Vocation : Writers : Poet

Thomas F. Parkinson (1920–1992) Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, was a poet in his own right; an expert on the poetry of W. B. Yeats; and one of the first academic authorities to write about the Beat poets and novelists of San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s. A deeply thoughtful man of great integrity, he was a quiet political activist for much of his life, and survived a murder attempt in 1961 by a deranged former student who sought to "get someone who was associated with Communism." Though Parkinson survived being shot in the face (and bore the scars of the assault for the rest of his life), the teaching assistant who was with him at the time was killed. Thomas Parkinson died of an apparent heart attack in 1992, at age 72, after a long illness.

William Procter Matthews III (November 11, 1942 – November 12, 1997) was an American poet and essayist.

Joseph Langland (February 16, 1917 – April 9, 2007) was an American poet.

Ronald Johnson (November 25, 1935 – March 4, 1998) was a poet from Ashland, Kansas, whose significant works include a number of experimental long poems such as The Book of the Green Man, RADI OS, and his magnum opus ARK. Johnson graduated from Columbia University 1960, wandered in Appalachia and Britain for a number of years, then settled in San Francisco for twenty-five years before returning to Kansas, where he died. Writer and critic Guy Davenport once referred to Johnson as America's greatest living poet, while poet Robert Creeley considered Johnson was "one of the defining peers of [his] own imagined company of poets."

X. J. Kennedy (born Joseph Charles Kennedy on August 21, 1929, in Dover, New Jersey) is an American poet, translator, anthologist, editor, and author of children's literature and textbooks on English literature and poetry. He was long known as Joe Kennedy; but, wishing to distinguish himself from Joseph P. Kennedy, he added an "X" as his first initial.

Pearse Hutchinson (16 February 1927 – 14 January 2012) was an Irish poet, broadcaster and translator.

William Sydney Graham (19 November 1918 – 9 January 1986) was a Scottish poet, who was often associated with Dylan Thomas and the neo-romantic group of poets. Graham's poetry was mostly overlooked in his lifetime; however, partly thanks to the support of Harold Pinter, his work was eventually acknowledged. He was represented in the second edition of the Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (Harmondsworth, UK, 1962) and the Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Clark Coolidge (born February 26, 1939) is an American poet.