LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
The Isolation Blues;
reflections during covid-19
“Am I the consciousness of a generation or just some old fool sounding off and trying to escape the dominant materialist avaricious consciousness of America?”
From a line in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s book “Little Boy” a stream of consciousness novel published around the time of his 100th birthday
RIP to Lawrence Ferlinghetti; eternal hero, liberator of the amusement park mind, the quiet bookstore clerk as 1-man molotov, the impassioned, fundamentally decent, serrated furtive genius who came as close as anyone to writing the blueprint for how to fight the modern sickness. As long as Ferlinghetti was alive, a sliver of hope remained. A psychic ballast anchoring the spot on Columbus Avenue, the keepsake of ancient dreams & dimly remembered fables. Who wrote visionary & incisive poems into his 90s. Speaking to him was a sacred rite. Rest in poetry.
Tribute written by Jeff Weiss; a music journalist, critic and editor from Los Angeles, his blog is Passion of the Weiss
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Since April is National Poetry Month I am profiling one of our poetry greats who recently passed away at the age of 101, Lawrence Ferlinghetti who was the owner of City Lights Bookstore in San Fransisco as well as an independent book publisher, poet, novelist, artist and radical rabble-rouser. Ferlinghetti was present at The Six Gallery on October 7, 1955 when Allen Ginsberg first read his explicitly brilliant poem “Howl.” The next day he sent Ginsberg a telegram, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript of Howl?” Ferlinghetti published Ginsberg’s first book of poems titled “Howl” and the two of them were arrested on obscenity charges and went to trial in 1957 (both were acquitted). City Lights Bookstore and Publishing became a hub and headquarters for inadvertent thinking and revolutionary experimentation. The book store policy encouraged browsing and hanging around as long as you needed to. Some of his home-made signs read, “Have a Seat and Read a Book,” “Books Not Bombs,” and “Read Here Now.” Ferlinghetti published his own first book of poetry in 1958 titled “A Coney Island of the Mind” which went on to sell over a million copies. In the introduction it says the poems “were meant to be performed aloud with a jazz accompaniment.”
I came across an interview where Ferlinghetti was talking about his friend and fellow writer Thomas Merton who was a Trappist monk at Gethsemane Monastery in Kentucky. (They both had book contracts with the same publisher, New Directions.) He told the story of how Merton stopped in San Fransisco on his famous trip to the East in 1968 for a dialogue with Buddhist and Catholic monastics where Merton would tragically die in Bangkok while delivering a lecture. Ferlinghetti picked Merton up at the airport on October 14th and Merton stayed at the City Lights editorial apartment that night on 485 Filbert Street. The two of them walked to Alvina’s Coffeehouse on the corner of Grant and Union that evening and sat at a table in the front window talking poetry, world affairs and watching the women walk by. Lawrence joked that it was a natural Trappist interest, why not? In Merton’s book “The Asian Journal” that chronicles his trip to the East, October 15th is the first entry as he is on the plane leaving San Fransisco heading to Honolulu. Merton is lamenting the excess baggage fee he had to pay for bringing too much luggage and he writes in his journal, “Lesson number one: not to travel with so many books. I bought more yesterday, unable to resist the bookstores of San Fransisco.” I wonder what bookstore he was referring to?
Here are a couple of my favorite Lawrence Ferlinghetti poems. I hand copied them into a notebook when in true Ferlinghetti fashion I leisurely browsed and spent most of the day in a bookstore (that also had a cafe). Of course, try as I might I still ended up purchasing more books than I intended.
from A Coney Island of the Mind
4.
In a surrealist year
of sandwich men and sunbathers
dead sunflowers and live telephones
when some cool clown
pressed an inedible mushroom button
and an inaudible Sunday bomb
fell down
catching the president at his prayers
on the 19th green.
O it was a Spring
of fur leaves and cobalt flowers
when Cadillacs fell through the trees like rain
drowning the meadows with madness
while out of every imitation cloud
dropped myriad wingless crowds
of nutless Nagasaki survivors
and lost tea cups
full of our ashes
floated by...
from A Far Rockaway of the Heart
4.
The present is a chance event
that stretches on and on
into the future
and becomes it.
The present is a piece of time
a hollow arrow flying both ways
through the universe
an endless happening
with some mute rhyme or reason
a post-modern happenstance
performed by some joker in a swallowtail coat
or the Pope
or some great happener
and flesh be grass
that bends and dies
in every season
even as at this instant
a man in striped pajamas
comes out on
an uptown balcony
and drops his house key
to an eternal woman on the sidewalk
but the shining key misses
her outstretched hand
and falls through a sewer grating
in the city of New York
and disappears forever
into the greater mystery.
46.
And every poem and every picture
a sensation in the eye and heart
something that jolts you awake
from the rapt sleep of living
in a flash of pure epiphany
where all stands still
in a diamond light
transfixed
revealed
for what it truly is
in all its mystery
so a bird is an animal
flown into a tree
singing inscrutable melodies
as a lover stands transparent
screened against the sun
smiling darkly in the blinding light.
Still in the woods,
Dave
April 12, 2021