Going there for the first time
it was so much smaller then
that crowded downstairs full of poetry
racks of tattered little mags against the wall
those rickety white tables where folks sat reading/writing
Vesuvio’s was like an adjunct office
Arriving again a year later, two kids in tow
Lawrence gave me a huge stack of his publications
“I’ve got books” he said “like other people have mice”
And North Beach never stopped being mysterious
when I moved out here in 1968
that publishing office on Filbert & Grant was a mecca
a place to meet up with my kids if we got separated
during one of those innumerable demonstrations
(tho Lawrence worried, told me I shd keep them
out of harm’s way, at home) I thought they shd learn
whatever it was we were learning—
Office right around the corner from the bead store
where I found myself daily, picking up supplies
How many late nights did we haunt the Store
buying scads of new poems from all corners of the earth
then head to the all-night Tower Records full of drag queens
& revolutionaries, to get a few songs
And dig it, City Lights still here, like some old lighthouse
though all the rest is gone,
the poetry’s moved upstairs, the publishing office
right there now too & crowds of people
one third my age or less still haunt the stacks
seeking out voices from all quarters
of the globe
I discovered City Lights in '71 while in college. Took me 40 years to get there. How wonderful it must have been to experience it in the early days of it.
Diane di Prima. WOW. What else have I been missing!? I feel ashamed. I did not know about her. Beautiful soul. Now I've read some book reviews on the internet. Found some of her poetry too. But not a single book in the library - not in the whole Helsinki-area. None among the oldbooks stores either. Not in the whole country. (That is Finland.)And it made me wonder. Why such a silence? Such a huge void. I have always felt the feminists in my country got it all wrong, but now I'm convinced. Thank God there is bookshops on the internet. Thank God for Poetic Outlaws. This site is like a torch in the great void.