All photos Mukethe Kawinzi, 35mm, Kodak ProImage100 + Ilford HP5 Plus 400
The only good thing left in San Francisco is the annual literary walkabout for Ferlinghetti Day.
Obsession is often inhabited with a frightening possessiveness, but devotional monomania is so much more interesting with a grounding in generosity. Chris Buck loves Lawrence Ferlinghetti and wants you to love him too.
Every year, Buck — an urban arborist by trade — gathers acolytes of the rabble-rouser/publisher, poet/bookseller, bohemian/painter for Ferlinghetti Day, a collective gallivanting through a scattering of spots related to the literary legend. At every stop, local writers step up and honor Lawrence with his own words, reading snippets of his sprawling canon to extant disciples and aimless passersby.
March 24th, 2025. The day started at 7:06 at 706 Wisconsin Street. The day wandered through Potrero Hill, through what-was-once-a-shipyard, down a dead-end alley, down an open-end alley, ’round a Romanesque rotunda. There were paintings and British anarchists via videoconference. Telephone poles were plastered with stickers of a red truck. There were hirsute men singing Leonard Cohen and there were Italians reading in Italian. There were flirtations, shameless and salacious, just like the Beats would have wanted. There was ringing laughter and language crass, common, and cultured, the whole day, the Beats would have wanted it no other way. There was pizza, and wine was had, hours before five o’clock, but wouldn’t the Beats have wanted it that way? There was the increasingly iconic blue stool, whose slight imbalance caused not a single spill. (Ferlinghetti’s ghost watching over us, surely.) There were trees in post-ides bloom, there were poppies, just shy of blood orange and spread-eagle to the sun, and there were, over and over again, from dozens of lips, thrust from page to place after place, from first light to last, poems.
The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it and twelve-plus hours of such breathless exaltation indeed suggests salvation. Buck hopes Ferlinghetti Day reaches the renown of Bloomsday, and there’s no reason why his dream can’t come true. If we’re lucky, it will. Join up in devotion next year, stroll a mile or six in Lawrence’s shoes toward “little old wooden North Beach,” and howl out some verse to keep the poetry of this city alive.
There are an infinite number of good things left in San Francisco. One of the most marvelously meandering things left in San Francisco is the annual literary walkabout for Ferlinghetti Day.
Wordsmiths and wanderers gather annually on March 24th for Ferlinghetti Day, a literary walkabout in honor of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s birthday. Follow @ferlinghetti_day and 3rd Street Creative Artery for images and videos from this year’s celebration, a list of the day’s poets and performers, and to keep abreast of Ferlinghetti Days to come.