The incredible story behind the quietest room in San Francisco

The Poetry Room, in City Lights Bookstore, is world renowned for its connection to the Beat Generation as well as having one of the nation's largest poetry collections. The Poetry Room, in City Lights Bookstore, is world renowned for its connection to the Beat Generation as well as having one of the nation's largest poetry collections. Photo: Blair Heagerty / SFGate Buy photo Photo: Blair Heagerty / SFGate Image 1 of / 24 Caption Close The incredible story behind the quietest room in San Francisco 1 / 24 Back to Gallery

“Printers ink is the greater explosive,” reads a sign watching over the Poetry Room at City Lights Bookstore.

The aphorism projects a militant tone, but it actually stands contrary to this calm second-story space. Here is the quiet of serenity above busy Columbus Avenue. It's especially so in the early weekday mornings, before North Beach rouses. Sunlight leaks through the room’s bamboo shades. Black-and-white photo prints of poets and musicians Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko hang on thick, aging ivory painted-walls, caked from years of reapplication. Slowly oxidizing paperback pages on stocky mismatched wooden bookshelves await the day's readers.

The words on that poster, a physical manifestation of the Beat Generation’s radical rallying cry, came from the hand of store owner and literary icon Lawrence Ferlinghetti. His language is meant to mobilize all who come here, but keeping with the air of the room, it’s a hushed sort of call to action. It’s an implacable silence, where insurgence can be metered, analyzed, interpreted as loud in resonance but not in volume.

Ferlinghetti opened City Lights’ Poetry Room in 1987, more than 30 years after City Lights itself was founded in 1953. This part of the store used to be a photography studio, and then it was the apartment home of the owner of the neighboring bar Vesuvio, Henry Lenoir. When Ferlinghetti took hold of the space, he designed it to be a singularity, different in feel from the rest of the store. Ascending 24 creaky steps from the store’s main rooms, there’s space to sit down, to sprawl out, to pace and browse. Shelves line the walls of the Poetry Room rather than invade the center. That’s intentional.

“There’s a stillness here that would reflect the kind of topography of the page,” says Paul Yamazaki, standing in the center of the room. “It's like, [with] most poetry, [a lot] of a poetry book is breadth, you know, that you can feel on each page. He wanted to have that in the room.”

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Yamazaki has worked here close to 50 years — since before this room contained its books, before Allen Ginsberg protested at the 1972 Republican National Convention, and Bob Dylan released his eponymous “Dylan” album. He worked here when Ferlinghetti bought the building “at a price that a poet could afford,” and converted the store’s main room from a barbershop to the center of City Lights. The evolution of the Poetry Room came next, inspired in part by Ferlinghetti’s New York provenance.

“I haven't been to another space in the United States where you have as much contemporary poetry as you do here in a commercial space,” Yamazaki says. “Lawrence really wanted to keep it open, spacious since he spent a lot of time on the East Coast.”

“You know,” Yamazaki continues before he pauses, pointing to the window, “he loved this kind of roofscape here, which reminds us of the Lower East Side.”

The window itself really is something special. Daniel Handler (“A Series of Unfortunate Events”) once told the San Francisco Chronicle the Poetry Room was a regular stop on dates with his wife Lisa, and children’s book author Jory John (“All My Friends Are Dead”) more recently described the window — beside Ferlinghetti’s beloved, but frail rocking chair — as one of his favorite places in San Francisco.

“I’ve spent a lot of time sitting upstairs at City Lights, by the window, where you can look toward downtown, dwelling and/or pondering,” he said. “I just love the feeling in there, like nothing’s changed in 35 years, including the furniture and the air. You almost always have that whole room to yourself. Every time I go in there I feel nostalgic for something, but maybe I’m just hungry. Or it’s a combination of nostalgia and hunger.”

They’re hardly alone. This room, and the store itself, have attracted artistic legends over the decades. Besides a recurring cast of Ferlinghetti’s friends like Ginsberg and poet Diane DiPrima, not to mention a last-minute visit by John Cage, Yamazaki’s been struck by walk-ins by jazz acts playing nearby Keystone Korners. He's seen saxophonist Archie Shepp, pianist Cecil Taylor — “a regular visitor” — and drummer Max Roach.

“To be a kind of young music listener working in a bookstore,” he remembers, “the first time Max walks you kinda go, ‘Oh my god.’”

They keep the store going just as much as anybody, though turning a large profit isn't really the point. It’s never been.

“Lawrence and [early employee] Shig [Murao] both felt, and Peter [Martin] afterwards, that one of the major functions in the store was always still kind of to represent the best of radical thought and contemporary literature and to have a place to contemplate it,” he says. “It wasn't just transactional.”

That giving nature of City Lights is best embodied by the Poetry Room. Besides popular titles by Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac (and the dictionary from 1993 in the corner), the library here rotates perpetually, always elevating something new, different, radical, and likely printed by an independent publisher.

“If you are attentive to them, you can really see how they change over seasons, even though it's hard to, because most of these books are spined out and they're very thin,” Yamazaki adds. “It’s really kind of like standing on the edge of a river — the surface looks the same, [but] there's this continual movement all the time.”

San Francisco changes. So does North Beach. But like its literary stock, the Poetry Room is timeless. It feels locked inside an era. Visiting here, and returning over time, does feels nostalgic, though it’s hard to say what exactly one misses. It’s not for the poems themselves, but maybe for the freewheeling encouragement to sit down and reflect on them.

As Ferlinghetti wrote on another sign, in this room he invites you to “educate yourself, read here 14 hours a day.” There’s no better seat than in his wooden rocker, the “poet’s chair,” by the window.

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGATE digital editor. Email: alyssa.pereira@sfgate.com | Twitter: @alyspereira

