Lawrence Ferlinghetti – Cultural Revolutionary (1919 to 2021) – my notes
It was 1970. I was on a brilliant drama course at Colchester Tech. We had sessions for the English Speaking Board, often poetry. Second time around, I could choose what to read. I had just discovered Ferlinghetti’s ‘A Coney Island of The Mind,’ twelve years after it was published, and chose from it “Sometime during eternity…” Back then I hammed it up in a mid-Atlantic accent. Students loved it, our tutor did not.
Even in 1970, the notion that Christ is dead (religion is dead) was a massive affront but at seventeen, having been through a C of E education, the sense of freedom this poem gave me and others at the time was palpable. Here it is, these years hence.
SOMETIME DURING ETERNITY
What I love about Ferlinghetti’s poetry is that it is both caustic and optimistic, and blialways ironic, written in everyday vocabulary, as if he’s scribbling poetry at a San Francisco café table, watching the world go by, as in his poem ‘Autobiography’. Though simply structured, the mundane flies into the worldly and the universal within a turn of lines.
Some poems he titles ‘Oral messages’ and the voice is all of Ferlinghetti’s poetry. Often performed with jazz bands, lines are, as it were, cut so that the air flows through them. “Constantly risking absurdity/and death” lays out the poet’s form quite specifically, breaking the lines as if an acrobat swinging on the high wire.
High above, will Beauty fall into the arms of an awaiting “charleychaplin man?” At the close of the poem, the acrobat is “spread-eagled in the empty air/of existence.”
Here Chaplin, the everyman, may or may not catch her: will the underdog grasp this moment in history? Can the poet himself hold on to the air, for this is what Ferlinghetti does in his poems – clings to the air - as they’re really nothing and everything all at once.
Many poets get queasy when talking of Ferlinghetti The Poet. I understand this. He was not a writer of deep and layered poetry, packed with poetic technique.
Consider this though: in a play, the motivations of the characters are acted out. We do not usually see deeply into the psychology of a character, as in a novel. So, in this sense, I find his poetry closer to the stage than the reader.
Ferlinghetti paints pictures of the seen world and acts out scenes from it. And, in a sense, Ferlinghetti was still the journalist of his early years, observing the surface of humanity. Yet, he is not just recording or reflecting or lamenting. His poems are events, and are often a call for action.
Many academics dismiss his poetry as ‘populist,’ at best. Yes, over a million copies of ‘A Coney Island of the Mind’ have been sold and, for so many of us, ‘Coney’ got us into poetry in the first place, right across the globe – ordinary people previously denied contact with poetry outside school found it through Ferlinghetti.
Of course, critics have to acknowledge his City Lights - Ferlinghetti the publisher, translator, organiser, editor and bookshop proprietor. From 1955 on Ferlinghetti published an array of poets, novelists, playwrights and others – and was responsible for the rise of The Beats (Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac etc). Alongside the poetry was the republishing of David Gascoyne’s influential “A short survey of Surrealism” in 1982, for Ferlinghetti was also a painter for sixty years and involved in theatre (five of his short plays make up his ‘Unfair Arguments with Existence’ book – (New Directions paperback1963)
From “philosophical anarchist” to “democratic socialist,” Ferlinghetti always knew which side he was on. A fervent anti-war activist, he railed against the tyranny of the powerful at the top. He campaigned to exclude cars from cities and was never afraid to address America through his poetry, his manifestos.
EXTRACT FROM HIS SECOND MANIFESTO
Written in 1978, the revolutionary dreams of the 1960s were already fading, yet Ferlinghetti’s poetry still cuts with those times and our times.
I hope his legacy is understood: he brought very many people to poetry, to alternative ways of thinking, and introduced writers who may never have been heard without him. His life was a rallying call for the democratisation of the Arts.
I’ll finish with the last part of “The world is a beautiful place.”
EXTRACT FROM ‘THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE’