Ferlinghetti

It reminds me most of a Ferlinghetti line from a poem: “We have despair to spare.”

Neeli Cherkovski, a prolific poet and denizen of beatnik cafes who chronicled the literary ethos of bohemian culture in biographies of Beat Generation writers, including his friends Charles Bukowski and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, died on March 19 in San Francisco.

At the cafe, and at his nearby apartment, Mr. Cherkovski hung out with Mr. Ferlinghetti, a poet and the owner of City Lights, and with other Beat writers, among them Harold Norse, Bob Kaufman and Gregory Corso — “vagabond souls,” as he once called them.

Poet and City Lights co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died two years ago, received the inaugural Literarian prize in 2005.

The activist ethos extends to Ferlinghetti’s hand-painted signs, which hang throughout the store.