Though more closely identified with the San Francisco
Beat artists and
poets of the late 1950s and early 1960s, DeFeo also looked to the Surrealists a generation older than she, and drew from artists such as Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray, whom she once
called her «north star.
His projective poetics was an inspiration to the so -
called Black Mountain
poets — a loose movement of teachers, such as Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley, and students at Black Mountain College — as well as other experimental
poets such as Denise Levertov, who was published in the Black Mountain Review (which Creeley edited), and also
Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure.