Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919- ). Biography and Сreativity

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the leading voices of the so-called Beat Generation, was born on March 24, 1919, in Yonkers, New York, to a Jewish mother and an Italian father. His was not an ideal childhood, and by the time he was a year old, his father had died and his mother, Clemence, had been diagnosed as insane and had been admitted to a state mental hospital. At that point, the child was sent to live with his uncle and aunt, Ludwig and Emily Mendes-Monsanto. Their marriage, however, began deteriorating almost as soon as Lawrence began to live with them, with the end result that young Lawrence was put in an orphanage until Emily finally separated from Ludwig and took Lawrence to live in Bronxville, New York.

Ferlinghetti began writing poetry at the age of 16 and soon enlisted in the U.S. Navy, serving during World War II. He attended the University of North Carolina, graduating with a B.A., and then earned his M.A. from Columbia. He then moved to Paris, to attend the Sorbonne, where he took his Ph.D. Significantly, the title of his dissertation was “The City as Symbol in Modern Poetry,” reflecting his concerns with the urban landscape and the role it played in 20th-century poetry. After receiving his Ph.D., he moved to San Francisco in the early 1950s, a move that would impact his career perhaps more than any other decision he would make.

In the San Francisco of the 1950s, there was an artistic movement called the San Francisco Renaissance, an explosion of a new kind of art and poetry. The poet Kenneth Rexroth is considered by most literary historians to have been the founder of this movement, out of which sprang poetry with an avant-garde flair. Rexroth, anticipating the Beat poets, was one of the first American poets to explore Asian poetic forms, such as the haiku, as well as being influenced by jazz music. The artistic atmosphere in San Francisco by the time Ferlinghetti arrived was one of exuberant experimentation.

There were new things happening musically, artistically, and literarily on the West Coast at this time. Once he arrived in San Francisco, he met Peter Martin, a sociology instructor who also had a passion for both film and books, and, in 1953, they founded the City Lights bookstore, which today still operates in its original location (http:// www.citylights.com). It was the nation’s first allpaperback bookstore; Martin and Ferlinghetti took the name City Lights from the Charlie Chaplin movie of the same name. The bookstore is considered today to be a significant historical landmark of America’s counterculture.

In 1955, Ferlinghetti started a book publishing business allied with the bookstore, City Lights Publishing, which published cheap paperback books by poets and other authors in order to make poetry more accessible to the public, such as the small volumes of poetry published under the Pocket Poets Series imprint. While Ferlinghetti was starting these businesses, he was also writing, and he published Pictures of the gone world with City Lights Publishing in 1955. This volume garnered some critical attention, but Ferlinghetti’s next book would be his big breakthrough. In 1958 City Lights published Coney Island of the Mind, one of the highest-selling single-author poetry books of the latter part of the 20th century. In the Prologue Ferlinghetti explains the concept behind the book’s first section:

The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller’s Into the Night Life. It is used out of context but expresses the way I felt about these poems as I wrote them—as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul.

This first section contains 29 poems written on a number of different subjects, including childhood memories of candy stores; meditations on artists and writers, such as Francisco Goya and Dante Alighieri; and ruminations on the power of art and the role of religion in American life. The second section, titled Oral Messages, was a group of seven longer poems that were conceived, Ferlinghetti said, “specifically for jazz accompaniment and as such should be considered as simultaneously spoken ‘oral messages’ rather than as poems written for the printed page.” The third section of the book included a selection of poems from his previous work, Pictures of the gone world. The book was a huge success; by the time the hardback edition was published 10 years later in 1968, it had already sold 600,000 copies, an extraordinary number for a volume of poetry.

Ferlinghetti’s interest in the fusion of jazz and poetry reflected the influence of the growing Beat movement. The Beats were primarily a group of writers who, beginning in the late 1940s, congregated in New York City, including Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. These writers were dissatisfied with the status quo; much of their writing rebels against the conformist attitudes of mid-century American culture. During the 1950s, many of the Beats traveled to the West Coast and ultimately to San Francisco, where Ferlinghetti became associated with them.

Characteristics of Beat literature generally are a dissatisfaction with the status quo, anger or frustration at the more confining or limiting aspects of conservative American culture, a romantic longing for or attachment to nature, and the idea of the journey as a means of self-discovery. Ferlinghetti’s own work reflects these; at times his poems feature what might be termed a “Beatnik” speaker and hipster language. His poem “Sometime during Eternity,” for example, features a Beatnik’s version of the life of Jesus Christ, wherein the speaker, describing the aftermath of Christ’s crucifixion, says that his followers are always “calling Him to come down and sit in on their combo as if he is the king cat who’s got to blow / or they can’t quite make it.”

Ferlinghetti continued his association with the Beats during the 1950s and 1960s, even publishing Ginsberg’s “Howl” and being arrested on obscenity charges for doing so. His interest in the more avant-garde aspects of the movement are reflected in the way he often performed his poetry with jazz music accompaniment and in his interest in poetry as an oral art form. He continued publishing both his own and other writers’ poetry in the 1960s and 1970s. He even made the spoken word record Tyrannus Nix? in 1970.

As the Beat movement waned in the 1970s and the power of the counterculture began to diminish, Ferlinghetti kept publishing. In 1973, New Directions published his Open Eye, Open Heart, a volume that contains poems that are still in “A World Awash with Fascism and Fear,” in which the poem’s speaker is appalled at the number of people who are oppressed and, in the poem’s final lines, tells us that the world “still cries out for freedom.” As a writer, Ferlinghetti continually addresses the problems of class, social injustice, and the oppression of marginalized groups. He still publishes regularly, and New Directions published his most recent book, Americus Book I, in 2004.

In addition to being a poet and a publisher, Ferlinghetti has become a cultural and literary icon. In 1998, he was named San Francisco’s poet laureate, and in 2003 he was awarded the Robert Frost Memorial Medal and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As visual artists are often the subject of his poems, it is not surprising that he is also a talented and prolific painter, regularly showing his work around the country and in Europe. In his 90s, Ferlinghetti retains a passion for social justice and for various liberal causes. Perhaps most important of all, he possesses a never-wavering passion for poetry. In 2005, he was awarded the Literarian Award for outstanding service to the literary community, and in part of his acceptance speech he refers both to American culture and to the power of art:

This culture may globalize the world, devastating indigenous historic traditions, but it is not our mainstream culture. The true mainstream is made, not of oil, but of writers and readers, musicians and composers, editors and publishers, bookstores and libraries and universities, and all the institutions that support them. Ferlinghetti’s dedication to the craft of writing reflects the way he has spent his life. His reputation rests chiefly on his passion for poetry and his belief in the ability of poetry to transform the world.