Madeline Gleason

Madeline Gleason (January 26, 1903 – April 22, 1979) was a United States poet and dramatist. She was the founder of the San Francisco Poetry Guild and, in 1947, the director of the first poetry festival in the United States, laying the groundwork (along with other figures such as Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, William Everson, Jack Spicer, James Broughton, et al.) for what became known as the San Francisco Renaissance. She was, with Helen Adam, Barbara Guest, and Denise Levertov, one of only four women whose work was included in Donald Allen's landmark anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (1960).

Gleason was born in Fargo, North Dakota and was the only child of Catholic parents. She attended the Catholic parish school, where she was viewed as something of a problem child. She and a cousin toured the Midwest, singing and tap-dancing in vaudeville shows.

When her mother died, she and her father moved to Portland, Oregon, where she started to work in a bookstore and write poetry which she circulated in manuscript form. She published a series of articles on poetry and poets in a local newspaper.

In 1934, Gleason moved to San Francisco, California to work on a history of California for the WPA Writer's Project. Two years later, a sequence of her poems was published in Poetry. For a number of years, she worked with the composer John Edmunds, translating songs by Schumann, Schubert and J. S. Bach. The pair also organised song festivals.

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