In his book on the Beat writers of the 1950s and ’60s, Harvey Pekar wrote, “Poetry and Lawrence Ferlinghetti have done very well for each other.” Ferlinghetti was, with the exception of Allen Ginsberg, the most celebrated figure to rise from the Beat poetry community, but while he managed to sell more than a million copies of his book A Coney Island of the Mind (an unheard of figure for a poetry collection), his love of the form didn’t merely benefit himself. Ferlinghetti was a tireless champion of other writers he admired; he opened one of America’s most celebrated bookstores, San Francisco’s City Lights Books, to promote the sort of literature other shops weren’t w...
Released:
2009
Rated:
n/a
Length:
79 mins