Kenneth Rexroth: Founding Father 
Madeline Gleason: Founding Mother 
Jack Spicer 
Robert Duncan 
Robin Blaser It all started when Kenneth Rexroth and Madeline Gleason became friends with Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser at Berkeley in the post war 1940s. Over the next few years, the group would find themselves together in San Francisco, joining a group of other poets to pioneer experimental styles of poetry reading, starting with the First Festival of Modern Poetry in April, 1947.
The name "San Francisco Renaissance" was invented by Donald Allen in his anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960 and included poems by Rexroth, Gleason, Duncan, Spicer, Blaser, and others, such as Brother Antonius, James Broughton, Helen Adam, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Bruce Boyd.
The existence of the San Francisco Renaissance spawned out of the right people meeting at the right time and making things happen in the Bay Area. The experimental performance aspect was the major contribution to the poetry world. SF was free from the commercial side of art galleries and publishing houses of NYC, eventually attracting the curiosity of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.
The artistic style of poetry from the San Francisco Renaissance is not bound by a common motif but does share a theme of a bleak outlook on the postwar American society and political climate of the time. Some poets wrote with influence of Asian poetic style. Much of the poetry was confessional and suggestive of a new found attitude towards religion, race, music, ethics, and sexuality. It is said to have influence the wave of rock music to become known as "The San Francisco Sound" in the 1960s.
In October, 1955, Allen Ginsberg gave his first ever poetry reading at the Six Gallery, put on by Rexroth and Spicer. It stunned the crowed and marked a period in time that would give birth to the Beat generation of poetry. .
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