Appreciating Lawrence Ferlinghetti: “What it takes for a revolution is hunger and passion.”

By Don Paul~Puppetgov

The past is precious in the life it eternally revives. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, author of A Coney Island of the Mind, publisher of Howl, anti-war activist, and painter, is now 90. For a quarter-century–between 1979 and 2004–he was my neighbor in San Francisco’s North Beach, strolling or peddling to the City Lights Bookstore that he’d co-founded in the middle of McCarthy-era repression. His long strides, his visage like a seacaptain’s, and his musing blue eyes were regularly a pleasure to encounter.

In January 2005 my review of Lawrence’s Americus I came out in the online publication Beyond Chron. That review, reprinted below, meant to offer tribute to a life’s work. The poems, paintings, video, and quotes that further follow here on the good ship Puppetgov are meant as more celebration of the worlds that L F has sought to deliver and preserve.

Review of Americus I ‘Loosely–and musically–for we must both see and hear lyricism that has signs in it–semiotic lyricism, say–the form of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s latest, ambitious and throw-in-banners-of-morning-headlines-from-the-1890s-onward-along-with-whiffs-of-Bronksville-basepaths Big Poem about America unfolds.

Bing Miller out at home, 1925

In part this book prompts pleased wonder.

How remarkable that someone 85, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s age now, can write with the vibrant detail and liltling flow of many passages in Americus I.

How wonderful that he remains aroused enough to try this kind of epic–and remains untrammeled enough to freely digress within its form. How valuable that we get to see and hear through a poet’s raised perceptions ways of life that are long-gone or going fast. How good it is that Lawrence Ferlinghetti is still singing and still swinging to hit home-runs in this year of our Empire 2004.

Americus I spans the 20th century from France’s Dreyfus Trial (‘ “J’Accuse” Screams Emile Zola’) through the first Kennedy assassination and the mass coming of Hip.

It’s an autobiographical, historical, poetical and fundamentally spiritual survey. Like Whitman’s ‘Song …’ and Leaves … and like many other precedents it cites (Pound’s Cantos, Thomas Wolfe’s novels, Olson’s Maximus, Kerouac’s Legend), Americus I wants to make sense of our United States of America as the same time as it presents and illuminates its wayfaring teller, its experience-celebrating I-voice, as everyday but mythic and emblematic character (‘a wop and a yid in one/ A kind of Don Quixote/ tiliting at sawmills and ginmills/ A Euro man indeed/ …’).

The first Leaves ...--Introduction by Malcolm Cowley

Jack's finest and most to-the-bone novel features a beneficient Lawrence Ferlighetti-character

The poem of 12 sections is for me most effective when it’s detailing autobiographical experience or when it’s lyrical to a songlike, abstract extreme. Its passages about boyhood stickball in Bronxville (‘And the kids playing stickball/ Their far cries echoing/ In this green meadow/ with its worn baseball diamond/ with rocks for bases/ …’) and young-manhood command of a ‘diesel-powered wooden-hulled subchaser’ on the English Channel late in the night before D-Day (‘And in the very first light on the western horizon astern, they were just begining to see a forest of masts rising up, … a huge armada of great ships and troop transports and escort vessels …’) are vivid. And its lines like song–combining personal romance with general history in poets’ intrinsic tendency–embed in consciousness like the remembered waves of Joycean dream: ‘While we made love/ Late that night/ In the fall of that year/ Among the yellow fallen leaves/ Under the linden trees/ In Boston Common/ In the fall of that year/ Where now they are marching again/ Wearing colored rags of flags again/ …’

The book’s empathic sensitivity also stands out. Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Americus) registers as ‘felt life’ the trench-bound impasses of World War I, the first World War in which artillery shells decimated men and horses. ‘Look look the horse has lost its head … They keep coming and coming the brown troops the gray troops the black uniforms in steel helmets pointed helmets my god we’re being run over…’ He registers also the enduring hopefulness of our public’s wishes just after World War II. ‘There was still a garden/ In the memory of America/ …/ In the sound of a nightbird/ outside a Lowell window/ In the cry of black kids/ in tenement yards at night/ In the deep sound of woman murmuring/ a woman singing broken melody/ in a shutted room/ in a wood house …’

'Number 9', Mark Rothko, 1948

The book works much less well when it digresses from tactile experience into cultural survey. While sometimes clever, its notes on German Expressionists (‘And Rotliff painted his rusty lust/ And Otto Mueller ate cruellers as his paintings grew crueler’; and on New York Abstract Expressionsts (‘with their primal nonobjective images/ destroying the fine arts tradition/ of their Euro fathers’; and on Proust (‘a whole belle universe where we did wander enchanted within a budding grove along Swann’s Way to a Germantes soiree’; and on Mannahatta’s motley mix (‘Irish micks and potato farmers/ dustbin pawnbrokers/ dustbin pawnbrokers/midtown clothing-district rabbis/ …’ ); and on ‘alienated generations’ who ‘lived out their expatriate visions/ here and everywhere’; and on the national totems fused into the mythic being of L. F./ Americus himself (‘He the journeyman poet/ On the Open Road/ He Abe the Railsplitter/ And Ahab the Whaler/ And Sinbad the Sailer/ …) are notes that often run to superficiality and cliche. They’re strangely disconnected. They lack exact, spiritual or physical sensation. Their palimpsest of selectively shared experience misses the ‘felt life ‘, in short, that makes other passages in the book affecting.

Americus I (let’s hope for a II and even a III) closes chronologically with the pall that followed the killing of JFK–that murder the trigger for violence which provoked hopeful rebellion later in the 1960s.

From its first section to its last Americus I poses choices for the public here. What  are we to have? What are we to make? Are we to make and have the embracing, egalitarian freedoms of Whitman and Chaplin that are beloved by L F? Or are we to have ‘totalitarian plutocracy’ under ‘Bush League Presidencies’?

Will our every day’s subliminal headline continue to be: ‘OUTMODED CAPITALISM/ THREATENS HUMANITY/ WITH MULTIPLE PERILS’?

Will our oil-based, air-conditioned, everything’s-gonna-be-made-out-of-plastic America be Olson’s ‘foul country where/ human lives are so much trash’? Will we continue to look back on something largely like Langston Hughes’ ‘past a mess of blood and sorrow’?                                                                                                  

Or can our America yet be Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s assertive hope for it:  ‘the greatest experiment on earth/ with the greatest chance to create/ a higher human being/…/ at home on the two continents of America/ made of many cultures and calamities’?

Or–in short–can we let the world outside the United States dance by joining that world’s potential rather than destroying its potential? Can we like lightning yet leap forth?

Americus I closes finally with lyrical celebration through the verity of spontaneous writing. In this closing passage L F again sides with … life.

‘Yet still endless the splendid life of the world/ Endless its lovely living and breathing its lovely sentient beings seeing and hearing feeling and thinking laughing and dancing …’, he writes.

‘No end to the making of love to the sound of bedsprings creaking … The waiting of lovers on station platforms the cawing of crows the myriad churning of crickets the running seas the crying waters rising and falling … No end no end to the withering of fur and fruit and flesh so passing fair and neon mermaids sing each to each somewhere … For there are hopeful choices still to be chosen … And there is no end no end to the doors of perception still be be opened and the jet streams of light in the upper air of the spirit of man the outer space inside us/ Shining! Transcendent!/ …’

“Bravo! Viva! Ride on!” So some young audience may respond to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, our good, gray, young-at-heart poet, now.’

One of many paintings by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Morris Graves' 'Bird in the Spirit'

Lawrence Ferlinghetti on Morris Graves’ 1943 painting ’Bird in the Spirit’

The wounded wilderness of Morris Graves
 is not the same wild west
 the white man found. 
It is a land that Buddha came upon
from a different direction. 
It is a wild white nest
in the true mad north 
of introspection
 where ‘falcons of the inner eye’
dive and die glimpsing in their dying fall 
all life’s memory 
of existence
and with grave chalk wing
draw upon the leaded sky
a thousand threaded images 
of flight

It is the night that is their ‘native habitat’
these ’spirit birds’ with bled white wings
these droves of plover
bearded eagles
blind birds singing
in glass fields
these moonmad swans and ecstatic ganders
trapped egrets
charcoal owls
trotting turtle symbols
these pink fish among mountains
shrikes seeking to nest
whitebone drones
mating in air
among hallucinary moons

And a masked bird fishing
in a golden stream and an ibis feeding
~on its own breast’
and a stray Connemara Pooka’
(life size)
And then those blown mute birds
bearing fish and paper messages
between two streams
which are the twin streams
of oblivion
wherein the imagination
turning upon itself
with white electric vision
refinds itself still mad
and unfed
among the hebrides

Another poem, The Plough of Time

Night closed my windows and

The sky became a crystal house

The crystal windows glowed

The moon shown through them

through the whole house of crystal

A single star beamed down

its crystal cable

and drew a plough through the earth

unearthing bodies clasped together

couples embracing

around the earth

They clung together everywhere

emitting small cries

that did not reach the stars

The crystal earth turned

and the bodies with it

And the sky did not turn

nor the stars with it

The stars remained fixed

each with its crystal cable

beamed to earth

each attached to the immense plough

furrowing our lives

George Whitman (of Paris' Shakespeare and Company bookstore) and LF

The video below, “Shakespeare Sleeps Here”, made by Current TV in 2009, features 24-year-old Sylvia Whitman in its footage about the Shakespeare and Company bookstore of Paris, France. Sylvia is named after Sylvia Beach, founder of the first Shakespeare and Company store and first publisher (1922) of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Sylvia’s father George, now 91, began his first bookstore in Paris (1951) upon a suggestion from his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

And finally this quote from Lawrence Ferlinghetti when interviewed by Jeff Troiano in 2003: “Nothing ’s going to change in this country as long as everyone ’s so well-fed. What it takes for a revolution is hunger and passion. There won’t be any changes until we have a Depression like in the 1930s …”

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