He was born in New Rochelle, New York, born to some wealth—his father was a diamond merchant—and after George’s mother’s death when he was four, the father remarried and moved the family to San Francisco, where George grew up. He started college at Oregon State and was expelled within months for staying out all night with his girlfriend, Mary, who became his wife. The young couple took off for New York City, where they met other young poets and started a press (with George’s money) and where, at the age of twenty-four, he published his first book of poems, Discrete Series. It was 1934, the country was in the depths of the Depression, and—this is a story poets know—George and Mary got involved in tenants’-rights strikes in Brooklyn, took up political organizing, joined the Communist Party of America, which eventually sent George to work in the auto factories in Detroit. During those years he simply set poetry aside. When the U.S. joined the war in 1941, he was thirty-three years old, working in a critical war industry, and he didn’t have to go, but he enlisted, elected to be in the infantry, and fought his way across France until he was wounded in 1944, awarded a Purple Heart, and sent home, to a country that was not hospitable to the young radicals of the 1930s.

[...] I first laid eyes on George at one of San Francisco’s mammoth group poetry readings. It may have been to honor the memory of Ezra Pound, who died in 1972. Gary Snyder read, I remember, and Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure. There were a couple of dozen poets, and in those tumultuous years, they all tended to dress florally. Suddenly on the stage appeared a taut, lean, grizzled man in a quiet dark suit, white shirt, and narrow black tie. Hard to convey how unexpected he looked. The person I was with, older than me, with different points of reference, turned to me and said, “Who is that guy? He looks like he’s been editing the Daily Worker for the last thirty years.” And then George read, for three or four minutes, poems that were so exact, concentrated, musical, and resonant that I found myself looking around, a little amazed, to see if other people were hearing what I was hearing.

you can actually watch, as the words are laid down on the page, the process from which the perception of the thing gets born into its numinous quality as a word

what was really going on at the level of prosody was not a presentation of the image as a picture but an analysis of the constitutive elements of the image as it is being presented