Lawrence Ferlinghetti: 90 Lyrical Years

Today is the 90th birthday of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He has been the touchstone of generations of poetry readers; if you had never read poetry, somehow, somewhere, if you had the inclination to, you'd run into the work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It seems as though serendipity and that is his magic.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is first and foremost a word magician (tired, I keyed musician, and he, of course is that, too: a word musician). His Coney Island of the Mind seems to be on everybody's list of best poetry books and deservedly so. Even so, he is hardly a one-trick pony. Here's a poem from his first collection, Pictures of the Gone World, published in 1955:



25

---------The world is a beautiful place
--------------------------------------------to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
------------------------------- ---not always being
--------------------------------------- --------- -- ---so very much fun
------if you don't mind a touch of hell
-----------------------------------------now and then
--------------just when everything is fine
-------------------------------------------------because even in heaven
--------------------------they don't sing
-------------------------------------------------all the time

------------The world is a beautiful place
-----------------------------------------to be born into
--------if you don't mind some people dying
------------------------------------------------------all the time
-----------------------or maybe only starving
---------------------------------------------------some of the time
--------------------which isn't half so bad
-------------------------------------------------if it isn't you

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Here's another from A Far Rockaway of the Heart, published 42 years later, in 1997:




#47

In far-out poetry
---------------- ---the heart bleeds upon the page
---------------------------------------------------------shamelessly
--------as printer's ink bleeds onto
---------------------------------------the fine tooth of paper
As blood in its rage
-----------------------beats through the body
--------------------------------------------------blind in its courses
Leaving its indelible imprints
--------------------those fine tattoos of living
----------------------------------------------------known as poems

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Finally from the 2001 collection, How to Paint Sunlight (not available via City Lights - o.p., maybe?), his beautiful elegy for the most beautiful Allen Ginsberg:

Allen Ginsberg is Dying

Allen Ginsberg is dying
It's in all the papers
It's on the evening news
A great poet is dying
But his voice
----------------won't die
His voice is on the land
In Lower Manhattan
in his own bed
he is dying
There is nothing
to do about it
He dying the death that everyone dies
He is dying the death of the poet
He has a telephone in his hand
and he calls everyone
from his bed in Lower Manhattan
All around the world
This is Allen
----------------the voice says
Allen Ginsberg calling
How many times have they heard it
over the long great years
He doesn't have to say Ginsberg
All around the world
in the world of poets
there is only one Allen
I want ed to you he says
He tells them what's happening
what's coming down
on him
Death the dark lover
going down on him
His voice goes by satellite
over the land
over the Sea of Japan
where he once stood naked
trident in hand
like a young Neptune
a young man with black beard
standing on a stone beach
It is high tide and the seabirds cry
The waves break over him now
and the seabirds cry
on the San Francisco waterfront
There is a high wind
There are great whitecaps
lashing the Embarcadero
Allen is on the telephone
His voice is on the waves
I am reading Greek poetry
The sea is in it
Horses weep in it
The horse of Achilles
weep in it
here by the sea
in San Francisco
where the waves weep
They make a sibilant sound
a sibylline sound
Allen
-------they whisper
-----------------------Allen

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Happy birthday, Mr. F. Send him a present; order a book or two of his work from City Lights Books, the finest independent shop in America. And, ah, what the hay, know how you like to give yourself a little something for your birthday, especially the older you get? Well, here's a little present from the younger Ferlinghetti (1955 again, this time "#2" from Pictures of a Gone World) to his older Lawrence-self, accompanied by the Pan-like, multi-faceted David Amram:






******************************************************************

No Cover Art by Bobo

This week's back issue from the Lilliput Review Archive comes from April 1993, some nearly 16 odd years later. Odd might be the operative word, if the 16 years previous to those had not been a good deal odder. Here's four short flashes of times gone by:




Weak with Doubt

catching a butterfly
who was ready to suffer

Vogn

The Right Moment

standing through the windshield
that the car behind you didn't have

Stacey Sollfrey

Getting ready

my mind walks out
of here

swoops
down flights of stairs

and glides to a gutter pigeon
its stiff body vibrating

about
to fly

Sanford Fraser

Ice Out

--------raging torrents, black waters rushing by
quiet nighttime hours, carrying whispers of
ancient female ghosts along on gentle river
winds, dusty voices, long gone pioneer wives
and mothers, once again searching for hope
amid new spring trilliums, wild cherry petals.

T. K. Splake

To finish, a greeting to spring from the master:

borrowing the umbrella-hat
daffodil...
sleeping sparrow

Issa
translated by David Lanoue

Enjoy it all - as long as autumn seems to linger, spring flies by.


best,
Don

Jack Kerouac: Pull My Daisy and Jazz and Jack Kerouac

Both Ubuweb and Google videos have got the famous loopy/goofy Jack Kerouac film, Pull My Daisy, for viewing. Here's the Wikipedia description that accompanies the film:

A short film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of a stage play he never finished entitled Beat Generation. Kerouac also provided improvised narration. It starred Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel, Sally Gross and Pablo Frank, Robert Frank's then-infant son.

Based on an incident in the life of Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn, Daisy tells the story of a railway brakeman whose painter wife invites a respectable bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results.

The Beat philosophy emphasized spontaneity, and the film conveyed the quality of having been thrown together or even improvised. Pull My Daisy was accordingly praised for years as an improvisational masterpiece, until Leslie revealed in a November 28, 1968 article in the Village Voice that the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and directed by him and Frank, who shot the film on a professionally lit studio set.

Pull My Daisy has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Here's the film in its entirety:







For me, this sounds much better than it appears. When you isolate the soundtrack, the improv/performance element of it is actually pretty amazing. If this legendary film actually lives up to its reputation, it is Kerouac's performance, unseen, that is the reason. It is interesting to see a young Corso and Ginsberg and all the others, but Jack is the only one who is actually acting.

The David Amram score is also quite good.

Speaking of sound, here's a public radio program entitled "Jazz and Jack Kerouac," from the program Night Lights, originally broadcast on WFIU Public Radio. There is some good work here, though there have been many stories on how some of the jazz guys, particularly in the "American Haiku" session (Al Cohn and Zoot Sims), were merely perfunctory and treated Kerouac with an indifference that shattered his dreams of a great blowing session. Here's David Perry's comments from the linear notes to The Jack Kerouac Collection:

Sims and Cohn, (Bob) Thiele (the producer) explains, thought of it as just another record date. Didn't even listen to him. Probably went out and got drunk. The incident also shows the vulnerable side behind the brawny voice. "When I found him, he was in a corner crying," says Thiele. "And he said, 'My two favorite musicians walked out on me. They didn't even want to hear this back.'"

In those days the typical thing was, the date's over and we'll see ya. These guys would head for the local pub. They could have been recording with Ellington or Benny Goodman and they still would've done the same thing.

This story somehow encapsulates the tragedy that was Kerouac; heartbroken by his jazz idols, yet misunderstanding that it wasn't personal, really to them it was nothing at all. Still, they weren't impressed and though Kerouac's understanding of jazz was deep, it's application to literature was more metaphoric than actual. For the jazz guys, it was non-existent. For them it was two different languages. It didn't translate. They didn't get it.

They didn't get it all.


best,
Don