Before it was a bookstore fighting for the soul (and loins) of the nation, City Lights was a Charlie Chaplin movie. The Tramp collected pennies to give sight to a blind flower-seller. City Lights Bookstore co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti nearly lost his sight in the end, but his vision lives on... am I over-milking this metaphor?
We need more poetry practice.
Historian Kevin Starr once said that if the First Amendment had a street address, it would be City Lights. It needs a movie, so the San Francisco dream team behind my own movie Brother Verses Brother (which starts in front of the bookstore) is making a doc about City Lights. Starr Sutherland, Jim McKee, and Frazer Bradshaw are great folks - please help finish the City Lights documentary with a tax-deductible donation, to immortalize the place that has been saving starving hysterical naked minds for generations, like mine:
Poems as Contraband
In 1957, police arrested Ferlinghetti and the store’s clerk, Shig Murao, on obscenity charges over Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Corrupting the youth, just like Socrates! When the judge ruled that Howl had literary merit, a tiny press moved the line on what Americans were allowed to read.
My dad wasn’t a witness at that one, but four years later he took the stand to defend a bookseller carrying Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and spent so long explaining quotation marks to the district attorney that his Volkswagen got towed. The jury foreman later admitted they acquitted because the bookseller claimed he thought the book was about astrology…
Now City Lights Booksellers, defying the tech takeover of the city, is San Francisco’s argument with itself in poetic form. It’s at the crossroads where North Beach leans into Chinatown, with Jack Kerouac Alley on one side and Vesuvio across the way. So next time you’re in town, climb the stairs to the poetry room, pull a Pocket Poet off the shelf - maybe Blood on the Fog by my co-star, former S.F. poet laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin. And thank Peter Maravelis for launching the poetry book I wrote with my dad and brother, Father Verses Sons, on what would have been my father’s 100th birthday:
And in honor of the poet in all of us, here’s a new one from me. Write a poem, kids!
Radioactive Ink
i've decided to get a radioactive tattoo
on my heart
it will say, “i heart nurses”
and the radiologist will tap one
and bring her into the room
and they will giggle together
but then secretly
the nurse will come to my room alone
listen to the beeping of my monitor
and lie next to me to sleep.
when the morning staff turns on the lights
she jumps out
has a lot of explaining to do
and i try to protect her job
“it was on my chart!”
i say
but it’s too late,
she has been fired.
no matter.
we move to guatemala
and live in the shadow of a volcano
and raise small creatures
who have both wings and fur,
and sharp little teeth
but when they bite
they draw blood only once in a while.
Loved that poem! Keep going strong, Ari! Best friend Montreal. Ez