A Quick Chat at City Lights

DEAR GEORGE, I was saddened recently to read that Lawrence Ferlinghetti, counter-culture poet and founder of San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore, had died at the age of 101. Ferlinghetti has always been one of my favorite poets, and, because we Antiochians regarded ourselves as fledgling beatniks, he was a significant role model in my youth. I actually met Ferlinghetti briefly when I was spending the summer of 1959 in San Francisco. I’d driven out before my final year of college to decide, once and for all, whether or not to devote my life to becoming a writer. I saw an ad for a poetry reading by Ferlinghetti at City Lights and decided to go. The Beat Generation had been around for five or six years, and San Francisco (and the City Lights Bookstore specifically) was one of its major centers, drawing icons like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso. Ferlinghetti had recently published his first collection, “A Coney Island of the Mind”, and he was reading selections. By the time I arrived the bookstore was packed to capacity, and employees were putting the few remaining chairs up on the stage. As it turned out, I took the last seat, right next to Ferlinghetti himself who was already at the podium. Before the reading started, he turned to me and asked if I were a writer. I said that I was trying to be and explained that I’d come to the city from Antioch to devote myself to writing fiction. When I expressed dismay at the string of rejection letters I’d gotten, Ferlinghetti was encouraging and said he’d gone through the same start to his own career. That filled me with inspiration and I churned out a dozen more short stories during my remaining month in San Francisco. All of them were rejected, of course. The following summer Katja and I got married and moved to Ann Arbor for grad school, that proving to be the end of my beatnik days as well as my quasi-writing career. However, I still have good memories of my exciting encounter at the City Lights Bookstore. LOVE, DAVE