BEAT ICON DIES
Poet Ferlinghetti, 101, helped launch movement
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the acclaimed Beat movement champion, poet and publisher who co-founded the iconic City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, has died at age 101.
The beloved bookseller who famously fought obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s counterculture manifesto “Howl” died at his San Francisco home Monday from lung disease, his son Lorenzo said.
Ferlinghetti received a first dose of the COVID vaccine last week and was a month shy of turning 102, The Associated Press reported.
Born in Yonkers in 1919, Ferlinghetti earned a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia University then moved to San Francisco in 1951 before opening City Lights in 1953.
Though widely recognized as an essential figure of the Beat era, Ferlinghetti shied away from associating his own work with the biggest names of the postwar literary movement.
“Don’t call me a Beat. I was never a Beat poet,” the fiercely private and humble publisher, writer and painter said in the 2009 documentary “Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder.”
“He was the midwife of the Beat generation, but he never liked being called a Beat poet. He always wanted to be a painter,” Christopher Felver, the director of the documentary and a longtime Ferlinghetti friend, told the Daily News Tuesday.
“He lived his life in a very elegant, avant garde way. He was always political, always on top of his game, with poetry that was almost like Emily Dickinson, just clear as a bell. He was no-nonsense. A great activist and environmentalist,” Felver said.
Ferlinghetti was arrested and stood trial in 1957 for allegedly breaking obscenity laws when he published “Howl,” now considered a landmark literary masterpiece that frankly describes psychedelic drug use and heterosexual and homosexual sex.
He was acquitted when the court ultimately ruled “Howl” had “redeeming social importance” and was therefore not obscene.
“Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemism?” Judge Clayton Horn said in his ruling.
Ferlinghetti and City Lights also released books by Beat legends Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.
And Ferlinghetti authored dozens of his own books and poetry volumes, including 1958’s “A Coney Island of the Mind,” a poetic critique of American culture that sold more than a million copies.
“Am I the consciousness of a generation or just some old fool sounding off and trying to escape the dominant materialist avaricious consciousness of America?” Ferlinghetti asked in “Little Boy,” a spiraling stream of consciousness memoir published for his 100th birthday in 2019.
“Lawrence Ferlinghetti has given us a slice of his cake in the form of a dense, daffy, and often delightful prose-poem,” the San Francisco Chronicle wrote in a review.
The artist and business owner who made City Lights an enduring cultural destination despite the onslaught of big-box retailers and online shopping was honored with a holiday in 2019 when San Francisco proclaimed his birthday, March 24, “Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day.”
“Generally, people seem to get more conservative as they age, but in my case, I seem to have gotten more radical,” Ferlinghetti told Interview magazine in 2013.
“Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic,” he said.