Davidson, Michael, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Davidson points out that even though the term San Francisco Renaissance is usually associated with the Beat movement, it was, in fact, a collage of different communities, often at odds with one another, whose agendas were social and political as much as aesthetic. These various communities provided important contexts for subsequent counterculture developments, such as gay liberation, feminism, and the New Left.

Friedman, Amy L., “Joanne Kyger, Beat Generation Poet: 'A Porcupine Traveling at the Speed of Light,'” in Reconstructing the Beats, edited with an introduction by Jennie Skerl, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 73-88.

This is an overview of Kyger's career that emphasizes the difficulties she has encountered as a woman poet in a competitive male environment and the lasting influence on her work of Beat poetics and relationships with Beat...