Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919 - 2021)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

 I first came to San Francisco from Ohio in the early sixties and was immediately attracted to the wonders of North Beach, dining upstairs family-style at the Basque Hotel or at the old Spaghetti Factory on Grant Avenue, witnessing the antics of would-be beatniks at the Coexistence Bagel Shop and especially browsing and buying books at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore which was, and still is, the epicenter of San Francisco's vibrant literary scene. Scanning my bookshelf, I spot half a dozen or so of the City Lights published Pocket Poets paperbacks including Allen Ginsberg's Howl, of course, which anyone who wanted to seem cool had to flaunt, but also other Pocket Poet books, Kaddish, Planet News and The Fall of America by the same woolly-bearded prophet. Other of my Pocket Poets include Kenneth Patchen's Love Poems and Kora in Hell by William Carlos Williams. Somewhere in my piles of books is buried Ferlinghetti's own A Coney Island of the Mind, Pocket Poet book #1, which has sold more than one million copies. Eat your hearts out, poets!

[Erratum: Actually, Nick, Pictures of the Gone World was Pocket Poets #1. Coney Island was published by New Directions.]

Despite many visits to City Lights and other Bay Area poetry venues I never met Ferlinghetti but yesterday on Facebook I received an elegy from Neeli Cherkovski who knew him quite well, which I am taking the liberty of posting here. Farewell, grand old soul.

MY FRIEND LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (1919 - 2021)

Ferlinghetti and I
Would go to the Surf Theater
Way out by Yokohama
He was an aggressive
Driver, his old Volkswagen
Bug had several dents.

Driving through the Stockton
Tunnel he'd proclaim,
"We're leaving the Casbah"
And he would chuckle
As he turned left on Van Ness
Leaving North Beach
And City Lights Books.

We saw a movie set in Paris.
The title escapes me, but
Lawrences's excitement
Over the sights, Notre Dame
In a side view, the Seine
Head-on, Apollinaire's shadow
On Boulevard St. Germaine.

"I should go for a visit," he said
"Like Henry Miller did."

Two days later we headed
To Bixby Canyon, he said
I could carve my name on
The outhouse wall alongside
Kerouac and Ginsberg.

We read from "Leaves
Of Grass" that night by
A campfire. "He's like
An older brother."
Lawrence said of Whitman.

A year later
He wrote from
Paris, "I'm bringing you
A new beret, made right
Here."

San Francisco, Paris,
Big Sur, an open
Heart who would
Never grow old,
Who would be an
Ancient bard, who
Would hold a lantern
In the dark.

He wrote
The dog
Trots freely
In the street" and
Told anyone
Who would listen
The secret meaning
Of Goya's greatest scenes.

Neeli Cherkovski