“Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone,” Ferlinghetti wrote. Though he was a frequent collaborator and champion of the Beats, he held himself at a remove from the movement, saying, “If anything, I was the last of the bohemians rather than the first of the Beats.” Ferlinghetti’s own poems, which have been translated into twelve languages, are a showcase for both his political conscience and his painterly precision.
In 1998, Ferlinghetti was named San Francisco’s first poet laureate in 2005, the National Book Foundation honored “his tireless work on behalf of poets and the entire literary community for over 50 years.” His birthday, March 24, has been declared Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day in San Francisco. Through City Lights Publishing, Ferlinghetti published Beat luminaries like Allen Ginsburg, Denise Levertov, and Frank O’Hara, as well as unforgettable work from later schools of writers, including Charles Bukowski, Sam Shepard, and Noam Chomsky. Today, it remains a Mecca for the readers and writers around the globe, who flock to the store as a must-visit San Francisco destination (it was declared a historic landmark in 2001). In 1953, Ferlinghetti founded City Lights, the first all-paperback bookshop in the United States, which he envisioned as a “literary meeting place.” Ferlinghetti’s best hopes for his store came wildly true “once we opened the door,” he said, “we couldn’t get it closed.” In the sixty-plus years to follow, City Lights became the heart and soul of literary San Francisco, a gathering place for bohemian writers and progressive activists to take part in the West Coast’s literary renaissance. From his perch at City Lights, his famed San Francisco bookstore, Ferlinghetti published and championed the greatest minds of the Beat Generation, while writing more than thirty acclaimed books in his own right. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, publisher, and political activist, has died at 101 of interstitial lung disease.
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