A Man of Many Hats: Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021)

Poet, painter, publisher, and bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti died at his home in San Francisco on February 22^rd, aged 101, with family by his side. One of the main figures of the “Beat Generation,” the co-founder of City Lights Bookstore in the city’s North Beach neighborhood was an award-winning poet who also published many of his peers, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, Michael McClure, Lenore Kandel, and Bob Kaufman, among others. But he’s also recognized for his historic commitment to freedom of expression. After launching Ginsberg’s expletive-peppered poem, “Howl” in a book of the same title in the late 1950s, he was arrested by the S.F.P.D. on obscenity charges, making the book an instant cause celebre’. The resulting trial acquitted Ferlinghetti of all charges, with the judge declaring that the work had “redeeming social importance,” a decision that facilitated the distribution of other controversial titles.

For a lot of us who came of age in the 1960s and 70s, Ferlinghetti was a cultural icon, and City Lights was more than just a book store — it was a sanctuary, a place where you could find classic literature in paperback at affordable prices, shelves full of obscure literary magazines, and tabloids of various political stripes. I remember my first visit there was on a trip with some of my high school friends — this must have been in 1963 or 64. The poet Michael Palmer was standing outside the entrance on Columbus Avenue, dressed and made-up convincingly as Charlie Chaplin’s “little tramp”, tipping his bowler hat and greeting one and all. He explained the connection for me — Chaplin’s film, City Lights, was the inspiration for the name of the store. Those were the days when you could hang out in the basement at one of the little round tables, thumbing through the latest edition of the Pocket Poet’s Series (Ginsberg’s Howl was the fourth in that series), when you could get a steaming bowl of minestrone soup with parmesan cheese on top and a slice of sourdough bread for a dollar at Mike’s Pool Hall across the street. Mike’s is long gone, but City Lights is still hanging in there, even during these challenging times, thanks to a GoFund Me campaign last year that raised $400,000 in just four days.

Ferlinghetti was a familiar sight around North Beach in those early years, sporting one of his many hats and riding his bike around the neighborhood. He didn’t regard himself as a “Beat” poet, but as one of “the last of the bohemians,” cultivating an appreciation for jazz and the visual arts, as well as letters. (He wrote his M.A. thesis on the painter, Turner, and recorded many of his first poems to jazz accompaniment.) The author of more than 30 books, including the bestselling volumes, Pictures of the Gone World, A Coney Island of the Mind, and, most recently, a novel, Little Boy, he served as the city’s first Poet Laureate in 1998. Among his many awards are the Robert Frost Memorial Medal from the Poetry Society of America and the Author’s Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2001, the quirky building that houses City Lights Bookstore was granted landmark status and in 2019, on the occasion of his 100^th birthday, March 24^th was declared Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day by the City of San Francisco.

Writing in the Paris Review, John Freeman described his work as Whitmanesque, with a “long, prosey line, but his I is softer, stranger, and less verbose…” as it steps “…across the pages with sudden, perfectly timed enjambments…” Some of his other influences were Thomas Merton, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams. Yet, in the end, the voice and the vision were unmistakably his own. An unapologetic lover of life and its many pleasures, he celebrated the joys and beauty of the world in his life and art, but he also took a stand against the dangers of nuclear proliferation, the moral turpitude of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, and many other issues of the day. 

I’m sure there will be countless heart-felt tributes to him in the weeks ahead, and more studies, too, that recognize his extraordinary contribution. Poet Tess Taylor, for CNN, has written a tribute that reads as part poem, part prayer (“Lawrence Ferlinghetti was the Hive and the Honey,” 2/24/21). It’s full of sweet reminiscence and gratitude for what he gave to the community he lived in for over sixty years, but I’ll quote just the last three lines here: “Hail and farewell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. May you rest under the good oaks. May you find someplace wonderful to sit in your hat, and may you speak long and well with the bards in the beyond.” Long-time employee Elaine Katzenberger, who now serves as director of book store, said that “I feel very grateful that I got to see him during the virus, and I’m glad that he lasted this long. I wish he was still here.” Reverend Mark Stanger, an Episcopalian priest and teacher at the Cathedral School for Boys, said that, “His words were a great friend to me.”

On Tuesday evening, February 23^rd, an impromptu vigil took place in Jack Kerouac Alley between Vesuvio’s Cafe and the store. Poets Jack Hirschman, Deborah Drozd, Scott Bird and several dozen other mourners gathered to read from his poetry and to share memories and toasts. Inside, “a shrine was placed in the upstairs poetry room,” according to Sam Whiting and Nora Mishanec, writing in the S. F. Chronicle. “His trademark black bowler, frayed at the brim, sat next to some vintage photos and a basket of free postcards with his poem, ‘The Golden Gate,’ on the front.” Ferlinghetti is survived by a son, Lorenzo, a daughter, Julie, and three grandchildren. No public memorial has been scheduled due to the pandemic.      

Tongo Eisen-Martin Appointed Poet Laureate of San Francisco

“Poetry is really the opportunity to see what your mind has to communicate or how it wants to communicate when not tasked with some kind of social reproduction or some kind of survival…it’s just you and your thoughts,” Tongo Eisen-Martin said recently after his appointment as the eighth Poet Laureate of San Francisco. Raised in the city’s Bernal Heights neighborhood, he was nominated by a nine-member panel and appointed by Mayor Breed during Black History Month in February. Asked by KRON what his vision is for the role, he said: “It’s a pretty simple equation, it’s just workshops with people, providing open mikes, providing publications…the aim is to move poetry more into the trenches of the city where it belongs.” An educator and Columbia graduate, Eisen-Martin has taught in prisons and youth homeless shelters, “even youth group psych wards, everywhere our conditions are most wretched,” he told PBS New Hour last year. He’s also the founder of Black Freighter Press and the author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes, which received the 2018 American Book Award and the California Book Award for Poetry (Pocket Poet’s Series, City Lights Publishers).