Ron Loewinsohn
1937—2014
Ron William Loewinsohn was born in the Philippines and came to the United States with his parents in 1945. After graduating from high school, Loewinsohn became part of the circle of young poets around Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and others associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. Loewinsohn’s first collection of poems, Watermelons (1959), featured introductions from Allen Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams, and Donald Allen included Loewinsohn in the influential anthology New American Poetry (1960). In 1963, Loewinsohn and his lifelong friend Richard Brautigan founded the little magazine Change. Loewinsohn taught at the San Francisco Poetry Center in the early 1960s and then went back to school at age 27, earning his BA from the University of California-Berkeley and a PhD from Harvard. He returned to the Bay Area in 1970 and taught at Berkeley until he retired in 2005.
Loewinsohn’s collection of poems L’Autre (1967) was the first full-length publication of Black Sparrow Press, the influential Bay Area poetry publisher. His other works include the poetry collections The Step (1968), Meat Air: Selected Poems (1970), The Leaves (1973), and Goat Dances (1976) and the novels Magnetic Field(s) (1983) and Where All the Ladders Start (1987). Loewinsohn’s poem “Siv, With Ocean (Pacific)” was featured in the Addison Street Poetry Walk Project, and he received a Poets Foundation Award, an Irving Stone Award, and an Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize for Poetry, among other honors. Until his death in 2014, he lived in Kensington, California, with his wife, Siv Sandler.
Loewinsohn’s collection of poems L’Autre (1967) was the first full-length publication of Black Sparrow Press, the influential Bay Area poetry publisher. His other works include the poetry collections The Step (1968), Meat Air: Selected Poems (1970), The Leaves (1973), and Goat Dances (1976) and the novels Magnetic Field(s) (1983) and Where All the Ladders Start (1987). Loewinsohn’s poem “Siv, With Ocean (Pacific)” was featured in the Addison Street Poetry Walk Project, and he received a Poets Foundation Award, an Irving Stone Award, and an Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize for Poetry, among other honors. Until his death in 2014, he lived in Kensington, California, with his wife, Siv Sandler.