Interview #48: Garrett Caples

City Lights editor on Beat legacy

Garrett Caples is a poet. His most recent collection is Lovers of Today (Wave, 2021). He has also written a book of essays entitled Retrievals (Wave, 2014) and a book of stories Proses: Incomparable Parables! Fabulous Fables! Cruel Tales! (Wave, 2024).

An editor at City Lights, he has worked on books by leading Beat writers, Philip Lamantia, David Meltzer, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger and Diane di Prima among many others, and curates the Spotlight poetry series. He lives in San Francisco.

As a pertinent coda to our recent Last Gathering of the Beats focus, Rock and the Beat Generation Founding Editor Simon Warner spoke to Caples about his life as part of the City Lights operation, his own associations with the local poets and those famous photographs showcasing a throng of hip writers and some notable rock stars all captured on film 60 years ago…

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Simon Warner: What is your role at City Lights and how long have you been attached to the business?

Garrett Caples: I’m an editor at City Lights, largely but by no means exclusively working on poetry. City Lights is small, so no one just does one thing here and other people work on poetry just as I also work on prose projects. I had been close friends with Philip Lamantia, who died in 2005, and started doing the odd task for City Lights in 2006. But it was a transitional time at the press and my remit quickly expanded; I edited my first book there in 2008 and have done roughly 70 or so books since.

What I brought to the table was the fact that I was a reasonably successful poet already and knew my way around that world, so I was able to do things like launch a contemporary American poetry series called City Lights Spotlight. I’m working on Volume 26, by Sunnylyn Thibodeaux, even as we speak.

SW: When you joined City Lights, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was still alive. Did you know him?

GC: Yes, Lawrence was a huge part of my being at City Lights. He was retired, of course, but his influence was still fairly potent until he died in 2021. He was not a demonstrative man – very shy and reserved, despite his fame – but he made it clear enough that he liked me and wanted me around.

I don’t know what I did to deserve his approbation, frankly, but it was key to being able to do something like start a new poetry series at the press. Occasionally I served as his assistant, opening mail and so forth, and I got to interview him for the Paris Review on the occasion of his 100th birthday. I feel like I owe him a lot and the only way to repay it has been to help keep what he started still going.

SW: What meaning do those 1965 ‘Last Gathering of the Beats’ photos have for the shop today? Are they still fondly remembered, even talked about?

GC: ‘Fondly remembered’ might be a stretch, just because virtually everyone in the photo is dead; I know the printer Andrew Hoyem is alive, but he’s the only one I can think of off the top of my head. Larry Keenan was always generous about letting City Lights reproduce his images for one project or another.

I know at some point in our history, people could buy Beat-related Keenan photos through City Lights, so he was always in the store’s orbit. There are photos he took from that day hanging in the shop and I’m sure the group photo has been a postcard we’ve sold. These photos always come up.

When Michael McClure died, you better believe the New York Times ran one of the photos of him, Ginsberg and Dylan in the alley. Even if you had no idea who Michael was and didn’t actually read the obit, the photo signifies ‘this guy was famous and important’ because Dylan is there.

But I wouldn’t say they’re top of mind on a day-to-day basis; Lawrence had a definite aversion to nostalgia that he built into City Lights and was constantly looking forward. He did things people don’t even realize, like publish poetry by Black Panthers Erica Huggins and Huey Newton, Insights & Poems (1975).

He was responsible for Paul Celan’s first book appearance in the US, in Jerome Rothenberg’s New Young German Poets (1959). He did a ‘green issue’ of the Journal for Protection of All Beings as early as 1969. Even the pivot to Dylan and rock & roll represents a reorientation away from the Beat era to the then-present counterculture.

The Beat Generation is crucial to City Lights – we’re a world-famous tourist destination and our #1 seller is still Howl – but one of the reasons we’re still here is Ferlinghetti’s stubborn insistence on the present.

On a day-to-day basis, City Lights is more directed toward contemporary issues; my boss, Elaine Katzenberger, for instance, has edited and published two poets from Gaza, Mosab Abu Toha and Nasser Rabah. No one in America had published a full-length book of a Gazan poet when Elaine published Mosab in 2022. I’m proud to be part of such an organization

SW: Would you say those images – whether those on the sidewalk or in the alley behind, whether the poets and artists or those separate shots with Bob Dylan – are part of the store’s collective memory?

GC: I would say it’s something deeper than that, like on a cellular level, rather than on a conscious level. Obviously, grizzled long-timers like myself have picked up a great deal about the history of the place, but everyone who works at City Lights has joined it in progress, and the employees have wildly varying knowledge of the Beat era.

I would go as far as to say some of them aren’t really interested in the Beat Generation as such, but they were drawn to City Lights for what it represents as a leftwing literary organization. Folks have different relationships to its history.

At the same time, the Beat Generation is what has made City Lights a beloved 70-year-old institution. The store comes from an era when print culture occupied a far huger place in human consciousness than it does now. You couldn’t even rent a movie, let alone stream one. TV used to shut off for the night.

Sometimes you had to be alone with your thoughts and maybe a copy of Lunch Poems (1964), while you were on the subway or killing time at a job. The Beats had a kind of popularity that writers, and especially poets, don’t really achieve anymore.

SW: Did you feel as if Ferlinghetti was pleased that had happened or did it become a bit of a burden or a distraction?

GC: Probably a little of both. There are conflicting accounts of how the photos even came together. Lawrence said at the time he was emulating the Paris Surrealists, who always took good group photos, but other times he said it was probably Ginsberg’s doing. Ginsberg was the direct connection to Dylan, of course. But it seems that Keenan was a student of McClure, so Michael asked him to come take pictures.

People call the group photo ‘Last Gathering of the Beat Generation’, which is patently untrue; these people have clearly never heard of Naropa. And the absences – Corso, Lamantia, Snyder, Kaufman, Kyger, Burroughs, Kerouac – are as notable as the poets present.

But the status of the photograph as a demarcation of the end of the Beat period isn’t necessarily inaccurate. December 5th, 1965: on the same day these photos are taken, the Beatles play their last live show in Liverpool. They stopped touring partly because their music was getting too experimental and difficult to reproduce live.

LSD is starting to happen, so we’re on the cusp of the psychedelic counterculture, which begins in San Francisco but is enthusiastically embraced by the Beatles themselves. The name Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is an obvious nod to San Francisco rock, like Big Brother and the Holding Company or Quicksilver Messenger Service.

Sgt. Pepper’s comes out in May 1967, in time to kick off the Summer of Love. The same month, City Lights publishes Philip Lamantia’s Selected Poems and Bob Kaufman’s Golden Sardine; in response to the times, Lawrence bet heavily on surrealism, seeing its parallels to the psychedelic imagination that the Magritte-collecting McCartney, among others, also saw. So 1965 really is a transitional moment in a way that may justify the ‘Last Gathering’ title.

SW: Did you ever talk to David Meltzer about the image? Did you meet or know anyone else who appeared in the frame?

GC: I met Ginsberg in NYC when I was young, well before I had any involvement with City Lights. I’ve never met Andrew Hoyem, though we have corresponded on the odd matter. The two folks I really did get to know were Michael McClure and David Meltzer. I was their editor at City Lights and became good friends with both.

Michael was shy, guarded even, in an interview situation. I think I interviewed him twice. He was very kind and supportive, but distant the way Lawrence was distant. David, however, was wide open; he wasn’t as famous as Lawrence or Michael, and he was much more relaxed about stating his opinion or discussing his past.

We clicked immediately while working on his Pocket Poets book, When I Was a Poet (2011), and were pretty tight till he died. He was the guy I could turn to for advice or commiseration when I had any kind of ‘professional’ problem, in terms of being a writer or an editor. He was a pro; chances were he’d been through an analogous situation.

What I remember David telling me about the encounter was that Dylan gave Ferlinghetti, McClure, and Ginsberg autoharps, with the idea that they could accompany themselves while they recited their poems. That autoharp Lawrence is holding on the cover of The Secret Meaning of Things (1966) or the one Michael has in the film of the Human Be-In (1967), those are the Dylan autoharps.

The idea, of course, was to make poetry more like rock music or at least folk music, more popular, in any event. Being a lifelong guitarist, David regarded these efforts with some amusement. But David was the youngest of the Beats – almost 20 years younger than Lawrence – and was himself a key player in the folk music scene that morphed into the psychedelic rock scene.

He hosted the Monday night jam at the Coffee Gallery and even had his own rock band the Serpent Power, with Clark Coolidge on drums. He had a more sophisticated sense of how poetry could work with music because he was truly in both camps. Certainly, the autoharp experiments aren’t considered highlights of the Beat corpus, but it’s an intriguing moment where a musician influenced by the Beats influences the Beats.

SW: Did Bob Dylan end up stealing the attention of the occasion somewhat?

GC: This I don’t know; probably?

See also: ‘Last Gathering at 60: The final tango?’, December 7th, 2025; ‘Last Gathering at 60: Jerry Cimino’, December 6th, 2025; ‘Last Gathering at 60: A survivor speaks’, December 4th, 2025; ‘Last Gathering at 60: ‘Making meaning’, December 4th, 2025; ‘The Last Gathering Beats’, December 2nd, 2025