Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the Cusp of 100

“Lawrence was a great initiating bridge and a stepping stone for young writers. He made poetry accessible to a wide audience.”

–Neeli Cherkovski

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For 43 years, Peter Munks has washed the windows at City Lights Bookstore and City Lights Publishing at 261 Columbus Avenue in San Francisco’s North Beach, where Lawrence Ferlinghetti has created and nurtured, with friends and fellow poets, a strange and wonderful, living and breathing institution that might be called “a rebirth of wonder.” That phrase comes from “I Am Waiting,” one of Ferlinghetti’s best known and most beloved poems, which appeared in his second book of poetry, A Coney Island of the Mind, published in 1958 by New Directions. The book has sold more than one million copies since then. “I Am Waiting” is one of Peter Munks’ favorite poems. “I love it,” he says on a day when he’s not washing windows—which, he explains, is a lot easier than cleaning the inside of the building at 261 Columbus.

As the City Lights window washer—he has also been a fisherman, an oysterman, a busker, and a troubadour—Munks, who was raised in Mineola, Long Island, and who graduated from Yale in 1968, has had a rare opportunity to see the bookstore and publishing company from the outside looking in and the inside looking out.

“The personnel has changed over the past four decades,” Munks told me. “Lawrence has lost much of his hearing and his eyesight, and he doesn’t come into the office as often as he used to, but from my perspective, City Lights hasn’t changed all that much.”

Still, it’s much larger and with many more books than it had when Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin co-founded the store in 1953. Martin returned to Manhattan in 1955 and opened The New Yorker Bookshop on West 89th Street; he died in 1988 at the age of 65, six years after his shop closed.

Over the course of several decades, Ferlinghetti expanded City Lights upstairs, downstairs, and sideways, too. With Martin gone, he took on new partners, including Shigeyoshi “Shig” Murao, who was arrested in 1957 soon after he sold, to two San Francisco police officers, copies of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, which Ferlinghetti had published in 1956 in the Pocket Poets Series.

Shig never went on trial for obscenity, though Ferlinghetti did. Judge Clayton Van Horn ruled that Howl was not obscene and that it had redeeming social and artistic value. Ever since that decision, Ginsberg’s quintessential Beat Generation poem has helped make the store into a destination for lovers of literature, bohemians, hipsters, Beats, hippies, punks and all manner of countercultural rebels from around the world. It has also helped turn the “project,” as Ferlinghetti has thought of it, into a viable commercial enterprise, though that was not a priority at the start.

Ever since the early 1970s, Nancy Peters—a graduate of the University of Washington and wife of the poet Philip Lamantia—has worked side-by-side with Ferlinghetti. For several decades, she was the co-publisher at City Lights. In that role she helped to expand the boundaries of City Lights publishing.

“I pressed for more women writers,” she told me. “Of course, that was also the work of the zeitgeist.” About Ferlinghetti’s role as a publisher, Peters added that “he has an instinct for good writers and as a poet he appreciates the importance of concision which makes him a natural editor.”

Fans of City Lights Bookstore, along with avid readers of the books published by City Lights, know Ferlinghetti as a poet, a publisher, a painter, and a pamphleteer. For the most part, they don’t think of him as a “patriarch.” Still, he’s the founder and the most venerable member of his tribe, which makes him a patriarch in the best sense of the word. On the cusp of 100—he was born in Yonkers, New York on March 24th, 1919—he’s more venerable and more venerated than ever before.

The word “patriarch” sounds odd to Paul Yamazaki, who has been the book buyer ever since 1982, and who began to work at the store in 1970, soon after he served time in jail for participating in the student strike at San Francisco State University.

“City Lights is a cohesive group of people,” Yamazaki told me. “We share Lawrence’s values and his outlook. We’re aware of his activism and his impact on the city of San Francisco.” Yamazaki added, “Lawrence has always been on the side of the underdog.”

If the word “patriarch” doesn’t suit the people who run City Lights day-in and day-out, neither does the word “anarchist,” though Ferlinghetti has been an anarchist for most of his adult life. In Poetry as Insurgent Art (New Directions, 2007) he writes “Change the world in such a way that there’s no further need to be a dissident.” He adds, “Be subversive” and “Poetry is the ultimate Resistance.”  Under the imprint Anarchist Resistance Press, he published his own overtly political poems.

Elaine Katzenberger is now the publisher of City Lights, as well as the executive director of both the store and the publishing company. Before she came to City Lights in 1987, she worked as a bartender at Vesuvio Café at 255 Columbus Avenue in North Beach. “Bartending drove me crazy,” she told me. “When I walked into City Lights I said, ‘This is my place. These are my people.’

“Lawrence believes in the effectiveness of creativity and poetry in particular as a means to engender and support democratic and civil society,” Katzenberger says. “He has a political commitment to inclusivity. It’s second nature to him. He’s a pacifist and an anti-capitalist.” In fact, he’s been a pacifist ever since the summer of 1945, when he witnessed the devastation at Nagasaki, six weeks after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the city. Prior to that, he served in the U.S. Navy and thought of himself as an “All-American boy.”

I asked Katzenberger if after all these years, Ferlinghetti is still waiting for a rebirth of wonder. She laughed and said, “Lawrence in his day, which lasted a long time, experienced many a rebirth of wonder. He traveled around the world and met poets and got inspired many times over. But he is still waiting. The rebirth of wonder has not yet happened.”

In his biography of Ferlinghetti published in 1979, San Francisco poet Neeli Cherkovski calls Lawrence “an urban poet” and “a painter-poet.” Indeed, painters from Bosch to Goya and Picasso have framed his way of looking at the world. So have novelists like Herman Melville and filmmakers like Charlie Chaplin. Cherkovski also calls Ferlinghetti “a survivor.” That word is even more apt today than it was in 1979. Ferlinghetti has outlived many of the poets and writers that he has published, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, and Charles Bukowski.

While Ferlinghetti has published a great deal of Beat literature, and while he’s been called a member of the Beat Generation, he has rejected that mantle.

“He doesn’t categorize himself as a Beat,” Paul Yamazaki told me. Indeed, when I interviewed Ferlinghetti for The San Francisco Chronicle in 1997, he explained “City Lights is in a much more ancient tradition than the Beats, the tradition of the outlaw, the outsider and the dissident that goes back to Francois Villon, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, and that in the 20th century included Jack Kerouac and William Saroyan.”

In 2015, during another interview with me, Ferlinghetti complained about the ruination of San Francisco by the dot-comers and Silicon Valley techies. Still, he insisted that he preferred San Francisco to New York. “In San Francisco you can still be an individual,” he said. “The city, what’s left of it, is the last frontier.”

San Francisco filmmaker and videographer Starr Sutherland wants to make a documentary about Ferlinghetti, but Ferlinghetti doesn’t want yet another documentary about his own life. In 2013, photographer and filmmaker Chris Felver made Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder, which runs 79 minutes. Ferlinghetti would like Sutherland to make a movie about City Lights, but as Sutherland rightly says, “you can’t make a movie about City Lights without it also being about Ferlinghetti.”

“People came to City Lights because of Lawrence’s commitment,” Sutherland told me. “That it exists today and that it has existed all this time is because of the way he set it up. He’s open and inclusive and good at giving people their due.”

In 2008, Ferlinghetti suggested, in an entry in his journal, published in Writing Across the Landscape (Liveright, 2015), that “one could write a novel reversing” Joseph Conrad’s “dark message” in Heart of Darkness. In Ferlinghetti’s retelling of the tale, the hero would go up a river and “discover the great light, the ‘Heart of Lightness.’” That outlook might give a hint at what to expect in Ferlinghetti’s new novel, Little Boy, which explores his traumatic childhood; the book is scheduled to be published by Doubleday in March 2019, to coincide with his 100th birthday.

Sutherland and Munks—who still washes the bookstore’s windows—have both said that, over the last year, Ferlinghetti has worried that he might not make it to 100, though everyone in the extended tribe at City Lights is rooting for him to be alive and well on that occasion. Situated between lightness and darkness, Lawrence Ferlinghetti is far more than a survivor. He’s a pilgrim, a pioneer, a godfather and a gadfly who has helped give birth to rebirths of wonder, again and again, through his poetry and his own brand of social protest. On the cusp of 100, there may yet be one more rebirth for this pivotal and indispensable figure in American letters who has bridged generations, languages and cultures around the world.

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From Rain Taxi (Volume 23, No. 4, Winter 2018). Reproduced with the permission of Rain Taxi. Copyright © 2018 by Jonah Raskin.