Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights in 2007
Occupation	poet, activist, essayist, painter
Literary movement	Beat, New American Poets, Postmodernism

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born March 24, 1919) is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. Author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, 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 of over 1 million copies.

Early life

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York on March 24, 1919. His mother, née Lyons Albertine Mendes-Monsanto was of French and Jewish Sephardic and Zak -Portuguese heritage. His father, Carlo Ferlinghetti, was born in Brescia, Italy in 1872. He immigrated to the United States in 1892, and worked as an auctioneer in Little Italy, NYC. At some unknown point, Carlo Ferlinghetti shortened the family name to "Ferling," and Lawrence wouldn't learn of his original name until 1942, when he had to provide a birth certificate to join the US Navy. Though he used "Ferling" for his earliest published work, Ferlinghetti reverted to the original Italian "Ferlinghetti" in 1955, when publishing his first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone World.

Ferlinghetti's father died six months before he was born, and his mother was committed to an asylum shortly 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., Ferlinghetti was placed in an orphanage in Chappaqua, N.Y. while Emily looked for employment. She was eventually 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 (now Northfield Mount Hermon School), he went to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where he earned a B.A. in journalism in 1941. Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America. 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 7, 1941, 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. Six 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 Romantic poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and James Joyce, as well as American poets Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Marianne Moore, e. e. cummings, and American 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 J. M. W. 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 honorable.” 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 marrying Selden Kirby-Smith in 1951 in Duval County, Florida, he settled in San Francisco in 1953, where he 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 and Martin founded City Lights Bookstore, the first all-paperbound bookshop in the country. The following year, after the departure of 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 fourth number in the Pocket Poets Series was Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Ferlinghetti was in attendance at the now-famous Six Gallery reading where Ginsberg first performed Howl publicly. The next day Ferlinghetti telegrammed Ginsberg: "I greet you at the beginning of a great literary career," subsequently offering to publish his work.

The book was seized in 1956 by the San Francisco police. Ferlinghetti and Shig Murao, the bookstore manager who had sold the book to the police, were arrested on obscenity charges. After charges against Murao were dropped, Ferlinghetti, defended by Jake Ehrlich and the ACLU, 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.

In 2010, Andrew Rogers portrays Ferlinghetti in the film Howl.

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. When the Indian poets of the Hungryalists literary movement were arrested in 1964 at Kolkata, Ferlinghetti introduced the Hungryalist poets to Western readers through the initial issues of City Lights Journal.

Poetry

One of his works is intact at San Francisco's Jack Kerouac Alley, which is right next door to the City Lights Bookstore.

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of
apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic. You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words....

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti. From Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames].

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, H.D., Marcel Proust, Charles Baudelaire, Jacques Prévert, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Blaise Cendrars. One of his poems, 'Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes', is now a poem studied at GCSE level in England, as part of the collection of poems in the AQA Anthology.

Political engagement

Soon after settling in San Francisco in 1950, Ferlinghetti met the poet Kenneth Rexroth whose concepts of philosophical anarchism influenced his political development. He self-identifies as a philosophical anarchist, regularly associated with other anarchists in North Beach, and sold Italian anarchist newspapers at the City Lights Bookstore. 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.

60 years of painting, the exhibition held in Italy in 2010 (Rome: February-April; Reggio Calabria: May - July) is a creative journey through the twentieth century, reflecting on social and political issues and on the role of the artist nowadays.

Jack Kerouac Alley

In 1988, he was the initiator of the transformation of Jack Kerouac Alley, located at the side of his shop. He presented his idea to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors calling for repavement and renewal. Since 1991, young volunteers from the Adopt-An-Alleyway Youth Empowerment Project — a program run by the Chinatown Community Development Center — have maintained the good condition of the alley, which is a bridge between Chinatown and North Beach.

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, French Order of Arts and Letters. Since 2009 he has been in the Honour Committee of IMMAGINE&POESIA, the artistic literary movement founded in Turin, Italy, with the patronage of Aeronwy Thomas (Dylan Thomas's daughter).

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. Ferlinghetti 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. Before this, the same painting was used for the cover of Michael Parenti's 1995 book, Against Empire, which was published by City Lights.

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 Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963) references a poem by Ferlinghetti in Chapter 121.He appears as himself in the 2006 comedy film The Darwin Awards. Bob Dylan used Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto", on the Baseball show of Theme Time Radio Hour. Roger McGuinn, the former leader of the Byrds, referred to Ferlinghetti and "A Coney Island of the Mind" in his song "Russian Hill," from his 1977 album Thunderbyrd. Cyndi Lauper was inspired by A Coney Island of the Mind to write the song "Into the Nightlife" for her 2008 album Bring Ya to the Brink.

The Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps's 2008 marching show was entitled Constantly Risking Absurdity, with movements titled after various lines in Ferlinghetti's poem. The corps took second place at the Drum Corps International Finals. Aztec Two-Step is an American folk-rock band formed by Rex Fowler and Neal Shulman at a chance meeting on open stage at a Boston coffee house, the Stone Phoenix[1], in 1971. The band was named after a line from the poem "A Coney Island of the Mind" by Ferlinghetti. Bristol Sound band Unforscene used Ferlinghetti's poem "Pictures of the Gone World 11" (or "The World is a Beautiful Place...") in the song The Word Is on its 2002 album New World Disorder.

Bibliography

• 50 poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti 50 images by Armando Milani ([1] Rudiano, 2010) Poetry and Graphics ISBN 9788889044665
• Pictures of the Gone World (City Lights, 1955) Poetry (enlarged, 1995) ISBN 9780872863033
• A Coney Island of the Mind ([2] New Directions, 1958) Poetry
• Tentative Description of a Dinner Given to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower (Golden Mountain Press, 1958) Broadside poem
• Her (New Directions, 1960) Prose
• One Thousand Fearful Words for Fidel Castro (City Lights, 1961) Broadside poem
• Starting from San Francisco (New Directions, 1961) Poetry (HC edition includes LP of author reading selections)
• Journal for the Protection of All Beings (City Lights, 1961) Journal
• Unfair Arguments with Existence (New Directions, 1963) Short Plays
• Where is VietNam? (Golden Mountain Press, 1963) Broadside poem
• Routines (New Directions, 1964) Plays
• Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes (1968)
• On the Barracks: Journal for the Protection of All Beings 2 (City Lights, 1968) Journal
• Tyrannus Nix? (New Directions, 1969) Prose
• The Secret Meaning of Things (New Directions, 1970) Poetry
• The Mexican Night (New Directions, 1970) Travel journal
• Back Roads to Far Towns After Basho (City Lights, 1970) Poetry
• Open Eye, Open Heart (New Directions, 1973) Poetry
• Who Are We Now? (New Directions, 1976) Poetry
• Northwest Ecolog (City Lights, 1978) Poetry
• Landscapes of Living and Dying (1980) ISBN 0-8112-0743-9
• Over All the Obscene Boundaries (1986)
• Love in the Days of Rage (E.P. Dutton, 1988; City Lights, 2001) Novel
• A Buddha in the Woodpile (Atelier Puccini, 1993)
• These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems, 1955-1993 (New Directions, 1993) ISBN 0-0112-1273-4 0-0112-1252-1
• City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology (City Lights, 1995) ISBN 978-0-872863118
• A Far Rockaway Of The Heart (New Directions, 1998) ISBN 0-8112-1347-1
• San Francisco Poems (City Lights Foundation, 2001) Poetry ISBN 9781931404013
• Life Studies, Life Stories (City Lights, 2003) ISBN 9780872864214
• Americus: Part I (New Directions, 2004)
• A Coney Island of the Mind (Arion Press, 2005), with portraiture by R.B. Kitaj
• Poetry as Insurgent Art (New Directions, 2007) Poetry
• A Coney Island of the Mind: Special 50th Anniversary Edition with a CD of the author reading his work (New Directions, 2008)

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)

See also

• Allen Ginsberg
• Hungry generation

References

Further reading

• 50 poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti 50 images by Armando Milani, poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and images by Armando Milani ([3] GAM Editrice, 2010)
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti - Italian Tour 2005, photographs by Walter Pescara (Nicolodi, 2006 - special edition, not for sale)
• Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk)
• Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time, by Barry Silesky (Warner Books, 1990)
• Constantly Risking Absurdity: The Writings of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, by Michael Skau (Whitson, 1989)
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Poet-at-Large, by Larry R. Smith (Southern Illinois University Press, 1983)
• Ferlinghetti: A Biography, by Neeli Cherkovski (Doubleday, 1979)
• The Beats: A Literary Reference, by Matt Theado (Carroll & Graf, 2003)

External links

• Guide to the Lawrence Ferlinghetti Papers at The Bancroft Library
• Template:Worldcat id
• 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
• Kerouac Alley - Lawrence Ferlinghetti multimedia directory
• Amy Goodman Interview (Transcript and streaming media)
• Audio and video of reading at University of California Berkeley "Lunch Poems" series (December 1, 2005)
• Video interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti about his paintings on KQED's Spark
• Proposed International Poetry Museum by Ferlinghetti friend Herman Berlandt