Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born Lawrence Ferling on March 24, 1919) ^[1] is an American poet and painter, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. Author of poetry, translations, fiction, theater, art criticism, and film narration, he is best known for A Coney Island of the Mind (New York: New Directions, 1958), a collection of poems that has been translated into nine languages, with sales over 1,000,000 copies.

Early life

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York on March 24, 1919. His mother, née Clemence Albertine Mendes-Monsanto was of French and Sephardic-Portuguese heritage. His father, Carlo Ferlinghetti, was born in Brescia, Italy, in 1872, immigrated to the United States in 1892, and worked as an auctioneer in Little Italy, NYC. Carlo Ferlinghetti shortened the family name to “Ferling.” Ferlinghetti reverted to the original Italian “Ferlinghetti” in 1955, and in the same year published his first book of poems under his restored name.

Ferlinghetti's father died before he was born, and his mother was hospitalized immediately after his birth. He was raised by his French aunt Emily (former wife of Ludovico Monsanto, an uncle of his mother from the Virgin Islands), who taught Spanish at the U.S. Naval Academy. Emily took Ferlinghetti to Strasbourg, France, where they lived during his first five years, with French as his first language.

After their return to the U.S., Lawrence was placed in an orphanage in Chapaqua, N.Y. while Emily looked for employment. She finally was hired as a French governess for the daughter of Presley Eugene Bisland and his wife Anna Lawrence Bisland, in Bronxville, New York, the latter being the daughter of the founder of Sarah Lawrence College, William Van Deuzer Lawrence. In 1926, Ferlinghetti was left in the care of the Bislands. After attending various schools, including Riverdale Country School, Bronxville Public School, and Mount Hermon School, he went to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where he earned a B.A. in journalism in 1941. His sports journalism was published in The Daily Tar Heel, and he published his first short stories in Carolina Magazine, for which Thomas Wolfe had written.

World War II

In the summer of 1941, he lived with two college mates on Little Whale Boat Island in Casco Bay, Maine, lobster fishing, and raking moss from rocks to be sold in Portland, Maine, for pharmaceutical use. This experience gave him a love of the sea, a theme that runs through much of his poetry. After the December 7th Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Ferlinghetti enrolled in Midshipmen’s school in Chicago, and in 1942 shipped out as junior officer on J.P. Morgan III’s yacht, which had been refitted to patrol for submarines off the East Coast.

Ferlinghetti was next assigned to the Ambrose Lightship outside New York harbor, to identify all incoming ships. In 1943 and 1944 he served as an officer on three U.S. Navy subchasers used as convoy escorts. As commander of the subchaser USS SC1308, he was at the Normandy invasion as part of the anti-submarine screen around the beaches. After VE Day, the Navy transferred him to the Pacific Theater, where he served as navigator of the troop ship USS Selinur. Two weeks after the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, he visited the ruins of the city, an experience that turned him into a life-long pacifist.

Columbia University & The Sorbonne

After the war, he worked briefly in the mailroom at Time magazine, in Manhattan. The G.I. Bill then enabled him to enroll in the Columbia University graduate school. Among his professors there were Babette Deutsch, Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and Mark Van Doren. In those years he was reading modern literature, and has said he was at that time influenced particularly by Shakespeare, Marlowe, the British Romantic poets and Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, as well as American poets Whitman, Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings, and novelists Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. He earned a master’s degree in English literature in 1947 with a thesis on John Ruskin and the British painter W.J. Turner. From Columbia, he went to Paris to continue his studies, and lived in the city between 1947 and 1951, earning a Doctorat de l’Université de Paris, with a “mention très honourable.” His two theses were on the city as a symbol in modern poetry and on the nature of Gothic.

San Francisco —City Lights Books

After first settling in San Francisco in 1953, Ferlinghetti taught French in an adult education program, painted, and wrote art criticism. His first translations, of poems by the French surrealist Jacques Prévert, were published by Peter D. Martin in his popular culture magazine City Lights.

In 1953 Ferlinghetti founded, with Peter D. Martin, City Lights Bookstore, the first all-paperbound bookshop in the country. The following year, after the departure of Peter Martin, he launched the publishing wing of City Lights with his own first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone World, the first number in the Pocket Poets Series. This volume was followed by books by Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Marie Ponsot, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, William Carlos Williams, and Gregory Corso. Although City Lights Publishers is best known for its publication of Beat Generation writers, Ferlinghetti never intended to publish the Beats exclusively, and the press has always maintained a strong international list.

The Howl Trial

The fifth number in the Pocket Poets Series was Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. The book was seized in 1956 by San Francisco police. Ferlinghetti and Shig Murao, the bookstore manager who had sold the book to police, were arrested on obscenity charges. After charges against Murao were dropped, Ferlinghetti, defended by Jake Ehrlich and the ACLU, Ferlinghetti stood trial in SF Municipal court. The publicity generated by the trial drew national attention to San Francisco Renaissance and Beat movement writers. Ferlinghetti had the support of prestigious literary and academic figures, and, at the end of a long trial, Judge Clayton Horn found Howl not obscene and acquitted him in October 1957. The landmark First Amendment case established a key legal precedent for the publication of other controversial literary work with redeeming social importance.

The Beats

Although in style and theme Ferlinghetti’s own writing is very unlike that of the original NY Beat circle, he had important associations with the Beat writers, who made City Lights Bookstore their headquarters when they were in San Francisco. He has often claimed that he was not a Beat, but a bohemian of an earlier generation. A married war veteran and a bookstore proprietor, he didn’t share the high (or low) life of the beats on the road. Kerouac wrote Ferlinghetti into the character “Lorenzo Monsanto” in his autobiographical novel Big Sur (1962), the story of Jack’s stay (with the Cassadys, the McClures, Lenore Kandel, Lew Welch, and Philip Whalen) at Ferlinghetti’s cabin in the wild coastal region of Big Sur. Kerouac depicts the Ferlinghetti figure as a generous and good-humored host, in the midst of Dionysian revels and breakdowns.

Over the years Ferlinghetti published work by many of the Beats, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Diane diPrima, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, and Gary Snyder. He was Ginsberg’s publisher for over thirty years.

Poetry

Though imbued with the commonplace, Ferlinghetti’s poetry is grounded in lyric and narrative traditions. Among his themes are the beauty of natural world, the tragicomic life of the common man, the plight of the individual in mass society, and the dream and betrayal of democracy. He counts among his influences T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, HD, Marcel Proust, Charles Baudelaire, Jacques Prévert, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Blaise Cendrars.

Political engagement

Soon after settling in San Francisco in 1950, Ferlinghetti met the poet Kenneth Rexroth whose concepts of philosophical anarchism influence his political development. A critic of US foreign policy, Ferlinghetti has taken a stand against totalitarianism and war.

Ferlinghetti's work challenges the definition of art and the artist’s role in the world. He urged poets to be engaged in the political and cultural life of the country. As he writes in Populist Manifesto: "Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds... Poetry should transport the public/to higher places/than other wheels can carry it..."

Ferlinghetti was instrumental in bringing poetry out of the academy and back into the public sphere with public poetry readings. With Ginsberg and other progressive writers, he took part in events that focused on such political issues as the Cuban revolution, the nuclear arms race, farm-worker organizing, the murder of Salvador Allende, the Vietnam War, May ’68 in Paris, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico. He read not only to audiences in the United States but widely in Europe and Latin America. Many of his writings grew from travels in France, Italy, the Soviet Union, Cuba, Mexico, Chile, Nicaragua, and the Czech Republic.

Painting

Ferlinghetti began painting in Paris in 1948. In San Francisco, he occupied a studio at 9 Mission Street on the Embarcadero in the 1950s that he inherited from Hassel Smith. He admired the New York abstract expressionists, and his first work exhibits their influence. A more figurative style is apparent in his later work. Ferlinghetti’s paintings have been shown at various museums around the world, from the Butler Museum of American Painting to Il Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. He has been associated with the international Fluxus movement through the Archivio Francesco Conz in Verona. In San Francisco, his work can regularly be seen at the George Krevsky Gallery.

Awards

He has received numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Kirsch Award, the BABRA Award for Lifetime Achievement, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters, and the ACLU’s Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award. He won the Premio Taormino in 1973, and since then has been awarded the Premio Camaiore, the Premio Flaiano, the Premio Cavour, among other honors in Italy. Ferlinghetti was named San Francisco’s Poet Laureate in August 1998 and served for two years. In 2003 he was awarded the Robert Frost Memorial Medal, the Author’s Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003. The National Book Foundation made him the recipient of its first Literarian Award (2005), given for outstanding service to the American literary community. In 2007 he was named Commandeur of the French Academy of Arts and Letters.

In pop culture

The Italian band Timoria dedicated the song Ferlinghetti Blues (from the album El Topo Grand Hotel) to the poet, where Ferlinghetti himself speaks one of his poems. Recordings of Ferlinghetti reading want ads, as featured on radio station KPFA in 1957, were recorded by Henry Jacobs and are featured on the Meat Beat Manifesto album At the Center, mistakenly credited to Kenneth Rexroth. Philadelphia rock musician, Kenn Kweder, also dedicated a track to the poet entitled, "Ferlinghetti." He also gave Canadian punk band Propagandhi permission to use his painting The Unfinished Flag of the United States, which features a map of the world painted in the stars and stripes, as the cover of their 2001 release Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes. On November 25, 1976 Ferlinghetti recited the poem Loud Prayer at The Band's final performance. Titled The Last Waltz, this concert was filmed by Martin Scorsese and released as a documentary which included Ferlinghetti's recitation.
Julio Cortázar, in his masterpiece Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963) references a poem by Ferlinghetti in Chapter 121.

He appears as himself in the 2006 film The Darwin Awards.

Bibliography

Pictures of the Gone World (1955) Poetry
A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) Poetry
Her (New Directions 1960) Prose
Unfair Arguments with Existence (short plays) (1963)
Routines (short plays) (1964)
Starting from San Francisco (New Directions 1967) Poetry
Tyrannus Nix? (New Directions 1969) Prose
The Secret Meaning of Things (1970) Poetry
The Mexican Night (Travel Journal) (New Directions 1970)
Back Roads to Far Places" (New Directions 1971) Poetry
Open Eye, Open Heart (New Directions 1973) Poetry
Who Are We Now? (New Directions 1976) Poetry
Landscapes of Living and Dying (1980) ISBN 0-8112-0743-9
Over All the Obscene Boundaries (1986)
A Buddha in the Woodpile (Atelier Puccini 1993)
These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems, 1955-1993 (New Directions)
A Far Rockaway Of The Heart (New Directions 1998)
Love in the Days of Rage (2001)
Americus: Part I (2004)
Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes (Unknown)

Discography

Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness (Track #8 "Dream: On A Sunny Afternoon..." with Helium). 1997
Poetry Readings in the Cellar (with the Cellar Jazz Quintet): Kenneth Rexroth & Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1957) Fantasy Records #7002 LP, (Spoken Word)
Ferlinghetti: The Impeachment of Eisenhower (1958) Fantasy Records #7004 LP, (Spoken Word)
Ferlinghetti: Tyrannus Nix? / Assassination Raga / Big Sur Sun Sutra / Moscow in the Wilderness (1970) Fantasy Records #7014 LP, (Spoken Word)

Footnotes

^ "Academic.Brooklyn". Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s italianita. Retrieved October 30. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)

External links

Ferlinghetti's Bookstore in San Francisco, City Lights
Lawrence Ferlinghetti at The Soredove Press Limited Edition Poetry Chapbooks, Broadsides and Art
Lawrence Ferlinghetti at The Beat Page Biography and Selected Poems.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Literary Kicks
Lawrence Ferlinghetti at American Poetry
Blue Neon Alley - Lawrence Ferlinghetti directory
1988 interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti by Don Swaim at Wired for Books
Audio and video of reading at University of California Berkeley "Lunch Poems" series (December 1, 2005)
He is a co-signer of the urgent call to Drive Out the Bush Regime
Political Commitment & the Poetry of Ferlinghetti

[heritage-1] "Academic.Brooklyn". Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s italianita. Retrieved October 30. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)

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