Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–2021)

This New Directions paperback from 1958 brings together a selection of poems from Ferlinghetti's first, self-published collection Pictures of the gone world (1955) with two new, longer poems, "A Coney Island of the mind" and "Oral messages".

The title poem, "a kind of circus of the soul," in 29 sections, taking its title from a line of Henry Miller's — is something like the Ferlinghetti version of "Howl", a confrontation between the poet's sensibility and the banality of Eisenhower's show more America. But it's all a lot more playful and literary, full of mischievous echoes of everyone from Wordsworth, Keats and W B Yeats to T S Eliot and James Joyce. Where Ginsberg's lines thump out at you in a merciless rhythm, Ferlinghetti dances down the page in unexpected leaps and pirouettes. And comes to a fabulous conclusion in section 29 where he manages to condense Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake, Anna Karenina, Hemingway, Proust and Lorca (and much else) into about 100 breathlessly unpunctuated lines.

"Oral messages" are jazz poems, meant for live performance but still quite effective on the page, again full of clever puns and literary references that you would probably only pick up on a very subliminal level in performance. "Pictures of the gone world" range a little more widely, with a few nods to the lyrical tradition, but still in the light-footed style of "Coney Island".

The typographic design, with its classic underground "typewriter-style" look, is superb — I loved that they even went as far as using freehand underlining for emphasis instead of italics. Freda Browne is credited as the designer, while the cover is by Rudolphe de Harak. show less

This 1950s poetry collection is the most famous writing by Ferlinghetti, who was also lauded as an activist, publisher, bookseller, and painter. It has three principal sections: the title piece, "Oral Messages," and poems from "Pictures of the Gone World."

The title of the book and its first section was taken "out of context" from Henry Miller's Into the Night Life. Ferlinghetti said that it was to describe the carnivalesque aspect of his own subjective experience in composing the poems. But show more a different and credible reading is to see the US society that the poet engages in his verse as a mental amusement park: corralling minds into circuitous rides that exhilarate, games that impoverish, and technology that dazzles and mystifies. Still, the weight of these poems often rests not in social criticism but in aesthetic contemplation, libidinal impulse, epistemic anxiety, and similar dilemmas.

The second section of the book is "Oral Messages," seven longer poems composed for recitation with "jazz accompaniment" (48), and to incorporate experimentation and spontaneity. Although this mode is a paragon of Beat Generation performance, and Ferlinghetti did publish prominent Beat authors, he rejected the "Beat" label for his own work. My favorite of these poems is "Junkman's Obbligato," which urges downward economic mobility in order to champion life and freedom. But a close second is the diffident brag of "Autobiography" ("I am the man. / I was there. / I suffered / somewhat.") succumbing irregularly to atypical end rhyme.

The final thirteen poems are selected from a volume "Pictures of the Gone World" that Ferlinghetti had written just three years previously. These are similar to some of those in the first section (briefer, and like them individually numbered rather than titled), and they tend toward a narrower and more intimate sensibility--even though the eleventh has the great wide scope of the world as the place for life and death.

Ferlinghetti offers some unflinching anti-Christian blasphemy in the fifth "Coney Island" poem (15-6), but the "Oral Messages" seem to exhibit sincere apocalyptic anticipation ("I Am Waiting") and a hope of obscure divine palingenesis ("Christ Climbed Down").

Despite Ferlinghetti's use of popular culture and accessible idiom, his texts are still in dialog with the canons of elite art and literature. The first poem of the book orients to the painting of Goya to reflect on "maimed citizens in painted cars" (10), and the second one alludes to Homer's Odyssey to indict "American demi-Democracy" (12). Later verses cite Hieronymus Bosch, Morris Graves, Franz Kafka, Dante, Chagall, Proust, and others. The poet fulminates against the enclosure of culture by experts and institutions in poem 9 of "Pictures of the Gone World," but he had an M.A. in English literature and a Ph.D. in comparative literature, and the consequences of this training are everywhere visible in his poems.

Twenty-first century readers may occasionally struggle with a dated allusion or two in these pages (nothing too arcane for a 'net search to remedy, though). Ironically, it is the "popular" and contemporary references from the 1950s that are more likely to have passed into obscurity. On the whole, the verses have aged well and still have a sense of immediacy sixty-four years later. show less

The publisher calls it "A novelistic memoir by famed poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti.”

I say it’s a rich stew of words, a stream of consciousness poem in one long sentence filled with allusions both literary and historic, surreal, sharp, ironic, and a joy to read covering a century of the poet’s life written a year before his death.

Ferlinghetti, himself writes: "And I am just waking in the vortex of past time, as it were a kind of Noctrama, a structure for animals that are show more awake only at night, or the vortex of time thus becomes a poem with an invisible subject like a novel that has no plot but wanders around, in which its characters wander around through life in what would appear to be an aimless fashion, or at least the author has no idea where his back is headed or will end up, just like life itself… " show less

Americus is a rush of somethings old, somethings new, and much that is borrowed that’s melancholy and horrifically true. Ferlinghetti’s poetic fugue is told in the rhythm of his musings on America and Europe through the twentieth century in a rapid rush of verbiage that is musical. But unlike a mental fugue state he remembers everything. It’s ecstatic, punctuated by the horrors of war and the wonders and contractions of life. Starting with a quote from T. S. Eliot the poem is stuffed show more full of allusions and quotes from authors as various as Victor Hugo and Ezra Pound, song lyrics from George M. Cohan and Tuli Kuperberg, and phrases in French, German, and Italian, all of which Ferlinghetti scrupulously footnotes at the end of the book.

It’s a bravo performance by a master poet. show less