Who Is Ferlinghetti?
J J R (jrovira@juno.com)
Sat, 14 Nov 1998 12:55:36 -0500 (EST)
I picked up this article from a website devoted to the Beat poets that
you can
find at:
http://www.charm.net/~brooklyn
Jim
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Born: March 24, 1919
Birthplace: Yonkers, New York
Born in New York, Lawrence Ferlinghetti earned a doctoral degree in
poetry at the Sorbonne in Paris with a dissertation entitled 'The City
as Symbol in Modern Poetry: In Search of a Metropolitan Tradition'. In
fact he was about to become part of a metropolitan tradition himself,
because after leaving Paris he moved to San Francisco, which was about
to discover the Beat Generation.
Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin started a magazine there called 'City
Lights,' named after the Charlie Chaplin movie. He and Martin
established their offices on the second floor of a building on Broadway
and Columbus in North Beach. They decided to open a bookstore on the
floor below as a side venture, naming it after the magazine. The City
Lights Bookstore became one of the most famous bookstores in the world,
and still stands proudly in its original location.
Doing double-time as a businessman and a poet, he began publishing
original books by himself and others under the City Lights name, most
notably the 'Pocket Poets Series.' The idea of Pocket Poets was to make
poetry books easily affordable, and the small attractive paperback
volumes are still a common sight today. Ferlinghetti published Allen
Ginsberg's 'Howl' as Pocket Poets Number Four, and was tried on
obscenity charges for this. He was declared innocent, a landmark victory
for free speech.
Ferlinghetti's own poems are simple and speak plainly, and they remain
tremendously popular with a wide range of readers. In 1958 he published
a volume with one of my all-time favorite titles, 'A Coney Island of the
Mind' (and in 1997 published a follow-up volume named after a Queens
beach not far from Brooklyn's Coney Island, 'A Far Rockaway of the
Heart.')
In the early 60's Ferlinghetti owned a rustic cabin in Big Sur that
became the focal point of Jack Kerouac's 1962 novel 'Big Sur.'
Ferlinghetti appears in the book as the sensible Lorenzo Monsanto, who
urges the drunken celebrity author based on Kerouac to go on a nature
retreat to stop drinking, with terrible results.
Ferlinghetti was one of the more politically-minded of the Beats, and
has been continually active on behalf of liberal causes. He attributes
his pacifist consciousness partly to his wartime experiences: he had
been sent to Nagasaki, Japan six weeks after the city was destroyed by
the world's second atomic bomb.
Ferlinghetti is still active today as a poet and as the proprietor of
City Lights. Two of his poems can be read here and here. I hope I won't
seem politically incorrect for saying this, but after immersing myself
in the writings of the guilt-obsessed asexual Jack Kerouac, the
ridiculously horny Allen Ginsberg and the just plain sordid William S.
Burroughs ... it's nice to read a few poems by a guy who can get excited
about a little penny candy store under the El or a pretty woman letting
a stocking drop to the floor.
Bibliography of Ferlinghetti's Works
(Thanks to Larry Keenan for the photograph used to create the stamp at
the top of this page)
Literary Kicks
by Levi Asher
--------- End forwarded message ----------
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