Beverly Dahlen liked her poetry difficult. Until her death on Sept. 19, at the age of 91, the Bernal Heights resident was a champion and writer of work that resisted attempts to understand it. She described poetry that was too easy to explain as “promiscuous.”
Those closest to Dahlen remember her as a kind, thoughtful, ambitious and introspective person whose poetry and criticism influenced many generations of poets.
“It was a great privilege to know her,” said Susan Gervitz, who first met Dahlen when she became involved with HOW(ever), a literary journal about experimental poetry by women. “I learned so much about thinking and writing from her.”
Dahlen co-founded HOW(ever) with fellow writers Kathleen Fraser and Frances Jaffer in 1983. By then, Dahlen was already an established voice in San Francisco’s experimental poetry scene. A self proclaimed “beatnik,” Dahlen’s work was directly influenced by the Freudian principle of free association, a stream of consciousness-like writing style that incorporates thoughts, feelings and sensations as they come to mind.
Dahlen was born November 7, 1934 in Portland, Oregon. As a child, she struggled with reading. No one bothered to tell her, she wrote, that you read left to right, not right to left. After a third- grade teacher realized she was illiterate, her mother began to tutor her at home. “Once I learned to read,” Dahlen wrote, “I was hooked.”
Dahlen moved to San Francisco in the mid 1950s, after graduating from California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt with a creative arts, literature and language degree. She married a visual artist, and hung out in North Beach.
Those were exciting years — it was the height of the Beat movement — but hard ones too. After a long illness, and then a divorce, she enrolled at San Francisco State University with the hope of getting her teaching credential, but immediately got thrown out of her first job as a student teacher. “Bev, are you always going to go on failing?” Dahlen recalled her mother asking.
As failures go, it was a good one. Walking around the empty summer campus, Dahlen saw that the school’s Poetry Center was hiring. The center, Dahlen said in a 2009 interview with Jacket Magazine, “became the center of my universe.”
Dhalen began to study and write poetry seriously. During the 1968 San Francisco State Third World Strike, Dahlen joined her peers in protests that led to the creation of the university’s Black studies curriculum, and then its Ethnic Studies department — the first of its kind in the nation.
She began to join writing and consciousness-raising groups. When her professors scorned the idea of reading female authors like Virginia Woolf, Dahlen began to think that she should definitely read some Virginia Woolf. She published her first book, “Out of the Third,” a few years later in 1974.
In 1978 Dahlen began writing what she referred to as her life’s work, a series of open-ended poems that included responses to books and articles that she read, thoughts that came to her while riding the Muni, and exchanges among friends.
The first volume of “A Reading” was published in 1985, and Dahlen went on to publish five more volumes throughout her lifetime. A collection of essays, “SOMETHING/NOTHING: Essays and Talks,” was published in 2025, by FurtherOtherBookWorks. Her last book, “A Reading (A Collection)” was published a few days after she died.
Dahlen leaves behind her friends and partner, Victoria Hack, whom Gervtiz said was, “an immense support to her for decades … up until the last minute.”
And she leaves behind more than that, added Stephen Vincent, Dahlen’s friend and former publisher. “Her family,” Vincent said, “was poetry.”
