For 43 years, Peter Munks has washed the
windows at City Lights Bookstore and City Lights Publishing at 261
Columbus Avenue in San Francisco’s North Beach, where Lawrence
Ferlinghetti has created and nurtured, with friends and fellow poets, a
strange and wonderful, living and breathing institution that might be
called “a rebirth of wonder.” That phrase comes from “I Am Waiting,” one
of Ferlinghetti’s best known and most beloved poems, which appeared in
his second book of poetry, A Coney Island of the Mind, published
in 1958 by New Directions. The book has sold more than one million
copies since then. “I Am Waiting” is one of Peter Munks’ favorite poems.
“I love it,” he says on a day when he’s not washing windows—which, he
explains, is a lot easier than cleaning the inside of the building at
261 Columbus.
As the City Lights window washer—he has
also been a fisherman, an oysterman, a busker, and a troubadour—Munks,
who was raised in Mineola, Long Island, and who graduated from Yale in
1968, has had a rare opportunity to see the bookstore and publishing
company from the outside looking in and the inside looking out.
“The personnel has changed over the past four decades,” Munks told
me. “Lawrence has lost much of his hearing and his eyesight, and he
doesn’t come into the office as often as he used to, but from my
perspective, City Lights hasn’t changed all that much.”
Still, it’s much larger and with many more books than it had when
Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin co-founded the store in 1953. Martin
returned to Manhattan in 1955 and opened The New Yorker Bookshop on West
89th Street; he died in 1988 at the age of 65, six years after his shop
closed.
Over the course of several decades, Ferlinghetti expanded City Lights
upstairs, downstairs, and sideways, too. With Martin gone, he took on
new partners, including Shigeyoshi “Shig” Murao, who was arrested in
1957 soon after he sold, to two San Francisco police officers, copies of
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems, which Ferlinghetti had published in 1956 in the Pocket Poets Series.
Shig never went on trial for obscenity, though Ferlinghetti did. Judge Clayton Van Horn ruled that Howl was
not obscene and that it had redeeming social and artistic value. Ever
since that decision, Ginsberg’s quintessential Beat Generation poem has
helped make the store into a destination for lovers of literature,
bohemians, hipsters, Beats, hippies, punks and all manner of
countercultural rebels from around the world. It has also helped turn
the “project,” as Ferlinghetti has thought of it, into a viable
commercial enterprise, though that was not a priority at the start. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/lawrence-ferlinghetti-on-the-cusp-of-100/
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