An excerpt about the Green Street Mortuary marching band on the back cover led me to buy this book without even looking inside the book. Only a true native would know about this weird tidbit!

I consider San Francisco my home town, and Mr. Felinghetti is a defender of the spirit that made the city great. His poems express his activism, passion, and criticism for the city. The poems profess love for the city and its people but also expose its flaws. They are wordy, not haikus. Many have continuous thoughts that never quite take a breath. They are comprehensible, ready for the masses (i.e., me, the poems illiterate). They are simple, yet expressive. They aren’t tender and sweet but are raw and grating, and they deliver the message. This passage was in his inaugural address as the poet laureate of SF: “…The manifesto was not a very original Whitmanian call for a universal poetry, with what I call ‘public surface’ – a poetry with a very accessible commonsensual surface that can be understood by most everyone without a very literate education…”

Three poems stand out for me.
“Challenges to Young Poets” reads similar to the “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” song were advices are shared.
“I Saw One of Them” addresses the homeless in the city; they are not an invisible population in the author’s eyes.
“Dog” roams the city “…with a real tale to tell and a real tail to tell it with…” A rather adorable poem.

In my youth I’ve passed by this nonchalant storefront hundreds of times if not possibly thousands. As an adult, I finally understood the landmark significance of the City Lights Booksellers and Publishers. Opened by a poet, this store grips tightly onto its independent spirit maintaining the few strands of bohemian flavors that remains in North Beach district, which holds dear some of my fondest memories. ( )

Every so often it's good to read something to remind me that poetry doesn't have to be minimal to be good. Not all the poems in this slim volume is a masterpiece, perhaps not even most of them, but a few of them did make me take notice. It's also fun to see the photos reproduced at the end depicting the Beats at various points in their epoch. ( )

A wonderful collection of poems by Ferlinghetti about his beloved San Francisco. Each poem captures a different aspect of the city and its people, what Ferlinghetti loved and what he detested about what happens in his city. One of my favorites of the collection is "A Report on a Happening in Washington Square, San Francisco," which talks not only about a beautiful area of the city, but of lives being joined and lives going their own way. Ferlinghetti's poems give a real, gritty, loving sense of a city for those who live there and for those who know it through visits. ( )