Dr. Gioia Woods

[00:06:55] Host: The Navy was kind of another pivotal moment. He landed on the beach in Normandy. He was also sent to Nagasaki weeks after the bombing. So that's a lot of death and trauma to be experiencing. And I imagined that must have amplified or kind of ignited his social and political and moral ideology.

[00:07:19] Woods: Absolutely. He writes later in life that landing in Nagasaki made him an instant pacifist, in fact. And he takes all this back with him to the United States, these feelings of eminent death and destruction and inhumanity. And then, of course, the Cold War is launched at this moment. And like over 2 million other GIs, he takes advantage of the GI Bill to go to college. He first goes to the University of North Carolina, and then he heads off to Paris to get a PhD at the Sorbonne. And while he's in Paris, he studies the poetry of the city. And one of the poets he looks at very closely is, of course, Walt Whitman, this sort of bardic tradition. We think of Walt Whitman and his love of Manhattan and singing Manhattan and glorifying the city. And Ferlinghetti was really moved by this. And what else he was moved by while he was in Paris was this open culture of the book. There are bouquiniste lined up on the river. You can walk into any bookstore in the city, loaf and lounge and read and hang out and meet people and talk without having to be expected to, you know, exchange money for your time or your reading, unless, of course, you're buying a book. And this made a great impression on Lawrence, and he really loved this sort of open access. Because we have to understand that in the United States at the time, bookselling was nothing like this. Bookselling was a sort of white glove elite affair. If you can afford to buy a hardback, that's what you did. But there was really no place in the U.S. to go in and lounge around. Bookstores were not meeting places. They were capitalist enterprises, mostly. And they were meant to improve you as a human being, right?

[00:09:27] Host: And he's fluent in French. So he's, you know, kind of at home and he's introduced to French poets as well.

[00:09:35] Woods: Absolutely. He's introduced to French poets. And one of the poets he comes to love the most is Jacques Prévert, who was a French populist poet who really wrote about the dissatisfactions of post-war French youth. And these feelings, one of his great poems is called in English, Say No to the Teacher,right? So, reject authority for authority's sake. Find your own meaning. And of course, this is deeply connected to the foment of existentialism that's happening in Paris at the time. You know, make your own meaning. All your choices are going to be the choices in which they will lead you to your meaning. Something else really important happens to Lawrence, I think, in Paris at the time, not just discovering Jacques Prévert, not just this open culture of the book, not just, you know, writing his dissertation on urban poetry, but meeting another expat who was there at the Sorbonne, ostensibly on the GI Bill, and this was George Whitman. And George Whitman, at the time, was operating a sort of lending library to GIs in Paris out of his apartment. And he kept the door unlocked and sometimes George Whitman would come back to his apartment and find Lawrence there reading. And so the two ended up becoming friends. And this was an extraordinarily important friendship for Lawrence. It lasted his entire life till George Whitman died at the age of 98, in fact. And George Whitman, of course, goes on to open City Light's sister institution, Shakespeare and Company, on the left bank in the Latin Quarter in Paris. And the two exchange letters their whole lives about the difficulties of being a dissident anarchist and yet running a capitalist enterprise, you know, like, how do we do this? And the letters are a great source of comfort, I think, to the both of them. And in fact, in the 1980s, they proposed trading bookstores. Why not? Let's go ahead and do it. Luckily, that never happened, because George Whitman had rather unorthodox ways of running the bookstore, you know, gluing down the carpet with pancake batter, for instance. And so they never exchanged bookstores, but they exchanged many thoughtful letters and had many, many decades of visiting one another to try and figure out what it meant to be a bookseller with a conscience. Yeah, so the Paris years are really formative for him.

[00:12:18] Host: And his art comes alive at that time, like his own creation starts to blossom too.

[00:12:25] Woods: He begins writing a novel, and he is just really creatively motivated. And of course, you know, at this time, he's an aspiring painter. So he's an aspiring painter. He's a reader. He's a book lover. And he's really getting into this bohemian lifestyle that was still evident, you know, throughout Paris, he is exposed to existentialism. And he comes to the US in 1951, right after New Year's Day. And he lands there and he finds a studio where he can commence with his painting. And he's trying to get his poetry published. But he's not finding any bookstores to go into and hang out. And this is something he's really frustrated by. And we know that at this time, he begins to sort of connect that access to books and literacy to a well-functioning democracy, how literacy is critical to democracy. And he finally does end up getting a couple of his poems, three of his poems, actually translations of Jacques Prévert, in fact, published by a fellow named Peter Martin. And Peter Martin at the time was running a little magazine called City Lights.

[00:13:47] Host: Right. Yeah. So he was looking for this kind of bohemian experience and he found it on the West Coast.

[00:13:56] Woods: He did.

[00:13:57] Host: And I feel like Lawrence Ferlinghetti's story and City Lights' story kind of follows or parallels San Francisco's story. So maybe you can give us a little understanding of what San Francisco was like in that 1951 era, what the art and the literary scene was in that post-war San Francisco.

[00:14:18] Woods: Yeah, absolutely. It's fascinating, in fact. And it's a really important bit of context to understand. Many scholars have pointed out, and Ferlinghetti himself and Kenneth Rexroth too, have pointed out that San Francisco didn't grow up like other great American cities, you know, along the lines of sort of puritanical settlement or colonial settlement. In fact, it was very much of a sort of rough and tumble frontier trading post, extraordinarily diverse and cosmopolitan, even in the 18th and 19th century, Russian fur traders, Spanish missionaries, shipbuilders, you know, folks from all over the world in San Francisco. And then in the 19th century, San Francisco develops this really strong tradition of union organizing. And so it is a bohemian place that has a sort of different character. of residents who are from different parts of the Asian world, for instance, who have a major influence on how the city is shaped.

So Lawrence Ferlinghetti shows up here, and one of the first people he meets, in fact, is Kenneth Rexroth. And Kenneth Rexroth had lived in San Francisco already for a couple decades. And Rexroth's importance can't really be overstated, right? I mean, he was a polymath, he was a genius, he was a self-taught linguist, he was already a poet, and he was the sort of the conductor of the literary and arts scene at the time Lawrence comes to San Francisco. Rexroth himself was an anarcho-pacifist. He had already translated poems from Japan, from China, from Spain. On Fridays, he'd hold these salons in his apartment called the Friday nights, or the weeknights. And at these meetings, you can only imagine there were philosophers, sure, there were poets, there were artists, but there were also longshoremen, and union organizers, and teachers. And they would come together and discuss theology, and politics, and philosophy, and poetry, and the proper response to the Cold War, which was beginning to feel like it was limiting human freedom. And so, this was really kind of a West Coast think tank, the libertarian circle. And Ferlinghetti met many folks there, and he and Rexroth became really good friends, and they worked together for quite a while.

[00:17:21] Host: And so, this relationship you mentioned with Peter Martin, the publisher of, only at this point, a couple of issues of City Lights, it was a magazine, correct? Published some of Ferlinghetti's translations of Jacques Prévert. But that relationship was the key to the kingdom, really. Tell us about what happened.

[00:17:52] Woods: It was a really, really important relationship. And this is one of the things I try to really underscore in my book, that Laurence Ferlinghetti was an exceptional contributor to, you know, he was a public intellectual in the 20th century, he was a giant, for sure. But he had really important relationships, and it's through these relationships that the sort of avant-garde begins to bloom. So, he has this relationship with Peter Martin. And Peter Martin is a sociology instructor at the time. He is also the son of a very important Italian labor organizer named Carlo Tresca. Tresca was assassinated in 1943 in New York. But before then, Tresca was a journalist and an organizer, and he was the publisher of an Italian anti-fascist newspaper called Il Martello. And Il Martello, of course, brought the idea of Italian anarchism to the United States labor movement and to the sort of culture of dissent. And the reason I'm telling you all this is because this is where, this is the water Peter Martin swam, and he himself was a dissident. He believed fiercely in the power of literacy as a non-negotiable ingredient of a functioning democracy.

So, Peter Martin publishes Ferlinghetti's poems by Laurence Ferling, still at the time, he was still going by that name. And the two meet by chance in person, apocryphally, the story is sort of apocryphal, but they meet by chance on the sidewalk, and Peter Martin is out there putting out his racks of books on Columbus Avenue. And they say, “Oh, you're Laurence Ferling.” “Oh, you're Peter Martin.” “Yes, you published my poems.” “Oh, terrific.” And they shake hands, and they begin to develop a friendship. And they find they have a lot in common, the dissatisfaction with the sort of elite stuffy book culture is one of them. Shortly, they decide that they were going to try their hand at their own bookstore. On a handshake and a $500 investment, they decide to open up City Lights at 261 Columbus Avenue, right between North Beach and Chinatown. And in those early days, they stocked radical pamphlets and anti-fascist newspapers and paperback books, and they could not close their doors at midnight when they closed. There was a real need. It became a literary meeting place. There was a hunger for this kind of thing. There were poets and activists and laborers and sanitation workers and teachers and all sorts of folks would come and hang out at the bookstore. And it was the first paperback bookstore in the country. And this is important to note because at the time, the paperback was a radical tool.

[00:21:09] Host: And that's a radical tool because it's accessible at this point. And it's fascinating because it kind of parallels Ferlinghetti's idea of what poetry should be, which is accessible. Taking it out of the university and out of the elite and putting it into the common household. And I mean, we can't imagine a bookstore without paperbacks at this point.

[00:21:39] Woods: Exactly. Exactly. And up until that moment, paperbacks had a mixed reputation, mostly a bad reputation, because-

[00:21:49] Host: They were like the comic books or the video games. Exactly.

[00:21:52] Woods: Or the Westerns or the-

[00:21:55] Host: Rotting the minds of the youth. Yeah.

[00:21:57] Woods: Exactly. These were not fit to improve you. And believe it or not, in the 1950s, I mean, I think the bookstore establishment was still in the sway of this elite book culture that meant to instill Victorian values in its readers. But in Ferlinghetti and Martin's hands, the paperback becomes a tool of revolution because it was extraordinarily accessible. Not just in people's homes, as you say, but literally in people's pockets. Right? And these weren't literature that would rot your mind, but literature that would hopefully transform society.

[00:22:38] Host: Right. Change the world. Yeah.

[00:22:39] Woods: Change the world.

[00:22:41] Host: It's really hard to separate City Lights and Lawrence Ferlinghetti from the Beats. I mean, we all, even if you have a minimal knowledge of it, you will kind of... Funny, I'm wearing an Allen Ginsberg shirt right now. But Lawrence didn't really consider himself a Beat, even though he was a part in publishing and supporting. That's not really how he saw himself.

[00:23:12] Woods: Yeah. No, you're exactly right. He was like Rexroth, sort of a conductor of the kind of literature that he felt would be transformative, that he felt could snap people out of their trance of conformity and materialism that could be a tool. He more considered himself one of the last of the Bohemians, really. And I think that the significant difference comes in the fact that he felt that perhaps the Beat writers, especially someone like Kerouac, were more disengaged and not interested necessarily in engaging in social transformation or the political world. And Lawrence was deeply engaged. In fact, in Donald Allen's really important 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry, Lawrence writes that only the dead are disengaged and I'm not dead. And so I'm going to be as plugged into what's going on around me as possible. And Lawrence's own signature style was a sort of... A style more like Jacques Prévert, like addressing authority in a sort of populist sidewalk style of poetry. He published the Beats, but he was not necessarily himself, you know, a Beat writer.

[00:24:46] Host: You say sidewalk style or this concept of street poet. There's an element, and you were talking about Rexroth's Salons, there's an element of performance to it, almost like the poems needed to be read out loud and taken in aurally. And it reminds me of kind of where we are with our current state of poetry with performance poetry and slam poetry.

[00:25:13] Woods: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, if you think about William Carlos Williams, who's, of course, the generation before, but William Carlos Williams is a really important sort of force in what comes to be called the San Francisco Renaissance, really mid-century poetry. And you think about that line from the Greeny Asphodel, I'm not sure if that's the right title, but you think about one of William Carlos Williams' most famous lines is that it's difficult to get the news from poetry, but people die every day for lack of what is found there. And William Carlos Williams, you know, is the one who writes a letter of introduction to Allen Ginsberg, when Ginsberg leaves New York and goes to San Francisco, and here, take this letter and go meet Kenneth Rexroth, you know, do yourself a favor. And there's this notion that poetry should be immediate, it should address what's happening, it should be observational, it should be, you know, some people might say, dismissively opportune, it should take advantage of what's going on around you. One of the great examples, I think, from Ferlinghetti's work is his poem called Dog, which was published in his 1958 best-selling collection, Coney Island of the Mind. It's so quintessential Ferlinghetti, the humor, the observation, the insight, the not-so-subtle questioning of authority, calling out the limits to human freedom, and giving some advice to live by.

[00:26:50] Host: So I want to look at, now, the publishing wing. Yeah. So in 1955, there was kind of a separation between Peter Martin and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. And once Peter left, Lawrence launched City Lights Press and launched the Pocket Poet Series.

[00:27:12] Woods: That's right.

[00:27:13] Host: And within a couple of years, that series became infamous. When Ferlinghetti was charged with selling and publishing obscene material for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl. And fascinating story.

[00:27:31] Woods: Yeah.

[00:27:32] Host: And definitely something that has stamped this man and this bookstore in infamy. Yeah. But I would rather talk about reading your book, I was more fascinated because I didn't know about it, the obscenity trial over Lenore Kandel's The Love Book.

[00:27:53] Woods: Yeah. Yeah. The Love Book. Exactly. Exactly.

[00:27:56] Host: Because that one, I mean, and especially, you can talk about how it ended differently and maybe the reasons of why it ended differently from Howl. Yeah.

[00:28:08] Woods: Yeah. So Lenore Kandel was a poet who was in the San Francisco scene. She was part of the Diggers. She was trying to get her poetry published in the late 1960s. So this is about 10 years after the Howl trial. And so Lenore is writing Lawrence letters and saying, you know, you really need more lady poets. And Lawrence had published a few women poets by this point. Denise Levertov of the Black Mountain School, for example, was part of the Pocket Poet Series. But Lawrence, for whatever reason, declines to publish what she's got. And she does finally get her book called The Love Book published. And it was a very frank exploration of female sexuality and female sexual pleasure. And of course, Lawrence said, you know, we'll definitely sell it in City Lights. And sure enough, the book came under scrutiny for obscenity. And although Lawrence didn't publish it and wasn't really charged with obscenity, he was involved in the obscenity trial as a witness and as sort of a counselor, if you will, because by then he had this well-earned reputation for promoting freedom of expression and literary expression.

So he recommended something that worked very well in the Howl trial. He collected a group of San Francisco State literature professors to come and testify on behalf of The Love Book and say, you know, this is literature, it has redeeming social importance. And that was one of the things that the Howl trial had made clear in 1957, that if literature has redeeming social importance, then it can't be considered obscenity. And so these professors, you know, testified to the fact that this book was not obscene, Lenore Kandel’s. Oh, and the local minister's wife came and testified to it and said, you know, this is a really beautiful book, etc. But Lenore Kandel lost that trial and The Love Book sort of languished for a while until it was able to be republished a few years later. But it's just so interesting, I think the difference, you know, in terms of the gender dynamic, while Allen Ginsberg's Howl was, you know, frankly addressed male homosexual desire, Lenore Kandel’s frank address of female heterosexual desire was thought to be much more dangerous, perhaps, much more prone to obscenity, you know, how could you have a woman talking about, you know, all these things?

[00:30:58] Host: And then how it also, the difference in the trajectory of their careers, too, looking at who Ginsberg, you know, this kind of icon of poetry, like, that case did so much for him. And again, like, I didn't know about the story of Lenore Kandel until I read this book.

[00:31:21] Woods: Yeah, Lenore Kandel is really interesting in many ways, her influences are shared by many other of the San Francisco Renaissance era poets in the Bay Area at the time, you know, Eastern religious mysticism, things like that, the natural world, romanticism in terms of, you know, feeling over reason, you know, all these things she shares with the community. So really, there's only one thing she doesn't share. And that is she's writing really frankly about female sexual desire. For sure, the Howl trial launched Ginsberg's career. And Ginsberg really made use of his platform in many, many really important and interesting ways, just as Lenore Kandel did. I mean, they were at future be-ins together, you know, on the stage together, Lenore Kandel and Allen Ginsberg. So I think she had a short lived but productive role in the sort of descent that was happening. But one of the things that her trial also sort of underscores for us, I think, for me as a literary historian, is that even in a movement like the diggers, you know, this street, sort of utopian society, street theater, collective, women had traditional gender roles. I mean, they were supposed to be the nurses and the cooks. I mean, so-

[00:32:40] Host: Yeah, raise the children.

[00:32:41] Woods: How utopian is this really? It's just sort of recapitulating that, you know. But then again, this is the very early days of second wave feminism. And I think things change pretty quickly. And City Lights begins to respond to the changes in feminist cultures and things like that.

[00:33:01] Host: I also want to look at one of the fascinating things in reading this book and studying City Lights and Lawrence Ferlinghetti brought international poets to the attention of American readers. Oh, yeah.

[00:33:14] Woods: Yeah.

[00:33:14] Host: Through translation. I mean, starting with Jacques Privert, but also, you know, with City Lights, the New Young German Poets, the Red Cats featuring Russian poets, Italian poets, and all who had a belief in something greater than themselves or a conviction or a cause. Poets that were capturing their moment in history. Yeah. And I love that it's, you know, it wasn't just poets that were sounded like Ginsburg.

[00:33:46] Woods: Yeah, right.

[00:33:47] Host: And that just makes me think of, like, The Beatles for some reason, or like bands, you know, international bands that at that time were trying to sound like The Beatles because they knew it was successful. But bringing that to America and bringing that to, you know, we wouldn't have these international poets if it weren't for City Lights.

[00:34:12] Woods: Yeah, I mean, City Lights was a critical purveyor of global literature, and they still are today in 2026. They really, in the 1970s, established one of the earliest sections for what was then called third world literatures with the bookseller Paul Yamazaki carrying on this tradition of foregrounding global literature. And the story is so interesting, as you rightfully suggest that Lawrence really was on the lookout for anti-fascist poetry from all over the world. And he ended up publishing Soviet poets and East German poets and Italian poets, but also Cuban poets and poets from Nicaragua and poets from India, all of whom shared this sort of passion for dissent, for naming the factors in society which limit human freedom. And I love, you rightfully, you know, point to this really interesting controversy. He was working with the ethnologist and poet Jerome Rothenberg on the volume of German poets, you know, and this is early on in the Cold War. It's, you know, the 1950s and or the early 1960s. And Ferlinghetti is kind of telling Rothenberg, go find me some poets who sound like Allen Ginsberg. And I just imagine Jerome Rothenberg throwing down his pen and he tells Ferlinghetti in a letter, look, we can publish a volume that's called Poets Who Sound Like Allen Ginsberg, but that's not going to capture the real energy of what's going on in different countries. And the one thing about Lawrence that people who knew him well agree upon is that he was very stalwart in his beliefs. He stood on a consistent moral ground, but he could be convinced by good arguments. And in the end, I believe Jerome Rothenberg convinced him that we need to look for the local genius, right? And I think that's the strength of the Pocket Poets series over the years, that it features so much genius from around the world of avant-garde, poetry of dissent, poetry celebrating freedom.

[00:36:40] Host: And really creating careers for some of these poets. Absolutely. Giving them opportunities to not just publish their poetry, but to come and teach in the United States and have life outside of kind of the confined existence that they were in.

[00:36:58] Woods: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

[00:37:01] Host: I want to talk about, so Ferlinghetti's pacifist, anti-fascist, anti-authoritarian, anti-totalitarian politics that were front and center around everything he did, as we've talked about. Near the end of his life, what was his response to where we as a country and society were headed in that first term of Trump's presidency? And then how do you think he would react as we're kind of being pushed into full-blown authoritarianism right now?

[00:37:39] Woods: It's such an important question. And if you don't mind, I'll go back a little before the first Trump presidency. In 2007, Ferlinghetti wrote and widely performed a very important poem called Pity the Nation. And Pity the Nation really is written in response to the issues that were vexing human freedom at that day. And Ferlinghetti was particularly troubled by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in particular, the news of torture coming out of Guantanamo. He wrote this poem, Pity the Nation, in response to that. He starts off by lamenting the nation whose people are sheep, whose people know no other languages but their own, who don't stand up to authoritarianism. And this was in 2007. And if you look around today, you see that this poem is getting a lot of currency on people's social media feeds, and people are writing articles about it. And in fact, the lines from Pity the Nation are now City Light's storefront, most recent wheat paste series of storefront banners, Pity the Nation, whose people are sheep. And it was a really important poem. And Ferlinghetti always denounced totalitarianism and authoritarianism, and he nailed it. He was consistent, even if it meant maybe that the bookstore was going to go bankrupt or denying a literary prize. He maintained a really fierce independence because he feared government censorship. I mean, this was a thing that was consistent all through his life. You know, since the Howl trial, government censorship was to be avoided, even if it meant turning down prize money. I think that this makes it all the more important for us today to support institutions that are independent, of course, like our libraries, but also our independent bookstores.

[00:39:51] Host: But is there this experience? I mean, you've spent your whole life practically fighting against this, and then you're nearing the end. And obviously, I mean, you're close to 100, and you're nearing the end. Is there that element of like, we're still here, and this is still happening, and we're still having these same conversations, and things aren't getting better?

[00:40:18] Woods: Yeah. You know, I would hate to presume that he was either melancholy or hopeful. But I know that the very ending of his really beautiful autobiographical novel, Little Boy, which he published on the eve of his 100th birthday, as I said, gives us that existential reminder. The novel ends saying, “you, reader, must decide if the bird cries are songs of despair or songs of hope.” I think that this is all the change and challenges that he had seen in his long life as an activist, poet, publisher, painter, world traveler, editor. I think he still believed, in this existential vision, that we can decide what things mean, we can decide to say no to the teacher and dream up a different world. This is what City Lights was born to do, was born to be a utopian space, to make a space for an alternative vision.

[00:41:32] Host: I'm going to give you maybe a complicated hypothetical.

[00:41:38] Woods: Okay.

[00:41:39] Host: If the world were to end, and all that a future society had of record of our past was Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poetry, what picture would it paint of our history of our existence?

[00:41:54] Woods: Ah, that's a fun question. I think it would paint a picture of a visually rich field of experience, from Goya's painting to Machu Picchu, the beauty, the aesthetic beauty of this world. I think it would paint a picture of the importance of observation. And I think it would paint a picture of humor. There's a lot of humor in his body of poetry, but a sort of keen, sardonic sense of questioning everything. Yeah. So beauty, questioning, humor, yeah. I love it. Yeah. This is what I think that his body of poetry communicates. There's also an urgency, I have to say. His poetry in the 21st century was quite urgent. The North Pole is no longer where it used to be, he writes. He knows that there are life-ending challenges, particularly around climate breakdown and war. But he still urges the readers to seek meaning and make meaning.

[00:43:22] Host: We'd like to thank Gioia Woods, University of Nevada Press, and City Lights Bookstore. Medium History is produced by Past Forward with support from Chapman University's Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, and Dr. Stephanie Takaragawa. For more socially conscious content, visit pastforward.org or follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.