Photograph Source: User: Wgreaves – CC BY-SA 3.0

Gioia Woods— a professor at Northern Arizona University and the author of a new enlightening book about City Lights (City Lights: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Biography of a Bookstore), the famed San Francisco Bookstore— first encountered and read a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1979 when she was a high school student in LA. The poem wasn’t from Ferlinghetti’s first book, Pictures of the Gone World, nor from his second book, A Coney Island of the Mind, which has sold over one million copies since it was first published by New Directions in 1957. Nor was it Howl, which Ferlinghetti published in 1956 and that made the publisher, the poet, the shop and the company globally famous. The poem Woods read was titled “The Old Italians Dying” and it was published as a broadside. Woods experienced a “shock of recognition,” the phrase that Herman Melville used to describe how he felt when he first read Nathaniel Hawthorne. Later, Edmund Wilson used Melville’s phrase as the title for his book The Shock of Recognition about the “development of American Literature.”

When Woods read Ferlinghetti’s poem, she says that she was “shocked to see people I recognized. In a poem! There they were, “the old Italians in faded felt hats…the old Italians in their black high button shoes…the old ones with gnarled hands / and wild eyebrows / the ones with the baggy pants with both belt & suspenders…the ones who loved Mussolini / the old fascists.” Not surprisingly, Woods emphasizes Ferlinghetti’s identity as an Italian, which became more and more pronounced as he aged. She also emphasizes the decisive role of three women at City Lights—Elaine Katzenberger, Nancy Peters and Amy Scholder—who together initiated and buttressed what she calls “the change in City Lights’ culture and mystique from........

© CounterPunch