At Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Hundredth Birthday Party
Read our Art of Poetry interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti in our current issue.
City Lights Bookstore
I hear the party at City Lights Books before I see it. The Beats, and their twenty-first-century torchbearers, are neither quiet nor sober. The bookstore is celebrating Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s hundredth birthday in an event open to all of San Francisco. A man with shoulder-length gray hair sits cross-legged on Columbus Avenue drinking Squirt and reading Mark Twain to himself. People step around him. Men with glasses sport boots that will never be polished. The air is thick with a blend of
