Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–2021)

If any man alive can be still held responsible for the Beat movement and/or the poetry renaissance of the ’50s and ’60s, it is San Francisco poet and City Lights Booksellers & Publishers co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He was there from the very beginning, helping to create a scene in the Italian North Beach neighborhood that reverberates to this day.

It was the publishing arm of City Lights that propelled East Coast writers such as Allen Ginsburg and Gregory Corso, as well as San show more Franciscans like Kenneth Rexroth and Ferlinghetti himself, into the national spotlight. The landmark Howl obscenity trial, sparked after San Francisco police seized the City Lights paperback, won more notoriety for what Ginsburg, et al, were up to than any lame spot-the-beatnik tours could have ever brought to bear.

The bibliographical note to this slim volume, Ferlinghetti’s own Ars Poetica, marks it as an on-going work in progress starting as a KPFA broadcast in the late ’50s. The main body of Poetry as Insurgent Art reads almost like a collection of daily affirmations, ranging from practical advice to writers—If you call yourself a poet, don’t just sit there. Poetry is not a sedentary occupation, not a “take your seat” practice. Stand up and let them have it—to more philosophical and sensual musings such as—Be a dark barker before the tents of existence—and—Instead of trying to escape reality, plunge into the flesh of the world.

Some of Ferlinghetti’s aphorisms seem antithetical to a movement that worshiped the idea of Jack Kerouac spontaneously writing On the Road on a continuous roll of teletype paper. Advice like—Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking. First thought may be worst thought—seems to place him outside of the spur-of-the-moment crowd.

Of course, Ferlinghetti always argued that he was never a “Beat,” but was rather a bohemian, sort of a proto-Beat, if you will. In her 2004 book, Bohemian Manifesto: A Field Guide to Living on the Edge, Laren Stover breaks down the evolution of bohemianism into five branches: Nouveau, Gypsy, Beat, Zen, and Dandy, any number and combination of which can still be found slouching around the City wherever hipsters congregate, leading to possibly my favorite of his bits of wisdom—Stash your sell-phone and be here now.

The book veers into more abstract attempts to answer the burning question of What is Poetry? some of which bear the brand of the modern world, such as—Poems are e-mails from the unknown beyond cyberspace. ’Erm, … why do I get the feeling that one may not make the cut in a future edition? Others are timeless—It is private solitude made public—psychedelic—Poetry is Van Gogh’s ear echoing with all the blood of the world—religious—It is the street talk of angels and devils—It is made by dissolving halos in oceans of sound—and political—The idea of poetry as an arm of class war disturbs the sleep of those who do not wish to be disturbed in the pursuit of happiness.

It takes him a while to get around to it, but toward the end of the book lies possibly the best definition of poetry I have ever read—Poetry is making something out of nothing, and it can be about nothing and still mean something. Ferlinghetti certainly knows what he’s talking about, and we’re truly lucky to still have him around. show less

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