Published in the “Opinion” page of the Herald-Zeitung, March 4, 2021.
Who and what we choose individually or as a nation to remember reveals our own character. One of those being remembered today is the “Beat Poet” Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died Monday, February 22nd. in San Francisco at the age of 101. As a poet, he revolutionized what poetry can sound like and what subject matters it might expand the boundaries of what had been expressed in poetry before him.
He is also remembered for co-founding one of the most famous bookstores in the United States and beyond: The City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. It became a gathering center for artists and writers where ideas were debated, expanded and made to feel important for the life of a culture. In 1953, the year of its founding, it became the first all-paperback bookstore, selling quality books at reasonable prices. In 1955 Ferlinghetti inaugurated “The City Lights Pocket Poets Series” to encourage people to read poetry for enjoyment and insights into being a human being.
Of course Ferlinghetti was writing and thinking and being an activist outside the pocket or pocketbook of conventional mores. As an homage to him published on the website of City Lights states: “His curiosity was unbounded, and his enthusiasm was infectious.” His energy was also directed to publishing fellow Beat poets like William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, whose famous title, On the Road became a national classic in an era of restlessness. But publishing Allen Ginsburg’s famous “Howl” brought Ferlinghetti heated charges of indecency because sex and drugs were part of the poem’s subject matter.
He was later cleared in court and brought to the fore the sticky subject of censorship. It became one of his causes, right up there with commenting on social ills and mass corruption. He and his fellow poets were writing at a time of social upheaval by questioning the status quo; his and their poems pushed deeper into the American fabric to expose topics that were considered forbidden to discuss publicly. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/poet-lawrence-ferlinghetti-death/index.html
Born in Yonkers, New York in 1919, he eventually found his way to the West Coast and to a more relaxed and tolerant cultural terrain. He arrived there in 1951 and admitted: “When I arrived in San Francisco in 1951 I was wearing a beret. If anything I was the last of the bohemians rather than first of the beats.” He had over time, formed the idea of “poetry as insurgent art.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti Obituary
His most famous collection of poems a generation kept close by in our college years, was A Coney Island of the Mind (1958). From it, the article above included these lines from one of its poems:
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don’t mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don’t sing
all the time
In 1987 my friend Tim and I drove from Dallas up to North Texas State University to hear Ferlinghetti. Read? It was more like a performance. One of the poems that has stayed with me, one that has become most loved by many, is
“I Am Waiting.” It is too lengthy to publish, but this is its second-to-last stanza:
I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder