Goodbye Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the Last American Bohemian?
Nonetheless, in our era of murderous corporate banality, we have never needed dreamers more.
By Jim Miller
We lost Lawrence Ferlinghetti last week. Ferlinghetti, who thought of himself less as a Beat poet than one of the last bohemians, had an epic 101-year run worthy of one of America’s great cultural figures. His life spanned the avant-gardes of late Modernism through the Beat Generation to the Sixties counterculture and additional decades of artistic, social, and political activism that only ended with his death.
As the Guardian piece on this death observed, Ferlinghetti’s radicalism did not mellow with age:
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 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, 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.”
Indeed, it would. But one hopes that on his deathbed, Ferlinghetti knew that not just his work as a poet but the iconic space he created with City Lights Bookstore (with its accompanying press) was precisely the kind of place that would foster the revolutionary imaginations of the future.
Poet Tess Taylor, in her remembrance of him observes that:
[H]e also built spaces where I or you or anyone could come and linger with them -- this in the days before the internet when you can search up or tweet poems at will. For a hungry young reader, for a hungry young writer, this bookstore was an invitation. Come nestle, come listen, come practice, come read, come learn.
It is also so important to realize the way City Lights and Ferlinghetti gave something to us California writers: this world he built was for us and of us, it was us. He fortified our local Rome: We could argue with it, we could add to it, we could debate inside its multitudes, but most importantly we would inherit it. It was ours, it showed that literature could be made, that we were invited to make more of it.
I would go so far as to say that Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore was a sacred space, an invaluably rare living literary touchstone in the growing cultural desert of American life. Over the last thirty years of my life, I made many pilgrimages to Ferlinghetti’s bohemian refuge. Every time I found myself in San Francisco, it was a mandatory stop. And I never left without finding a book to feed my soul.
As a young man, City Lights was where I sat on the floor in the poetry room, lingered on the creaking stairs, or strolled through the aisles for hours, searching the shelves for obscure novels, books on politics, surrealism, the Situationists, Buddhism, and, of course, the Beats. It was a revolutionary library, an intellectual mecca with an aura of profound dreaming.
Later on, in middle age, seeing my own books on the shelves there was a revelation of sorts, like witnessing the incarnation of my younger self’s dreams. But, if Ferlinghetti’s example teaches us anything, it is to not stop dreaming against the odds. In one of my favorite poems of his, “Pictures of the Gone World” in A Coney Island of the Mind, he captures that spirit with the lines:
Oh the world is a beautiful place to be born into/if you don’t mind/a few dead minds/in the higher places/or a bomb or two/now and then/in your upturned faces/or such other improprieties/as our Name Brand society/is prey to/with its men of distinction/and its men of extinction/and its priests/and other patrolmen/and its various segregations/and congressional investigations/and other constipations/that our fool flesh/is heir to/Yes the world is a beautiful place for all such things as/making the fun scene/and making the love scene/and making the sad scene/and singing low songs and having inspirations/and walking around/looking at everything/and smelling flowers/and goosing statues/and even thinking/and kissing people and/making babies and wearing pants/and waving hats and/dancing/and going swimming in rivers/on picnics/in the middle of the summer/and just generally/’living it up’/Yes/but then right in the middle of it/comes the smiling/mortician.
As an old man Ferlinghetti kept writing, and the City Lights store and press endured as he railed against the horrifying hyper-gentrification of San Francisco and the ongoing nightmares of American empire. Now that he is gone, I wonder how much longer City Lights will last and if we will ever again see a re-emergence of the kind of bohemian spaces that foster dreamers and revolutionaries.
The vast inequality that has driven the bland upscaling of nearly every last outpost of culture in not just San Francisco but the whole country has done a lot to extinguish any hope of a robust, transformative counterculture coming to save us as Ferlinghetti would have wanted. Nonetheless, in our era of murderous corporate banality, we have never needed dreamers more.
When it gets hard to imagine a better future, it’s time to demand the impossible.
The dime store hipsters and arrogant tech bros of the present aren’t the future for which Lawrence Ferlinghetti yearned. Still, somehow, despite everything, when I think of drinking a coffee in Caffe Trieste or a beer in Vesuvio Cafe or Specs with a book of poetry in hand, his words come back to me, and I find myself “waiting for the rebirth of wonder.”
Lead image: Steve Rhodes via Flickr