Poetry Friday: Remembering Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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)