[ The much renowned poet, political insurgent and countercultural
pioneer put on trial for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl went on to
become a beloved icon of San Francisco and a respected poet
worldwide.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI, POET AND FOUNDER OF CITY LIGHTS BOOKSHOP, DIES
AGED 101  
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Sian Cain
February 23, 2021
The Guardian
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_ The much renowned poet, political insurgent and countercultural
pioneer put on trial for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl went on to
become a beloved icon of San Francisco and a respected poet worldwide.
_

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, outside City Lights in San Francisco. ,
Photograph: Clay Mclachlan/AP // The Guardian

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, publisher, painter and political
activist who co-founded the famous City Lights bookshop in San
Francisco [[link removed]] and
became an icon of the city himself, has died aged 101.

Ferlinghetti died at home on Monday night. His son Lorenzo said that
the cause was interstitial lung disease.

Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York in 1919. His father died
before he was born and his mother was committed to a mental hospital,
leaving him to be raised by his aunt. When he was seven, his aunt,
then working as a governess for a wealthy family in Bronxville,
abruptly ran off, leaving Ferlinghetti in the care of her employers.
After attending university in North Carolina, he became a journalist
in 1941, then joined the US navy during the second world war. While
studying for his doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris on the GI Bill, he
began to write poetry.

Returning to the US in 1951, he was drawn to California as a place to
start afresh. “San Francisco had a Mediterranean feeling about
it,” he told the New York Times
[[link removed]].
“I felt it was a little like Dublin when Joyce was there. You could
walk down Sackville Street and see everyone of any importance in one
walk.”

In 1953, he co-founded the City Lights bookshop and publishing company
with friend Peter Dean Martin, who left soon after, with the mission
to democratise literature and make it accessible to all. “We were
young and foolish,” he told the Guardian in 2019. “And we had no
money.”

While most bookshops across the US closed early and on weekends at the
time, City Lights stayed open seven days a week and late into the
night, fostering a countercultural community that attracted the likes
of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
[[link removed]]. City Lights
initially focused on selling paperbacks, which were cheaper but looked
down on by the literary establishment, and publishing poetry, offbeat
and radical books by the likes of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Paul Bowles, Gary
Snyder and Gregory Corso.

In 1955, Ferlinghetti heard Ginsberg’s seminal poem Howl read for
the first time at the Six Gallery in North Beach. The next day, he
sent a telegram to Ginsberg: “I GREET YOU AT THE BEGINNING OF A
GREAT CAREER. STOP. WHEN DO I GET MANUSCRIPT OF HOWL?” The epic poem
was printed in Britain and shipped to San Francisco, where the copies
were seized. Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were arrested on obscenity
charges in 1957.

“I wasn’t worried. I was young and foolish. I figured I’d get a
lot of reading done in jail and they wouldn’t keep me in there for
ever. And, anyway, it really put the book on the map,” Ferlinghetti
told the Guardian
[[link removed]].
Having already sent the poem to the American Civil Liberties Union,
“to see if they would defend us if we were busted”, the ACLU
successfully defended the poem at a trial that lasted months. The
verdict set an important precedent for reducing censorship, and
heralded a new freedom for books around the world, while also making
both men internationally famous.

 

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (left) and Allen Ginsberg in London in
1965. Photograph: Stroud  //  The Guardian
 

In 1958, Ferlinghetti published his own first collection, A Coney
Island of the Mind, which sold more than 1m copies. He went on to
write more than 50 volumes of poetry, novels and travel journals. As a
publisher, he maintained a lifelong focus on poetry and books ignored
by the mainstream, even as it became harder in the face of behemoth,
profit-driven presses.

He self-identified as a philosophical anarchist, hosting many sit-ins
and protests against war at City Lights. He regarded poetry as a
powerful social force and not one reserved for the intellectual elite,
saying, “We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can
change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general
populace.”

In later decades, Ferlinghetti became an icon of his city. In 1978,
when San Francisco was rocked by the double assassination of the
city’s mayor, George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk,
Ferlinghetti wrote a poem that ran two days later in the San Francisco
Examiner. It was titled An Elegy to Dispel Gloom, and he was
personally thanked by the city for helping maintain calm. In 1994 a
street was named after him, and four years later he was named San
Francisco’s first poet laureate.

He remained active in City Lights until the late 2000s, chatting with
fans and tourists who popped in just to meet the legend. “When he
was still here every day, fixing a lightbulb or some other little
thing, he never refused somebody who wanted to talk to him,” Elaine
Katzenberger, the current manager of the shop, said. “He usually
looked for some commonality to have a little conversation with
them.”

Though mostly bed-bound and nearly blind in his later years, he
remained busy, publishing his final book, Little Boy, on his 100th
birthday
[[link removed]].
A loosely autobiographical novel, Ferlinghetti refused to describe it
as memoir: “I object to using that description. Because a memoir
denotes a very genteel type of writing.”

In 2019, San Francisco named 24 March, his birthday, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti Day to mark his centennial, with celebrations lasting all
month. In an interview from his bed to mark the occasion
[[link removed]],
he told the Guardian that he was still hoping for a political
revolution, even though “the United States isn’t ready for a
revolution … It would take a whole new generation not devoted to the
glorification of the capitalist system … a generation not trapped in
the me, me, me.”

When asked whether he was proud of his achievements, Ferlinghetti
said: “I don’t know, that word, ‘proud’, is just too
egotistic. Happy would be better. Except when you get down to try and
define the word happy, then you’re really in trouble.”

_[Essayist Sian Cain is the Guardian's books site
[[link removed]] editor. A collection of her
cultural writing for The Guardian is available HERE.
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Read more on Ferlinghetti _HERE_
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