August 28, 1928 [San Francisco] – December 24, 2006 [Los Angeles, California]
Boyd was born in in San Francisco to Harold and Vera Boyd. He was an early member of the San Francisco Renaissance along with Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer. He met Los Angeles poet Stuart Perkoff in 1958 and eventually moved to Venice (to escape “what he described as the confining provincialism of the San Francisco gay scene” according to a biographer) where he lived in a house on the canals. (Some records indicate he might have moved to L.A. earlier, in 1956.) He eventually moved back to San Francisco. Boyd was, along with Perkoff, one of the two poets associated with Los Angeles included in Donald Allen’s seminal anthology The New American Poets in 1960, though it is possible his poems were written in San Francisco. He never published a book of poetry (several of the poems reprinted here have only appeared in underground journals). He was living in North Hollywood when he died.
