READIN

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

🦋 Happy Birthday, Larry!

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 90 years old today. What a milestone! He is one of my favorite poets -- this evening when I have some time I would like to pick out a couple of his pieces to post here. In the mean time you ought to give him a birthday present by heading over to City Lights and buying a book.

Ooh and look at this! Nick Lowe (the Jesus of Cool) turns 60 today! And Olivia is 9 years old. A good day for birthdays.

posted morning of March 24th, 2009: Respond
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🦋 Ferlinghetti in my life

I was pretty young when I found out about A Coney Island of the Mind -- I bought a copy at one of the bookstores on Telegraph Ave. and it's the first book of poetry I can remember carrying around in high school. I just loved the title! And the poems themselves began gradually to sink in, too... I read them today and they are familiar like old relatives and slightly embarrassing too, like old relatives can be; but it seems to me like there is real beauty in them mixed in with the clumsyness.

I have not lain with beauty all my life

telling over to myself

its most rife charms

I have not lain with beauty all my life

and lied with it as well

telling over to myself

how beauty never dies

but lies apart

among the aborigines

of art

and far above the battlefields

of love

It is above all that

oh yes

It sits upon the choicest of

Church seats

up there where art directors meet

to choose the things for immortality

And they have lain with beauty

all their lives

And they have fed on honeydew

and drunk the wines of Paradise

so that they know exactly how

a thing of beauty is a joy

forever and forever

and how it never never

quite can fade

into a money-losing nothingness

Oh no I have not lain

on Beauty Rests like this

afraid to rise at night

for fear that I might somehow miss

some movement beauty might have made

Yet I have slept with beauty

in my own weird way

and I have made a hungry scene or two

with beauty in my bed

and so spilled out another poem or two

and so spilled out another poem or two

upon the Bosch-like world

A couple of more poems below the fold.

Here is "Spirit of the Crusades," from These are my Rivers (1994). It is a concise, powerful image, it hits you with the same force as his early poems but it is, I think, much more disciplined:

Stony Wales
with its slate-grey roofs
in slate-grey Cardiff
and its greystone houses on greystone terraces
and its great high statue of
"The Spirit of the Crusades"
in the Wales National Museum
portraying a medieval knight
in grey metal armor and helmet
with visor down
on a great grey steed
with four grey foot soldiers
in close march around him
(two at the head of the horse
two behind)
wearing World War One helmets
and carrying World War One rifles
with fixed bayonets
And the Crusades are over
but they are still marching
over the sea-locked land
in a dead march
straight through the twentieth century

In 1997 he published A Far Rockaway of the Heart, which might be my favorite book of his poetry for the way it reflects back on A Coney Island of the Mind from the perspective of a much older, more mature poet. I saw Mr. Ferlinghetti reading from this book and got his signature!

Driving a cardboard automobile without a license

at the turn of the century

my father ran into my mother

on a fun-ride at Coney Island

having spied each other eating

at a French boardinghouse nearby

And having decided right there and then

that she was for him entirely

he followed her into

the playland of that evening

where the headlong meeting

of their ephemeral flesh on wheels

hurtled them forever together

And I now in the back seat

of their eternity

reaching out to embrace them

↻...done

posted evening of March 24th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

🦋 Landscapes

I picked up Ferlinghetti's Landscapes of Living and Dying again this weekend and found myself entranced again by the crystal clarity of his images and by the sparse beauty of his syllables.

For years the old Italians have been dying
all over America
For years the old Italians in faded felt hats
have been sunning themselves and dying
You have seen them on the benches
of the park in Washington Square
the old Italians in their black high button shoes
the old men in their old felt fedoras

with stained hatbands

have been dying and dying

day by day

posted evening of May 10th, 2011: Respond

Saturday, March 24th, 2012

🦋 93

As I grow older I perceive Life has its tail in its mouth and other poets other painters are no longer any kind of competition It's the sky that's the challenge the sky that still needs deciphering — from "Poet as Fisherman" Happy birthday Mr. Ferlinghetti!

posted morning of March 24th, 2012: Respond

🦋 At the end of our little universe

In honor of the man's birthday: here is one of my favorite Ferlinghetti poems.

The Painter's Dream

(from These are My Rivers)

I'm with Picasso and "Fernande in a Black Mantilla" looking tragic with turpentine like rain running down her shoulder

And I'm in Pontoise with Pisarro

And with Gauguin in "The Vanilla Grove"

And in the "Mountains of St. Remy" with Van Gogh

And at "The Bend in the Road through the Forest" with Cézanne

And with Vuillard in "The Place Vintimille"

And with Picasso and "El Loco" and his blue acrobats

And with Picasso shaking his fist at the sky in "Guernica"

And I'm Durer's Steeple-jack seen by Marianne Moore

And those harpies "The Demoiselles of Avignon" are glaring at me personally

And Degas' ballet dancers are dancing for Matisse and Monet and Renoir and all the Sunday painters of Paris and John Sloane and all the Sunday painters of America and most of the painters of the Hudson River School floating along so calm and holding hands with most of the West Coast Figurative painters and their Have a Nice Day cohorts

But I'm also with Malevich in his "Red Square" in the Beautiful Corner

And with Delacroix' "Liberty Leading the Masses"

And with Goya's groaning masses in "The Disasters of War"

And I'm rocking across the Atlantic with "Whistler's Mother"

And I'm crossing the Delaware with Washington standing in the boat against Navy regulations

And I'm with Bierstadt crossing the Rockies on a mule

And with Motherwell and DeKooning and Kline and Pollock and Larry Rivers in the broken light in the shaken light of the late late late twentieth century

And then I'm walking through a huge exhibition in the Whole World Museum of Art containing all the greatest paintings of the entire fine arts tradition of all the centuries of western civilization

When suddenly a wild-haired band bursts into the Museum and starts spraying paint-solvent onto all the paintings

And all the paint in all the paintings starts to run down onto the floors of all the galleries forming fantastic new and exciting images of the end of our little universe

And elite curators in Gucci shoes rush in and cut up the painted floors and hang them on the walls while picturesque bohemian painters in berets stagger through the halls weeping

posted afternoon of March 24th, 2012: 3 responses
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Saturday, October 18th, 2014

🦋 Two faces of modern poetry

In one of his classes, Amalfitano said: the birth of modern Latin American poetry is marked by two poems. The first is "The Soliloquy of the Individual," by Nicanor Parra, published in Poemas y antipoemas, Editorial Nascimento, Chile, 1954. The second is "Trip to New York," by Ernesto Cardenal, published in a Mexico City magazine in the mid-'70s (1974, I think, but don't quote me on that), which I have in Ernesto Cardenal's Antologí­a, Editorial Laia, Barcelona, 1978. Of course, Cardenal had already written "Zero Hour," "Psalms," "Homage to the American Indians," and "Coplas on the Death of Merton," but it's "Trip to New York" that to me marks the turning point, the definitive fork in the road. "Trip" and "Soliloquy" are the two faces of modern poetry, the devil and the angel, respectively (and let us not forget the curious fact -- though it may be much more than that -- that in "Trip" Ernesto Cardenal mentions Nicanor Parra). This is perhaps the most lucid and terrible moment, after which the sky grows dark and the storm is unleashed.

Those who disagree can sit here and wait for Don Horacio Tregua, those who agree can follow me.

--Roberto Bolaño, Woes of the True Policeman

• Parra, Soliloquio del individuo, translated by Ferlinghetti as "Soliloquy of the Individual" -- here is a recording of Ginsberg reading the translation, though annoyingly cut off before the end. Here is a recording of Parra reading.
• Cardenal, Trip to New York. (Annoying -- this is a Google Books preview and only the first page is available; I haven't been able to find a link to the original text.) (Or possibly there are more than one poem of that title by Cardenal -- I just found a link to the first page of a poem called Viaje a Nueva York which begins differently than that one.) (Update -- we'll know soon enough, I just bought the 78 Laia Antología via AbeBooks...)

  posted morning of October 18th, 2014: Respond
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