Open-mic poetry readings moved from North Beach east to Tenth Street galleries

Evidence

The coffeehouse boom coincided with that of bardic poetry as well as folk music. Readings migrated east from North Beach and east again from MacDougal Street to the art galleries of East Tenth Street. The key venue was Mickey Ruskin’s Tenth Street Coffeehouse, which began hosting Monday night open readings in fall 1960, around the time Lord Buckley was busted at the Jazz Gallery. One poet recollected these as “brutal and exhausting” competitive jam sessions: “Everyone was pushing and demanding to be heard.” Heckling was not uncommon. Young poets came to make themselves known while established ones read to burnish their reputations. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 266

Categorization

• XREF: The westward-to-eastward drift of scene venues parallels gentrification-geography arguments: avant-gardes hop cheap neighborhoods in sequence.