Lawrence FerlinghettiReseñas

This New Directions paperback from 1958 brings together a selection of poems from Ferlinghetti's first, self-published collection Pictures of the gone world (1955) with two new, longer poems, "A Coney Island of the mind" and "Oral messages".

The title poem, "a kind of circus of the soul," in 29 sections, taking its title from a line of Henry Miller's — is something like the Ferlinghetti version of "Howl", a confrontation between the poet's sensibility and the banality of Eisenhower's America. But it's all a lot more playful and literary, full of mischievous echoes of everyone from Wordsworth, Keats and W B Yeats to T S Eliot and James Joyce. Where Ginsberg's lines thump out at you in a merciless rhythm, Ferlinghetti dances down the page in unexpected leaps and pirouettes. And comes to a fabulous conclusion in section 29 where he manages to condense Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake, Anna Karenina, Hemingway, Proust and Lorca (and much else) into about 100 breathlessly unpunctuated lines.

"Oral messages" are jazz poems, meant for live performance but still quite effective on the page, again full of clever puns and literary references that you would probably only pick up on a very subliminal level in performance. "Pictures of the gone world" range a little more widely, with a few nods to the lyrical tradition, but still in the light-footed style of "Coney Island".

The typographic design, with its classic underground "typewriter-style" look, is superb — I loved that they even went as far as using freehand underlining for emphasis instead of italics. Freda Browne is credited as the designer, while the cover is by Rudolphe de Harak.

I wasn't familiar with the work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti until I read this title -- The Beat writers whose work I know the best are: Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Although, according to Wikipedia, Ferlinghetti did not consider himself to be a Beat poet -- The poems in this collection remind me of Kerouac's style (the poetic aspect of Kerouac's writing, that is). The poem, in this work, which blew my mind more than any other -- Was written when Ferlinghetti was circa 35-36 years old (Poem #2 on p. 78 of this edition, from "Pictures of the Gone World", 1955). It could be that Poem #2 came into being as a result of either intuition, instinct -- Or both (according to the "Encyclopedia of World Biography", Ferlinghetti's father, Carlo, died six months before L. Ferlinghetti's birth; L. Ferlinghetti's mother, Clemence, was then thrown into a downward spiral and eventually institutionalized). In any case, I was amazed by what I perceived to be Ferlinghetti's visceral understanding of mortality, in the way that he juxtaposed an image of the young, lighthearted and oblivious -- With that of the old and decrepit, in Poem #2. Despite my being a person who's not usually interested in poetry -- I was impressed with this collection. And so I'll end with the text of Poem #2 from p. 78 of this edition -- As it had such a profound effect on me (the text is left-justified below i.e. not formatted in the way that Ferlinghetti did in this book).

just as I used to say
love comes harder to the aged
because they've been running
on the same old rails too long
and then when the sly switch comes along
they miss the turn
and burn up the wrong rail while
the gay caboose goes flying
and the steam engine driver don't recognize
them new electric horns
and the aged run out on the rusty spur
which ends up in
the dead grass where
the rusty tin cans and bedsprings and old razor
blades and moldy mattresses
lie
and the rail breaks off dead
right there
though the ties go on a while
and the aged
say to themselves
well
this must be the place
we were supposed to lie down
and they do
while the bright saloon careens along away
on a high
hilltop
its windows full of bluesky and lovers
with flowers
their long hair streaming
and all of them laughing
and waving and
whispering to each other
and looking out and
wondering what that graveyard
where the rails end
is

In notes at the end of the book Ferlinghetti describes the second volume of Americus as:

"A fragmented recording of the American stream-of-consciousness, in the tradition of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, Charles Olson’s Maximus, Allen Ginsberg’s Fall of America, and Ed Sanders’ America: a History in Verse.

‘Time of Useful Consciousness,’ an aeronautical term denoting the time between when one loses oxygen and when one passes out, the brief time in which some lifesaving action is possible. …

Certain separate poems previously published are here given a context."

The poems start in New York and sweep westward with the expanding nation. There are significant stops in the Mississippi River Valley, Chicago, Las Vegas, and San Francisco before returning in the end to Brooklyn where the author yearns for Walt Whitman to say some words of comfort as the “Optimist of humanity en masse.”

As with the first volume, Ferlinghetti alludes to or quotes directly from other poets and songwriters, especially his fellow twentieth century bohemian cohorts. This time there are no footnotes that cite these lines. Literary aficionados start researching!

Americus is a rush of somethings old, somethings new, and much that is borrowed that’s melancholy and horrifically true. Ferlinghetti’s poetic fugue is told in the rhythm of his musings on America and Europe through the twentieth century in a rapid rush of verbiage that is musical. But unlike a mental fugue state he remembers everything. It’s ecstatic, punctuated by the horrors of war and the wonders and contractions of life. Starting with a quote from T. S. Eliot the poem is stuffed full of allusions and quotes from authors as various as Victor Hugo and Ezra Pound, song lyrics from George M. Cohan and Tuli Kuperberg, and phrases in French, German, and Italian, all of which Ferlinghetti scrupulously footnotes at the end of the book.

It’s a bravo performance by a master poet.

Great interviews. Lots of fun.

Can see the influence of Kerouac in his writing. Mixture of B&W sketches and text, arranged chronologically writings from the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and 2000-2010. From poetry reciting tours, to imprisonment alongside Joan Baez. The book is full of Ferlinghetti's experiences in Italy, South America, and many other locations; heavily influenced by his reading, sometimes humourous (as in visiting his father's birthplace resulting in the dailies publishing "...Poet Arrested in Search of His Father"). I am impressed by his multilingual abilities, some of the text is not in English. Well worth a read.

11. City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
published: 2001
format: 306-page hardcover – 60th anniversary edition (2015) (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)
acquired: November read: Dec 4-12, 2022, Jan 16-Feb 10, 2023 time reading: 5:10, 1.0 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: Poetry theme: poetry

List of contributors: (Which I hope is useful, because it took me an embarrassingly long time to put it together): Rafael Alberti – tr. fr. Spanish by Kenneth Rexroth, Antler, Alberto Blanco – edited by Juvenal Acosta, Robert Bly, Stefan Brecht, Dino Campana, Ernesto Cardenal – tr. fr. Spanish by Jonathan Cohen, Paul Celan – tr. fr. German by Jerome Rothenberg, Adam Cornford, Gregory Corso, Julio Cortázar, Kamau Daáood, Diane di Prima, Robert Duncan, Hans Magnus Enzensberger – tr. fr. German by Jerome Rothenberg, Allen Ginsberg, Günter Grass – tr. fr. German by Jerome Rothenberg, Nicolas Guillén – tr. fr. Spanish by Kenneth Rexroth, Helmut Heissenbüttel– tr. fr. German by Jerome Rothenberg, Jack Hirschman, Walter Höllerer – tr. fr. German by Jerome Rothenberg, Bob Kaufman, Jack Kerouac – edited by Ann Charters, Semyon Kirsanov – tr. fm. Russian by Anselm Hollo, La Loca, Philip Lamantia, Denise Levertov, Federico García Lorca – tr.fr. Spanish by Kenneth Rexroth, Malcolm Lowry – edited by Earle Birney, Antonio Machado – tr.fr. Spanish by Kenneth Rexroth, Vladimir Mayakovsky – tr.fr. Russian by Maria Enzensberger, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, David Meltzer, Rosario Murillo – tr. by Alejandro Murguía, Pablo Neruda – tr.fm. Spanish by Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Nichols, Harold Norse, Peter Orlovsky, Nicanor Parra – tr.fm. Spanish by Jorge Elliot, Pier Paolo Pasolini – tr.fm. Friulan(?) by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca Valente, Kenneth Patchen, Pablo Picasso – tr. by Paul Blackburn, Heinz Piontek – tr.fm. German by Jerome Rothenberg, Janine Pommy-Vega, Marie Ponsot, Antonio Porta – tr.fm. Italian by Anthony Molino, Jacques Prévert – tr.fm. French by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Cristina Peri Rossi, Charles Upton, Simon Vinkenoog – edited by Scott Rollins, Andrei Voznesensky – tr.fm. Russian by Anselm Hollo, Anne Waldman, William Carlos William, Pete Winslow, Yevgeny Yevtushenko – tr.fm. Russian by Anselm Hollo, Daisy Zamora – tr.fm. Spanish by Barbara Paschke

It's been a long time since I read a book of poetry (well, one published within the last 400 years). So I just went with the flow. I read this in 10- and 20-minute sittings, and I really enjoyed them. An entertaining and refreshing mixture to me. The contents are presumably Ferlinghetti's favorites. Lots of Ginsberg, and several entries by Kerouac. Also Pablo Picasso. A lot is translated, most authors are men, but there are several entries by several different women. Mostly this was a whole bunch of names I didn‘t know.

Rewarding. And, if nothing else, this made a nice filler as I waited for my morning coffee to cool.

2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/348551#8072955

This 1950s poetry collection is the most famous writing by Ferlinghetti, who was also lauded as an activist, publisher, bookseller, and painter. It has three principal sections: the title piece, "Oral Messages," and poems from "Pictures of the Gone World."

The title of the book and its first section was taken "out of context" from Henry Miller's Into the Night Life. Ferlinghetti said that it was to describe the carnivalesque aspect of his own subjective experience in composing the poems. But a different and credible reading is to see the US society that the poet engages in his verse as a mental amusement park: corralling minds into circuitous rides that exhilarate, games that impoverish, and technology that dazzles and mystifies. Still, the weight of these poems often rests not in social criticism but in aesthetic contemplation, libidinal impulse, epistemic anxiety, and similar dilemmas.

The second section of the book is "Oral Messages," seven longer poems composed for recitation with "jazz accompaniment" (48), and to incorporate experimentation and spontaneity. Although this mode is a paragon of Beat Generation performance, and Ferlinghetti did publish prominent Beat authors, he rejected the "Beat" label for his own work. My favorite of these poems is "Junkman's Obbligato," which urges downward economic mobility in order to champion life and freedom. But a close second is the diffident brag of "Autobiography" ("I am the man. / I was there. / I suffered / somewhat.") succumbing irregularly to atypical end rhyme.

The final thirteen poems are selected from a volume "Pictures of the Gone World" that Ferlinghetti had written just three years previously. These are similar to some of those in the first section (briefer, and like them individually numbered rather than titled), and they tend toward a narrower and more intimate sensibility--even though the eleventh has the great wide scope of the world as the place for life and death.

Ferlinghetti offers some unflinching anti-Christian blasphemy in the fifth "Coney Island" poem (15-6), but the "Oral Messages" seem to exhibit sincere apocalyptic anticipation ("I Am Waiting") and a hope of obscure divine palingenesis ("Christ Climbed Down").

Despite Ferlinghetti's use of popular culture and accessible idiom, his texts are still in dialog with the canons of elite art and literature. The first poem of the book orients to the painting of Goya to reflect on "maimed citizens in painted cars" (10), and the second one alludes to Homer's Odyssey to indict "American demi-Democracy" (12). Later verses cite Hieronymus Bosch, Morris Graves, Franz Kafka, Dante, Chagall, Proust, and others. The poet fulminates against the enclosure of culture by experts and institutions in poem 9 of "Pictures of the Gone World," but he had an M.A. in English literature and a Ph.D. in comparative literature, and the consequences of this training are everywhere visible in his poems.

Twenty-first century readers may occasionally struggle with a dated allusion or two in these pages (nothing too arcane for a 'net search to remedy, though). Ironically, it is the "popular" and contemporary references from the 1950s that are more likely to have passed into obscurity. On the whole, the verses have aged well and still have a sense of immediacy sixty-four years later.

Greatest book of poems only second to Whitman.

Ferlinghetti lends us another master piece with this moving collection. There isn't much else to say, Ferlinghetti's style is his own unmistakeable; You either get it or you don't. I'll never tire of these glimpses of brilliance

loving it so far but due back to the library so will finish the book when my own copy arrives.

Perfect for anyone interested in the Beat generation as a whole or Allen Ginsberg specifically. Unfortunately some of Ferlinghetti's responses were destroyed so there are more written by Allen included than Ferlinghetti but I love them both so I still geeked out at being able to peek in to the lives of the famous pair.

Although small in volume this collection has so many topics, questions and half-answers, as all of Ferlinghetti's work. It's brilliant, three poems in particular I will carry with me for some time to come. Lawrence Ferlinghetti does it again, one of the few authors who has yet to let me down.

review of
Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 12, 2011

Rereading A Coney Island of the Mind for what might be the 1st time in 41 yrs felt like going home again - by wch I mean that it feels like something that I'm very familiar w/ - even though I'm not. There's always the possibility that when one reads something in one's 'formative yrs' that it becomes deeply instantiated. Rereading this felt strangely comfortable - like being w/ an old friend that I can trust.

Ferlinghetti was probably the 1st 'rebel poet' I ever read. When I did so, in the early 1970s, his literateness & anti-war attitudes jived w/ my own. These days. I often feel like I live in an all-too-illiterate society (hence my enthusiasm for Goodreads' counterbalance) & reading a bk at all, esp 1 that references many other writers & artists, is ultimately what probably makes me feel like I'm in the company of friends - even though I only 'know' most or all of these people thru their works.

Goya (p9) & Morris Graves (25) & Dante (28) & Chagall (29) & Kafka (31) & Hemingway & Proust & T.S.Eliot (44) & Djuna Barnes (45), etc, etc, grace these pages as characters. What a cast! Ferlinghetti is, of course, the cofounder of City Lights bks & a publisher - as well as a writer in many forms. I can relate: I'm the cofounder of Normal's Books & a publisher & a writer in many forms. I reckon that if I ever have the opportunity to meet him (he's still alive at 92 as I write this) he wdn't have any problem recognizing many of the creative people that I frequently mention & wd probably stump me from time-to-time w/ his own extensive knowledge. If only this were the case more often!

A Coney Island of the Mind was originally published in 1958 & some of the poetry in it dates back to his 1st bk from 1955: Pictures of the Gone World. It astounds me somewhat how much I can relate to the attitude of this bk. He refers to "anarchy" in a completely friendly positive way w/o bothering to even acknowledge the substantial suppression of it in the USA of the time. Take this sentence from "Autobiography":

"I have seen Egyptian pilots in purple clouds
shopkeepers rolling up their blinds
at midday
potato salad and dandelions
at anarchist picnics."

It amused me, & seemed precocious, to read the phrase "drugged store cowboys" on p13 - knowing that a movie wd be similarly named decades later.

On p48 he mentions that the poems "Junkman's Obbligato" & "Autobiography" had been read by him w/ The Cellar Jazz Quintet & released on record. This recording is also on 2 different CDs - one w/ Kenneth Rexroth & one w/ Kenneth Patchen. There're probably people who wd find poetry read along w/ jazz to be a sad cliché of a bygone age - for me, these recordings are utterly wonderful. & reading these poems again I hear Ferlinghetti's readings in memory.

I rarely, or never, hear my poet friends mention Ferlinghetti. Is it b/c he's so much a part of the culture that there's no 'need'? After all, A Coney Island of the Mind is sd to've sold over a million copies - &, given that it's an easy read, most of those copies have probably been read. I wonder if it's more b/c he doesn't self-identify w/ the Beats - the literary superstars of the 20th century? According to his Wikipedia entry:

"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."

I don't really find his writing to be "very unlike that of the original NY Beat circle" at all & find that to be a somewhat surprising statement. The poetry, at least, seems akin to Ginsberg's. Then again, it's often unclear to me who the Beats were - aside from the core circle of friends most often referenced: Burroughs, Ginsberg, Corso, McClure, Kerouac.. Many people seem to be sometimes associated w/ the Beats & sometimes not.

If Ferlinghetti's not a Beat is he a progenitor (well, no, he's a few yrs too late for that)? His "I am Waiting" (from no later than 1958) is a list poem of sorts that predates Anne Waldman's more famous "Fast Talking Woman" by 16 yrs or so. City Lights published that too. Now Waldman's one of those folks ambiguously associated w/ the Beats (she's the coeditor of the Beats at Naropa bk) although I'm told she associates herself more w/ a New York school that's not Beat. Here's a small section from "I am Waiting" that seems like a good place to end this review:

"and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy"

As usual, it's strange looking at these bks that I read over 3 decades ago. Maybe I read this when I was 19, maybe in 1972. At the time, I reckon I considered Ferlinghetti to be one of the major beat poets. Now, when I think of beat poets I just think of Ginsberg. Ferlinghetti seems more regional - like a San Francisco poet - sortof beat, sortof not beat. I don't know how he's historified. Even categorizing this in "plays" (wch is where I have it shelved in my library) seems a little over-pigeonholing - I mean these are ROUTINES, not necessarily PLAYS. A subtle difference, perhaps. Bks read when I was a teenager get lumped together in my vague memories w/ a certain feeling, the feeling of discovering & searching & finding political opinions I cd identify w/ & writing styles that seemed to reach from one person (the writer) to me (the reader) in some sort of direct way. I think of Hermann Hesse, eg - someone who wrote about hero's journeys taken by young men - Ferlinghetti seems like a figure encountered on my (anti-)hero's journey. If I read this when I was 19, I wd've been a hitch-hiker/drifter at the time - exploring the US under conditions w/ no money & not always friendly. I still have a fondness for Ferlinghetti that's probably somehow tied up w/ his connection to my late youth, to my groping in the dark for like-mindedness, for anti-war ethics, for.. something. Regardless, I actually lost interest in him fairly quickly.. - as if the bks were too simple, not radical enuf, maybe too 'spiritual' - a term that acquired pompous & simple-minded associations for me. As if by reading the few bks of his that I did, I'd "been there, done that" & had no more to learn from him. & that's probably entirely too simple-minded of ME.

review of
Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Back Roads to Far Places
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - May 29, 2021

Around the time of Ferlinghetti's 100th birthday, my friend Karen Lillis invited me to give a reading of Ferlinghetti's work at the excellent bkstore that she manages, Caliban. I gave a short reading (on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/c-FLu6yW_TY - on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/Happy100thFerlinghetti) w/ my friend The Dirty Poet (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11160980-emergency-room-wrestling) & in the process was reminded of how much I like Ferlinghetti's work - even tho I rarely read it. Ferlinghetti died this yr, almost making it to 102.

Recently, I met a woman who met Ferlinghetti, probably at his City Lights bkstore in San Francisco. She sd she hadn't liked him, had found him disagreeable or grumpy or some such. I don't know how old he was when she met him but let's speculate that if it were 30 yrs ago he wd've been 72. Now let's just imagine that he might've only been unpleasant that day - or that he might've gotten more unpleasant as he aged, perhaps that he was very enjoyable company when he was younger. I have no idea whether any of that is true but I can say that from reading his work I find him tantalizingly fascinating.

Back Roads to Far Places is one of those little paperbacks, published by New Directions, that measures 5" X 6&3/16th" X 1/4". The poem is in what I assume to be Ferlinghetti's handwriting & there are drawings, also assumed to be by Ferlinghetti. The text is large & easily readable. My used copy has the extra perq of a gifting note from one friend to another w/ stick figure drawings. The poem begins:

"Let my
Japanese Pen
tel its story

They say it is made
of bamboo shoot
and
does not scatter
drops of black blood
when shaken

You have to put
its foot down
right in the snow
before it will
walk off..._ _ ..........

My typing of it here doesn't do the calligraphy or the justification or the dot & dash sizes justice. There's a drawing of a man's face on this 1st p too, presumed to be LF's.

The whole mode of presentation enhances the content. The feel of it is of a meditative, personal journal. This is what probably many people think of as 'poetry'. I'm not even necessarily that enthusiastic of this idea of what poetry is &, yet, it completely works for me w/ Ferlinghetti.

The last p of the poem says this:

So passing strange mountains
And dropping pine needles
in an envelope
I send you some of my bones

This followed by a similar face drawing to that of the beginning. If this were a present from a friend, I wd love that friend more deeply. Somehow, it seems like a present from Ferlinghetti. I intend to finally read more by him.

p.s. It's worth noting that this edition of the 1971 bk doesn't have an ISBN. As such, to some unfortunate lost souls, It's NOT A BOOK. It is, however, very much a bk.

A poetic carnival true to its billing, with plenty of beatnik sideshows. The first page is a gem, recalling the firing squad from Goya's "The Third of May 1808." The middle section is the prototype for the poetry slam, which helps explain the CD-enhanced 50th anniversary edition.

The mutterings of a nation's unconscious. As soon as I opened this up my admiration for Ferlinghetti was once again raised higher.

In the year of his demise I thought I should honour Ferlinghetti's life and vision by reading a selected poems. So many of his poems have the lightness of the wings of fancy lifting off the pavement of pedestrian common sense. So often he reorientates me and reminds me of the spirit of play and freedom that can be crushed out of us by duty and suburbia. Thanks for your legacy, I treasure it.

I loved this book. I am sure it will not be to everyone's taste. It is classic beat stream of consciousness prose. It helps to have read widely as he has many direct and indirect references.

It must be nice to be Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to know what is right and wrong so infallibly without having to give the matter any thought at all, not feeling the need to reassess your thoughts on the matter over the last thirty or forty years, and to continue churning out lines about how bad it is to think that capitalism is democracy, or that you can just slot environmentalism into your politics without considering that democracy and the protection of the environment are, in many ways, completely incompatible.

It must be nice, I guess, to go to sleep every night without worrying that the vaguely hippyish new-left 'anarchism' that you prefer is more or less identical to the capitalism that you claim to despise: each prefers to atomize societies, cultures, communities and institutions; each rejects the idea that there can be a common good; each considers the individual's desires to be prima facie good and right.

It must be wonderful, too, to be such a big name that you can keep writing derivative beat poetry, which occasionally rises to irony but is otherwise just a record of one person's thoughts and emotions put on a page in vague rhythms that virtually demand to be read as if every line was a question? because no thought is ever completed? and for whatever reason this is how poets read their poems? especially when they think they're performers?

That last was unfair; I've never heard him read. But otherwise this is an intellectually insulting rant. Much of what he hates deserves to be hated, but he has no reason to hate it other than a vague dislike of things that other people like. Might like to give that some thought.

A masterpiece of autobiography and breathless poetic free-form babbling. Thank you Monsieur Ferlinghetti for the wildest ride of philosophical and artistic musings I have encountered in 2020. A joy to read. A line runs from Emerson, to Thoreau, to Whitman to Ferlinghetti - they are not 'poets of loss' they are the great Yea-sayers.

Happy 100 years on the blue and green orb to an elder statesman of American letters!

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, socialist activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. At 99 he is one of the last survivors of the Beat generation of poets and writers. Little Boy is semiautobiographical and begins with his childhood shuffling between guardians, service in World War II, and Paris. A long life blends the old and the new. An excellent mix of Google and Barney Google. Facebook gains mention along with the World Wide Web early on in the book. It is an unexpected mixture of ages but rather plain. The reader falls into a routine the begetting in Chronicles. Suddenly the text explodes into a Ginsbergesque rant. He calls on the poets of the past as one would call on the saints. He has anger:

We’re the victors we set the exchange rates the laws the
treaties not worth the paper they are printed on ha-ha we’ll tell you
how to breathe all you fuckers trying to destroy us bombing the Twin
Towers you little creeps with your pajama clothes and weird religions
and who the hell was Mohammed Zoroaster Sufi Buddha-boy Omar
Khayyam Rumi smoking hookahs and kicking back we’ll take care of
you buddy after Twin Towers we’ll generate this huge national
paranoia allowing our guv to abolish liberty in the land of the free with
panic legislation

The words flow smoothly, sometimes violently, but always with meaning and life. The words seem alive. Here is a man, on in his years, not calmly telling his life and experience to grandchildren, but raging refusing to go gently into the night. Here is a man who saw the remains of Nagasaki and wants to remind us it can happen again. Powerful, moving, a lifetime recorded on a hundred pages.

Well, I note that i originally entered this as a book by S.J. Perelman, a now dormant humorist, his stuff not having the eternal themes of Leacock. Mty bad. However, it was one of the iconic poetry collections of the 1960's so if you wish to truly embark on that time period, you had better read it.

I am just under halfway through this book. Yes, it's like a roller coaster, with that typical first part being pulled up slowly with only the strong feeling that we are in for a wild ride. Didn't take long but it's certainly exhilarating. I'm struck by the erudite allusions peppered everywhere and know that I am only seeing some of them since I am nowhere near the level of Ferlinghetti in any way or even of his intended audience. I am perplexed though at the apparent misunderstanding the author has of the Immaculate Conception, as as I look through the internet trying to understand this it appears somewhat common that this misconception exists. For the record, the Immaculate Conception has nothing to do with Jesus' conception rather everything to do with Mary's. I think there is plenty of food there for metaphor and allusion without betraying an ignorance of its true meaning in Christian lore, after all, we westerners are steeped in this culture and will be long after its power is gone. Why should we consciously misrepresent the details of this? Given the intellectual level of this work and the reputation of the publisher, I'm at a loss why this has been done. I can only assume this is done on purpose, but do not understand why.

Little Boy
by:Lawrence Ferlinghetti
2019
Doubleday
4.0 / 5.0

This book was written and published when Ferlinghetti was 99 years old. His writing style, stream of consciousness, either endears him to you, or turns you off. I love his use of this style, and is a perfect representation of him as a person; constantly doing, thinking, learning, evolving. Its Ferlinghetti in words.
This is a fast and intense book. Autobiographical. Beat Rants. Philosophical. I enjoyed this quick one. What an amazing mind.