'It's not in books, it's in the world': Lawrence Ferlinghetti's shining legacy

On Monday, the Bay Area lost one of our strongest voices and advocates for social equity in the arts when Lawrence Ferlinghetti — author, publisher and founder of San Francisco’s famed bookshop, City Lights  — died at the wondrous age of 101.

A longtime resident of the city’s North Beach neighborhood, his passing is a reminder that San Francisco’s identity as a revolutionary, countercultural bastion isn’t what it once was. While the cost of living continues to rise and older generations of activists fade away — making it harder for free-spirited artistry to exist — we gather tightly to embrace Ferlinghetti’s cathedral in all its dusty homeliness and independent boldness on the corner of Columbus and Broadway.

Yet, Ferlinghetti’s contribution to our region transcends these brick-and-mortar walls — no matter how world-famous they are. Because it’s Ferlinghetti’s unabashed legacy of altruism that will be most useful for the rising generation of local poets, who, even in his absence, have something to gain. In fact, the Gandalfian figure has already ensured his imprint on the Bay Area’s literary future by inspiring the Lawrence Ferlinghetti Poetry Fellowship at the University of San Francisco.

The program, which was launched in 2012 as part of the university’s MFA program, enacts a reality of Ferlinghetti’s vision: “This fellowship honors Ferlinghetti, who published and supported the work of writers who were outsiders ― outside traditional academia or traditional social conventions,” the university’s website says.

Accompanied by a backing band, American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti gives a reading at the Jazz Cellar nightclub, San Francisco, February 1957.

Nat Farbman/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty

But it gets better. Much better. “This fellowship, which provides full tuition funding, is awarded bi-annually to an applicant in poetry whose work embodies a concern for social justice and freedom of expression.”

In other words, for emerging poets who might not otherwise see themselves inside institutional academia — and are instead rooted in their own communities — the Ferlinghetti Fellowship is a pathway for pursuing a master’s in creative writing within a supportive, fully funded capacity.

I personally know how impactful an opportunity like this can be for a marginalized voice because I was selected as the second-ever Ferlinghetti Fellow in 2015.

My introduction to poetry wasn’t in books. It was in the world — doing graffiti, freestyling rap lyrics and attending political protests as a first-generation Mexican American growing up in the South Bay. When I was a teen, reading the words of older white men was far from anything I’d do — it felt unrelatable and out of touch for me and my friends, so we were more likely to cut class, skip assignments, play video games and pursue our sense of freedom elsewhere.

Then, in community college, after years of academic floundering, my younger sister — who was an avid reader — introduced me to a little black book that would unexpectedly launch my path into a lifetime of poetic exploration and commitment to literary justice in ways I’d never known possible. The booklet fit inside my back pocket and was titled "Poetry as Insurgent Art."

Ferlinghetti’s work was essential as I began to carry it with me wherever I went, since it helped me feel validated as an aspiring intellectual; I started to believe that maybe a voice like mine deserved to be inside of books, too. I learned that Ferlinghetti was a weird Bay Area poet — like me — and the more I grew obsessed with his library of work, including "A Coney Island of the Mind" and "Starting from San Francisco," the more I realized that poetry wasn’t some untouchable ivoried beast.

Instead, while wandering around City Lights the physical and psychic space that embodies Ferlinghetti’s egalitarian philosophy with its sprawling, nonlinear beauty — I learned that literature could be as casual as a conversation with a longtime friend, or as a radical as a Public Enemy verse, or both at once. Ferlinghetti’s liberated sense of being — along with the poetry of Martin Espada, June Jordan and Sonia Sanchez, among others whom I’d discovered on the famous bookstore’s shelves — were about declaring yourself in a society that was designed to silence you; about the dirty underwear in your lived-in apartment; about foreign landscapes and the ravages of warfare; about neighborhoods we inhabited and our duty to preserve them.

“We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace,” Ferlinghetti wrote. And it’s something that quietly sparked a flame in me and others like me — to be voices, not only for ourselves, but for each other.

When I found out I’d received full tuition from the University of San Francisco as a Lawrence Ferlinghetti Poetry Fellow — after having been rejected from multiple other institutions in previous years — I knew his legacy would forever become a part of my fabric, and that poetry wasn’t just something to be written, but to be lived.

At the time, I was a public high school teacher in Boston, but because of the fellowship’s generous funding, I was able to relocate back to the Bay Area. I attended the two and a half year program to study the craft of poetics with mentors like D.A. Powell, Brynn Saito and Barabara Jane Reyes — without ever paying more than $25 a semester for registration fees.

As someone who has been the first in my family to attend a four-year university after transferring from community college, and then became the first to receive my master’s, I knew that my ability to access this privilege was largely due to Ferlinghetti’s generosity and radicalism.

But I’m not the only one who benefited from the late poet’s advocacy. Since the program’s introduction, there have been three other Ferlinghetti Fellows: Victor Inzunza, Juan Rodriguez and Rosa De Anda. All of us are Latinx, all of us are Northern Californians, all of us have come to poetry as outsiders, and all of us, in our own ways, carry Ferlinghetti’s urgency to be insurgent with our words.

City Lights employee and local poet Josiahluis Alderete, with Alan Chazaro.

Briana Chazaro

Inzunza — a Mexican American who grew up in Stockton, California, and served as a United States Marine after enlisting in 2001 — became the inaugural fellow and welcomed me into the group like an older brother. Having served two tours of duty in Iraq, he embodies the diverse and textured perspective that Ferlinghetti sought to uplift through his life’s work — bringing in those from the periphery.

“I grew very dark and angry,” Inzunza said in a previous interview. “Eventually, being able to put those words on the page allowed me to have the freedom to express myself and not be afraid of those feelings.”

I remember riding BART from South Hayward into Powell Street and talking to Victor on the phone during my first year, as he would offer me advice and listen to my questions. It felt like family within an otherwise disembodied experience as a married and older graduate student. Years later, I’ve tried to do the same with Juan, who succeeded me as the next fellow and whom I’ve befriended (we are so alike that we share the same city of birth on the Peninsula and loudly support the Oakland A’s and 650 area code together).

Now, it’s Rosa’s turn, the first woman in the fellowship to carry Ferlinghetti’s torch. “He’s a guiding ancestor, emanating knowledge through poetry, love and demand for social justice in all forms,” said De Anda. “His light is eternal.” Rosa is a manifestation of that spirit, approaching the classroom from an untraditional angle as a middle-aged woman, but using her edges to carve a space into the world. Like Ferlinghetti, De Anda doesn’t hold back, and neither do her poems, which explore sexuality and the body in ways that would make the Beatniks blush.

And after Rosa, there will undoubtedly be more.

Now, it’s ironic that Ferlinghetti is heralded by a university for rejecting the status quo myth, since he was once fired from teaching at the University of San Francisco after offering a course that offered queer readings of Shakespeare’s sonnets. As he retold it in an interview, “I was giving a lecture on the homosexual interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets and in walked the priest who headed the department. That was the end of my academic career.”

The irony, of course, is that — after quickly ending his career at USF — Ferlinghetti has become the genesis for so many younger poets and learners, activists and artists, wanderers and dreamers to pursue our voices in the very institution that once shut him out. So, in a way, we won’t ever have to go very far to find him again, because he's still there, writing through so many of us, in a multitude of tongues, demanding to be heard in places we’ve often been left out of.

Alan Chazaro is a Bay Area writer and teacher. His books, "This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album" and "Piñata Theory," are available through Black Lawrence Press. Follow his updates on Twitter and Instagram @alan_chazaro.

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