City Lights was an unfledged small press with no cadres of supporting critics. Which brings me to my central point. I don't think the Bay Area has ever been a major center for fiction, certainly when compared with the Southern tradition, New England, above all, New York. But the Bay Area's special strength, certainly since the forties, Rexroth, Duncan, two poets that Gioia never mentions, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser, and whirling constellations of others, has been poetry. I'm not at all sure, finally, why that's so.
Fiction costs a lot more to publish.
There's a lot more money to be made in fiction. And equally important, fiction is primarily a print medium. The combination of these factors overlays narrative literature with questions of business and media strategy. It would be overstating the case to say that poetry doesn't cost money to publish, to advertise. Certainly publishers of 'major' poets adopt 'national' strategies in their marketing, publish hardcover books in an initial printing, look to get their authors reviewed prominently, get them on radio or, God help us, TV, send them on cross-country reading tours.