Today marks the birthday of poet, playwright, publisher, and activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died in 2021 at the age of 101 at his home in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood.
Ferlinghetti founded San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore in 1953 and launched City Lights Publishers two years later. Ferlinghetti and his publishing house became national news following his arrest in 1957 for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems.
When Ferlinghetti visited the NYS Writers Institute in 1994, the event drew an enthusiastic crowd eager to meet the poet and cultural icon who brought the Beats -- Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, novelist Jack Kerouac and so many others -- to American literature.
Writers Institute Executive Director Tom Smith was overjoyed at the prospect of bringing one of his favorite poets to Albany. In a letter dated March 18, 1994, Smith wrote:
"I have been a great fan of yours for a very long time -- I go back to the Village days in the mid-1950s -- so it is a special pleasure for me to invite you to come here to the New York State Writers Institute..."
The event was featured in an advance story published in the Times Union by reporter -- and current Writers Institute Director -- Paul Grondahl in early September. Grondahl's story began:
"Lawrence Ferlinghetti hasn't been back to Albany since he took the night boat up from New York City in the late 1930s. Before that, the Yonkers native ventured as far north as Coxsackie during a Boys Scouts canoe trip up the Hudson when he was 14 years old. That was in 1933, a journey he recounts in a poem "Wild Dreams of a New Beginning" in which Indians 'retake their canoes.'
It's hard to imagine that this man -- born during World War I, commander of a ship during the invasion of Normandy, arrested for publishing Howl nearly 40 years ago, catalyst of the Beat movement, whose work has been read by more people in more countries than that of any other living American poet -- stills feels restless and in need of searching for the great truths.
'The enormous popularity of the Beat writers today is partly due to this huge nostalgia for an America that no longer exists,' Ferlinghetti was saying one morning recently by phone from his office at City Lights Books in San Francisco."
In a second letter to Ferlinghetti dated Sept. 22, 1994, Smith wrote:
"I just wanted you to know how very much all of us here at the Writers Institute are looking forward to your visit on September 29th. You have many, many fans in the Albany area, and your public reading is generating much interest."
Tragically, Tom Smith died suddenly four days later on September 26 while swimming in the university pool. He was 63.
Before a packed house at Page Hall on the evening of Thursday, Sept. 29, 1994, Writers Institute Assistant Director Suzanne Lance opened the event with a moment of silence in honor of Tom, "the perfect boss and the instant friend of everyone with whom he came into contact."
Read Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem "I Am Waiting" below the photo gallery.
Paul Grondahl's Times Union story published on September 13, 1994.
Ferlinghetti's postcard to Tom Smith dated April 4, 1994
NYS Writers Institute event poster
Tom Nattell's postcard invitation for an after-hours event at his home.
Dan Wilcox, Ferlinghetti (second from left), Charlie Rossiter, and Tom Nattell at Tom's house following the Page Hall event. Dan Wilcox wrote on his website: "He ended up staying at Tom Nattell's house because he didn't like the motel he was in & the water in the pool burnt his eyes... I don't remember who took the picture, perhaps Mary Anne Winslow.")
I Am Waiting
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder
I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder
I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder
Originally published in A Coney Island of the Mind. (1958)