Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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9. 'Let Us Prey' with Henry Kaiser, Synclavier

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from Rebel Poets' Worlds Made Flesh, I/R, 1989, San Francisco

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10. Remembering Neighbors: Lawrence and the "Fort Point Gang"

Lawrence Ferlinghetti walked up and down and along Stockton Street, to and from the Bookstore that he co-founded, City Lights, and his flat toward Fisherman’s Wharf. He sometimes wore a peacoat. He sometimes wore a Captain’s cap. He sometimes paused to examine the tree I’d planted in front of my flat nearby the corner of Stockton and Filbert Streets.

Sometimes, too, we happened to meet along Lawrence's route. Less often did we stop to talk. Lawrence’s blue eyes were often faraway. His walk could be meandering like that of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger. His mind might be enwrapped in imaginations.

Lawfrence did me many good turns.  He did good turns for many. He helped mightily to beget the Beats into popular consciousness. He published and defended Allen’s Howl. He gave Jack residence in his cabin in Big Sur. He hosted Yevtushenko and Voznevsensky. He brought Jack Hirschman front and center and published and promoted, too, generations of poets’ Brigades from Latin America.

He supported Matt Gonzalez’s campaign for Mayor of San Francisco in 2003.

Lawrence was a stalwart. He was of that generation Depression-matured before World War II. He was battle-tested like the “Fort Point Gang” (Bill Bailey, Tillie and Jack Olson, Al Richmond, …) whom I was also lucky to know and regularly encounter in San Francisco of the 1980s. The Gang 

of walkers five-miles-daily round-trip along Golden Gate Bay, when the Presidio’s Promenade was unfenced, puddled earth and driftwood … were of confrontations where Police shot striking Longshoremen dead on the Embarcadero and protesters for Unions and workers’ rights died on Market Street, too; the Lincoln Brigade fought Franco’s Fascism in Spain; and a ‘Long View from the Left’ carried through decades.

Lawrence climbed that hill and wrote and his books and painted in his

Hunters Point studio faithfully as the Fort Point Gang maintained their walks and talks. He was always for Whitman and the worker roughs

and Surreal antidotes. He averred from the 1940s and his U.S. Navy Captaincy into the very teeth of 2020’s upside-down definitions that our nation is here to fulfill immigrants’ ambitions and mystic visions of freedom. He deserved whatever cap he wore and his eternal. wrinkled irony of a smile and bright, surprising leaves on any path he chose.