Bay area folk tell me Ferlinghetti worked the till at City Light Books as late as the 2010s. Born 1919, this would have situated him at 90 years old, and though I was not there, and am only privy to the stories friends relay I can imagine him quietly sorting, pricing the Pocket Poets paperbacks he published widely. They generated “obscenity” charges by the government from the get. I imagine Ferlinghetti responding with a churlish noneya (the ACLU stepped in on behalf of Ferlinghetti and bookstore manager Shigeyoshi Murao in 1957, charges against ‘Howl’ by Ginsberg were acquitted under the First Amendment) and promptly reaching out to Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams and Robert Duncan for the next few installments of the series. Ferlinghetti formalizes his mission statement in City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology. “The aim was to publish across the board, avoiding the provincial and the academic and not publishing (that pitfall of the little press), ‘just our gang.' I had in mind rather an international, dissident ferment. What has proved most fascinating are the continuing crosscurrents and crossfertilizations between poets widely separated by language or geography." This roster of artists, today, are prone to immediate name recognition, and this speaks to Ferlinghetti’s innate ability to register not just a talent but a cause. Poetry does impose names for non-existent things or desires that seem to have little justification or tangibility. It attempts to rectify or elucidate these justifications; there is a longing for subject, object, comings, goings, uttered. Cause is born, and with the right guide given its proper due. Ferlinghetti arrived in San Francisco after a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne on the GI bill. A part of the Navy in WWII he surveyed the destruction of Nagasaki, and a still shell-shocked Paris became the site for continuing his creative work on injustice, the perils of mass production and instant gratification. San Francisco broadened Ferlinghetti further, prodding him to fuse jazz and manifesto. “It was only when I got to San Francisco that I started listening to the first free radio, KPFA (a community-supported radio station in Berkeley). KPFA had just been founded in 1949, and it was a totally different station than it is today. It started out as a station that really had a wide cultural program for that time. Alan Watts was on there. And so was Kenneth Rexroth...I used to go to his soirees on Friday night. That's where I met Kerouac and Cassady and Corso.” With the improvisations of Sonny Wayne and pianist Bill Weisjahns, Rexroth and Ferlinghetti read works in progress. “The poets today are talking to themselves, they have no other audience. The competition from the mass media is too much. Poetry used to have an audience. Lindsay went around the country reciting poems for bread– that was his phrase. And Sandburg, when he was younger, went around with a guitar and had an audience. Put the clam on the voice!” writes Ferlinghetti in the liner notes for Poetry Readings in The Cellar. I found the LP at my record shop job one winter day and quickly threw it on. Ferlinghetti said to me, to us, “Let us recite from broken bibles on streetcorners / follow dogs on docks / speak wild songs / throw stones / say anything / blink at the sun and scratch and stumble into silence / let us arise and go now / under the city / where ashcans roll / hurry up please it’s time.”
-Katie Calderon