Cafe Babar (named after the storybook elephant) is a little Cafe on 22nd and Guerrero behind the Mission District in San Francisco. From there on the West Coast from the mid-late '80s up through about 1994, a unique group of poets gathered on Thursday nights for a feature, followed by an open mike.

The poets performing or reading their work there became known across the United States and in Central and Eastern Europe as some of the best poets in the U.S. They valued emotional honesty and their poems captured it. They found academic writing boring. Regarded the bohemian beatnik poets of...