Michael McClure, Duncan McNaughton, David Meltzer, Michael Palmer, Aram Saroyan, and Anne Waldman. 

In the film, these poets recount their first-hand experiences in and around some of our nation’s most notable poetic traditions. Steve Dickison introduces the Berkeley Renaissance and San Francisco Renaissance movements, spearheaded by Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. Then we visit Joanne Kyger in her verdant Bolinas backyard, talking about the North Beach poetry salons run by Spicer and Duncan, the arrival of the Beats in the mid 1950s, and the transition to/symbiosis with Rock and Roll that took over in the 1960s. Kevin Killian tells of Spicer’s influence on poets of later generations as a trailblazer of experimental and Queer poetry. Anne Waldman praises Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s essential helming of City Lights bookstore and press and talks about dropping acid on Bolinas beach. She and half of the poets in this film tell of the fantastic lives that they and dozens of other poets shared in isolated 1970s Bolinas. David Meltzer, who found his way from North Beach to Bolinas and back again, speaks about his three-decade career teaching at the experimental Poetics Program at New College of California in the Mission, where he taught alongside Duncan, Diane di Prima, and many others. “I met some wonderful people,” Meltzer says, “wonderful poets, figures, creative people, [and] a bunch of deadbeats, you know, cranks, mad folks. But come on, this is education in America, it can’t be all ideal, or it wouldn’t be real.” Norma Cole, Duncan McNaughton and David Levi Strauss add their own authoritative accounts of what really went down.

The film features original footage of Michael McClure reading his poem “From the Tower” and of Diane di Prima reading her poem “In a Dream of Another Life I Visit Tassajara” as well as nearly one hundred archival photos, videos and sound recordings, sourced from the poets' personal collections and from university archives. Father and son Vincent and Oliver Katz made this film over eleven years, filming each of these poets in their homes, from San Francisco to Bolinas to New York City to Los Angeles. Each poet’s living and working space illuminates a life dedicated to poetry, to, in the words of New York School poet Frank O’Hara, “making your own days.”

59 minutes, color

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