I didn't make it to City Lights until my last day in the city, but there was certainly no way I would miss it. The legendary bookstore and publishing house founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been on my mind for decades now — at least since 1989, when my freshman English teacher came to class one afternoon with a beret and bongoes and read Ferlinghetti's poems to us. Despite the Maynard G. Krebs props, Mr. Cook seemed to love and respect the work, which unlike everything else we read in the course, was alive. He told us that Ferlinghetti was still alive, and still had this bookstore in San Francisco, and you could still probably find him there. Wearing a beret, no doubt. To a kid still stuck in a small New England milltown worldview, that was an amazing concept.
When I made it to the store the night before we left, the sun was gone and it was drizzling. Before heading in I crossed "Kerouac Alley" to visit Vesuvio, the charming little dive where the boys did some of their famous drinking. It was just after work, the bar was pretty crowded. There were two groups of what were obviously tourists on some kind of literary pub crawl, filling the big tables and looking around while making slight small talk to each other. I squeezed up to the bar, between two groups of office women talking earnestly about their days at work. Way off in the corner, where the bar met the wall, there was a young man in a button-down shirt and glasses reading a giant book open in front of him. It could have been me, but I'm the kind of loner at bars who pulls out a notebook and starts scribbling all the time.
I like the place very much, even though it was crowded and loud, and managed to have installed gigantic plasma tvs that were showing sports. That, ironically, is one of the only things I remember about the first time I arrived at Vesuvio in 2004, when I watched some of the Athens Olympics there.
Back over to City Lights, which is so much smaller and quainter and less crowded than I expected. To my surprise, the big event seemed to be an anniversary run of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems, published by City Lights 50 years ago. It had a fancy new edition in bright blue and orange, and it included in the back reproductions of the correspondence between O'Hara and Ferlinghetti. I sat on a stool upstairs and read the whole thing, and felt perfectly at home. Despite the sheer amount of time I've spent in them, many kinds of bookstores feel alien to me — except, oddly, used bookstores which have a kind of down market charm that makes me think that time has vanished.
City Lights has an astonishing poetry section: full and broad and evangelical in the way it welcomes you and practically admonishes you to stay and have your mind opened a little. "Sit down and read something!" the sign commands. There are photos of Mayakovsky and Corso on the walls (and Yevtushenko, alas. No one's perfect). It is one of those places that remind you that poetry is important and matters, and isn't necessarily as frippy and dispensable as daily life can lead you to believe. It is a kind of temple to remind you of why poetry is important to you, and I dearly wish there were more places like it around.
I learned from a few other books about the lives the gang led in San Francisco, and the realization that Allen Ginsburg wrote "Howl" in an apartment on Pine Street, which is just behind the place where we were staying on Bush Street. That the Moloch he wrote about, the red-eyed monster in the smoke and mist, was the Sir Francis Drake Hotel on Powell Street that we'd walked past dozens of times already. That the hum of the cable car line in the street was the rhythm of that second canto of the poem.
It was a very literary block. From our window we could see the alley, where I key event in The Maltese Falcon happened (Dashiell Hammett Lane was right next to us). A plaque a few buildings away revealed that Robert Louis Stevenson had lived there for a little while. But the revelation about "Howl" was really amazing to me. I had always imagined it as a great New York poem — the references to Harlem and Rockland. Putting it there on that block, in that very specific location opened it up for me. A stew of very specific images and sounds had been born, something that nearly achieved the level of the universal. This poem that I read one afternoon in my high school library before baseball practice, shortly after Mr. Cook's performance. When I remembered those strange, long lines, those explicit bits that embarrassed me, the idea of freedom and space and future that poetry has in its guts.
