review of
Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Back Roads to Far Places
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - May 29, 2021

Around the time of Ferlinghetti's 100th birthday, my friend Karen Lillis invited me to give a reading of Ferlinghetti's work at the excellent bkstore that she manages, Caliban. I gave a short reading (on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/c-FLu6yW_TY - on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/Happy100thFerlinghetti) w/ my friend The Dirty Poet (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11160980-emergency-room-wrestling) & in the process was reminded of how much I like Ferlinghetti's work - even tho I rarely read it. Ferlinghetti died this yr, almost making it to 102.

Recently, I met a woman who met Ferlinghetti, probably at his City Lights bkstore in San Francisco. She sd she hadn't liked him, had found him disagreeable or grumpy or some such. I don't know how old he was when she met him but let's speculate that if it were 30 yrs ago he wd've been 72. Now let's just imagine that he might've only been unpleasant that day - or that he might've gotten more unpleasant as he aged, perhaps that he was very enjoyable company when he was younger. I have no idea whether any of that is true but I can say that from reading his work I find him tantalizingly fascinating.

Back Roads to Far Places is one of those little paperbacks, published by New Directions, that measures 5" X 6&3/16th" X 1/4". The poem is in what I assume to be Ferlinghetti's handwriting & there are drawings, also assumed to be by Ferlinghetti. The text is large & easily readable. My used copy has the extra perq of a gifting note from one friend to another w/ stick figure drawings. The poem begins:

"Let my
Japanese Pen
tel its story

They say it is made
of bamboo shoot
and
does not scatter
drops of black blood
when shaken

You have to put
its foot down
right in the snow
before it will
walk off..._ _ ..........

My typing of it here doesn't do the calligraphy or the justification or the dot & dash sizes justice. There's a drawing of a man's face on this 1st p too, presumed to be LF's.

The whole mode of presentation enhances the content. The feel of it is of a meditative, personal journal. This is what probably many people think of as 'poetry'. I'm not even necessarily that enthusiastic of this idea of what poetry is &, yet, it completely works for me w/ Ferlinghetti.

The last p of the poem says this:

So passing strange mountains
And dropping pine needles
in an envelope
I send you some of my bones

This followed by a similar face drawing to that of the beginning. If this were a present from a friend, I wd love that friend more deeply. Somehow, it seems like a present from Ferlinghetti. I intend to finally read more by him.

p.s. It's worth noting that this edition of the 1971 bk doesn't have an ISBN. As such, to some unfortunate lost souls, It's NOT A BOOK. It is, however, very much a bk. ( )