New York Times's on Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Novel-Memoir To the Light House

Legendary San Francisco poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti has had an unlikely friendship with his literary agent, Sterling Lord, for six decades. The two, who met in the height of the sixties, continue to inspire (and perhaps, entertain) each other, most recently while putting together Ferlinghetti's near-memoir To the Light House, a project that has held Ferlinghetti's attention for the last twenty years. More:

SAN FRANCISCO — The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was sitting at his kitchen table in his North Beach apartment on a drizzly morning, telling a story about Allen Ginsberg, when he hopped up suddenly and bounded out of the room to retrieve his hearing aid.

“At my age, if it’s not one thing, it’s another,” he said cheerfully.

Tall and agile at 97, with a neatly trimmed gray beard and oval tortoise shell glasses that magnified his glassy blue eyes, Mr. Ferlinghetti could pass for a man in his 70s. He still writes almost every day — “When an idea springs airborne into my head.”

Mr. Ferlinghetti is one of the country’s most prominent poets, and arguably its most successful: His 1958 collection “A Coney Island of the Mind,” which was published by New Directions, has sold more than one million copies. Over the last 61 years, he’s published around 50 volumes of poetry.

His latest work is unlike anything he’s ever written. After retrieving his hearing aide, Mr. Ferlinghetti got up again and returned to the kitchen with a cardboard box stuffed with reporter’s notebooks, numbered up to 78. He set it on the table, next to a bowl of fruit and a half-empty bottle of merlot.

The box holds the first draft of a novel he’s been working on, in fits and starts, for the last 20 years. “I think it’s a new genre,” he said.

The book, titled, “To the Light House,” blends autobiography, fiction and surrealist riffs on mortality, nature and consciousness. It’s the closest thing to a memoir that he’ll ever write, he said.

Mr. Ferlinghetti’s project came as a happy surprise to his longtime literary agent, Sterling Lord, who has been badgering his client to write his autobiography for nearly two decades. Mr. Ferlinghetti has repeatedly spurned the idea. “I’ve stopped asking him,” Mr. Lord said.

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