From Counter Punch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/08/dancing-to-ferlinghettis-beat/
America’s Revolutionary Poet
by LOUIS PROYECT
February 8-10, 2013
As you watch the 93-year-old Lawrence Ferlinghetti with shoulders squared back like a 21-year-old athlete striding briskly through the streets of San Francisco in the marvelous new documentary “Ferlinghetti: a Rebirth of Wonder”, it might occur to you that poetry and radical politics are the magic elixir that Ponce De Leon was searching for in vain.
As a seminal figure of the Beat Generation, Ferlinghetti is still going strong as are a number of other poets who pay tribute to him throughout the film, including Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Amiri Baraka (who started out as a beat poet named LeRoi Jones.) Though having departed to higher spiritual realms, Allen Ginsberg makes a striking appearance as well, sitting side by side with Ferlinghetti as they are interviewed on art and politics. The connection between the two is particularly intimate since Ferlinghetti risked prison time for publishing “Howl” back in 1956 through the auspices of City Lights Books, an offshoot of the bookstore he had launched a few years earlier.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of bookstores like City Lights and George Whitman’s Shakespeare and Company in the 1950s. Shakespeare and Company opened in Paris around the time that Ferlinghetti was working on a PhD at the Sorbonne. After coming back to the United States, he decided to open his own store modeled on Whitman’s, paying homage to it by putting up a sign “Shakespeare and Company” just above “City Lights” and right above the front door. In the mid-50s, the paperback revolution was gathering strength and people like Ferlinghetti were in the vanguard, placing titles by New Directions and Grove Press on their shelves, as well as those of publishers even more on the leading edge. Fortunately Whitman was interviewed for the documentary just before his death at the age of 98 in December 2011, additional evidence that rebellion is good for your health.
In New York City the counterpart of such stores was the Eighth Street Bookshop owned and operated by Eli Wilentz, the father of historian Sean Wilentz. As an aspiring young Beatnik and Bard College undergrad in the early 60s I used to make pilgrimages to Wilentz’s store to check out the latest books and magazines. I bought my Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Gary Snyder there, as well as Barney Rosset’s Evergreen Review. Harry Braverman, who had parted ways with the Socialist Workers Party in the mid-50s for pretty much the reasons I had about 25 years later, had joined Rosset’s Grove Press as an editor and could be relied upon to stump for books like “Autobiography of Malcolm X”, “Che Guevara Speaks”, and Franz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”, all Grove Press imprints.
Ferlinghetti states emphatically that the beat generation provided the roots of both the 60s radicalization and the counter-culture. The beats had a smaller audience, including only the most alienated teenagers at outposts like Bard College, Oberlin, Antioch, and Goddard who were ready to go on the road even if this meant dropping out of school.
Continue reading at: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/08/dancing-to-ferlinghettis-beat/
See also Raw Story: ‘Ferlinghetti’ explores the remarkable life of the poet-painter-activist
