Ferlinghetti's Light
By Terry Fleming • April 23, 2021
Lawrence Ferlinghetti died on February 22, 2021 at the age of one-hundred and one. In honor of Independent Bookstore Day, we'd like to pay tribute to him, the founder of the legendary City Lights Bookstore and City Lights Publishing.
The passing of Lawrence Ferlinghetti marked the end of an era. Though he didn't consider himself a Beat poet, he'll forever be associated with the Beat movement (the luminaries of which are Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Herbert Huncke) because of the integral role he played in introducing them to the world (not to mention, his most famous book of poetry—A Coney Island of the Mind—certainly has wild Beat flourishes of imagination and activism). But he was more than simply a poetic contemporary of the Beats—he was a publisher, painter, playwright, activist, and an ambassador for the arts.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Bronxville, New York and studied in Massachusetts (boarding school), North Carolina, Manhattan, and Paris, but San Francisco was his spiritual home. He moved there in 1951, where he met Peter D. Martin, who'd started a literary magazine called City Lights (after the Chaplin film), publishing Bay Area writers like Philip Lamantia, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Ferlinghetti himself. Martin and Ferlinghetti became business partners in 1953, and with an initial investment of $500 each opened City Lights Bookstore, with the objective of being a primarily "pocket" or paperback bookstore, selling affordable books to the masses.
In 1955, Martin sold his share of the business to Ferlinghetti, and in the same year, Ferlinghetti launched City Lights Publishing with the Pocket Poets series, with his own Pictures of the Gone World as the premiere title. The fourth title was Allen Ginsberg's Howl, a work so controversial that Ferlinghetti was arrested on obscenity charges for publishing and distributing it (a judge later declared that Howl was not obscene—and the work is now considered a modern classic).
Throughout its history, City Lights Publishing has been on the forefront of bringing disenfranchised voices to America and the world, publishing such influential authors as: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Charles Bukowski, Cindy Sheehan, Sam Shepard, and Michael Parenti (scan to the bottom of this post to see more featured authors of City Lights). Through the example of City Lights Publishing, Ferlinghetti demonstrated his belief that art is for everybody, not just intellectuals, and he encouraged artists to become involved in the politics of their day:
Poets, come out of your closets,
Open your windows, open your doors,
You have been holed-up too long
in your closed worlds...
(Populist Manifesto, 1976)
His natural empathy for people fueled his art and his activism, and for more than sixty years, both City Lights Publishing and City Lights Bookstore have been a haven and distribution network for radical political and cultural thinkers. The Kennedy Assassination, McCarthyism and the Vietnam War were all topics covered by his poems, and he was the recipient of numerous awards and was named San Francisco's Poet Laureate in 1998. In 2012, he was awarded the Janus Pannonius International Poetry Prize from the Hungarian PEN Club, but refused the €50,000 prize on the grounds that the ruling right-wing Hungarian government was interfering with freedom of speech and other civil liberties for the Hungarian people.
Again, he didn't consider himself a Beat poet, but whether you agree with his own self-assessment, by launching Howl on his publishing label, he set off a cultural chain reaction unmatched in modern times. Beat poetry was born out of the disillusionment following World War II, the use of the atomic bomb, and the holocaust, but it was sustained by a resistance to the Cold War and the conformity and materialism of the 1950s. It combined surrealist imagery with the stream-of-consciousness rhythms of Jazz to create a new language and a new aesthetic, a radical individualism that stood in stark contrast to the pressure to blend in. Starting with Howl, Beat culture swept across the world, helping to create other movements, such as French New Wave cinema and the psychedelic music of the '60s. As the founder of the City Lights Bookstore and City Lights Publishing, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a Prime Mover in this sea change. Without him, there's no telling how stunted the growth of American thought would've been.
I consider him inexorably associated with the Beats, and with his passing, the Beats are gone, but their legacy is transformative and as impossible to undo as walking back evolution. For Ferlinghetti, loyalty to the underdog was written across his DNA, not to mention his powerful hope for a better, more vibrant, accepting, and awe-inspiring world, best exemplified by his own words—the first passage of his poem I Am Waiting (from A Coney Island of the Mind):
I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
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