SF's Poet Laureate Genny Lim: Finding inspiration in North Beach, jazz and humans

The clacking of cable cars, the whipping bay winds and the bray of the fog horn were all among the rhythms of Genny Lim’s childhood growing up on a sharp San Francisco hill overlooking the bay in North Beach. It’s a view that’s inspired many a poetic impulse, so it’s only appropriate Lim would also find a life path toward poetry.

“The place is very important,” Lim said sitting in her Rincon Hill apartment. “North Beach is very important, and the whole era; the rock, the 60s, they’re all in my poetry.”

Last year, then-Mayor London Breed named Lim San Francisco’s poet laureate, the first Chinese-American to hold the post. It’s a culmination of a truly artistic San Francisco life, from her childhood growing-up in North Beach haunting the area’s famous City Lights bookstore to singing in rock bands to exploring the issues of cultural identity as the daughter of Chinese immigrants.

“It was an inspiring neighborhood,” Lim said. “It was all Sicilian, Italian and we were the first Chinese family in that neighborhood and that alley.”

NBC Bay Area

NBC Bay Area

Growing up on Winter Place alley in North Beach, Lim could hear the clanging of cable cars and could see Angel Island, where her parents first landed in the new world, only to be detained for a time at the Angel Island Immigration Station. Her mother remembered looking out the barracks window as boats pulled in delivering witnesses to vouch for the detainees. Later in life Lim would help catalog the poems scrawled by detainees on the detention center’s walls, which became the book Island.

“I was drawn always to the arts,” Lim said. “I had a secret life where I would pretend I was an actor or a dance, it never occurred to me to be a poet.”

Lim’s father worked at the Fairmont Hotel as a janitor and sometimes as a bellboy. Her mother worked as a sewer in Chinatown. With her parents at work, she and her six siblings would roam the streets of Chinatown and North Beach. Sometimes she and her sister would slip into City Lights Bookstore, founded by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

“I would go down to the basement,” she said, “and I would pluck books off the shelf and I was always attracted to the poetry section.”

Lim’s interests ran along the arts. She sang in a rock band called Glass Mountain, fell in love with jazz — and moved to New York to study journalism at the Columbia Journalism School.

While there, Lim took an interest in dance and theater and considered trying her hand at acting. But there weren’t many parts for Chinese Americans so she decided to take matters into her own pen.

“I could never try out for roles that were suited for white characters,” Lim said. “So I decided I’ll write my own play.”

Her first play, Paper Angels, a story about Angel Island detainees like her parents, was picked up by American Playhouse. A lover of words, she also began to write poetry in the Big Apple and threw herself into the practice after moving back to San Francisco when her dad died.

She would turn out every Friday night to share her poems at the Kearny Street Workshop, the nation’s oldest Asian Pacific American multi-discipline arts organization. She’s since written several plays and numerous books of poetry. Her life is in every line.

“I’m Asian-American,” Lim said. “I have a lot of poems that are influenced by the American culture, and slang, rock and jazz.”

Lim said she hears music when she writes. So it makes sense that often her readings are accompanied by live jazz, a nod to the Beat poets whose poems were imbued with the poetic culture of North Beach. In her position as poet laureate, she shares a post originally occupied by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose legendary City

Lights book store in North Beach became a touchstone in Lim’s youth.

“What he brought to North Beach and City Lights,” Lim said. “It actually provided me with a library as I was growing up.”

Outside Lim’s apartment window, the city was bustling. The Bay Bridge loomed prominently in her view, its roadway lined with billboards announcing advertisements for tech and A.I. companies. Lim says more than ever, she values human connections and artists whose works are a product of the head and heart.

“What’s the point of building more buildings — building A.I. to replace us?“ Lim wondered. “If there’s no connection from one person to another, we’re lost.”

These are the types of thoughts and questions Lim poses in her poems; sometimes biting, sometimes cynical but always honest. She laughs that people are often surprised to find she’s much more jovial in person than her poems might let on. But there are things to be said, and so she sometimes delivers those ideas with words cloaked in color and rhythm.

“Poetry and music, all the arts — we come from intuition, we come from the place of the soul,” she said. “And that’s why we as poets are here to remind people who we are.”