Status
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Description
Ferlinghetti is a national treasure, and his voice has become part of our collective conscience. Some of his most famous poems from this collection such as "I Am Waiting" and "Junkman's Obbligato" were created for jazz accompaniment. Written in the conservative post-war 1950s, his poems still resonate, as they will continue to resonate, with a joyful anti-establishment fervor that beats a rhythmic portrait of humanity. Ferlinghetti sings of a world in which "the heart flops over / gasping 'Love'," "cadillacs fell thru the trees like rain," and where "we are the same people / only further from home / on freeways fifty lanes wide." This special 50th Anniversary Edition comes with a newly recorded CD of the author reading the 29 poems of the title section ofA Coney Island of the Mind as well as selections fromPictures of the Gone World.… (more)
User reviews
Ferlinghetti
The printing press has made poetry too silent. I want it to be heard, to have the direct impact of speech.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti. 1958
The title of the book and its first
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 previous 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, and 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 incorporation 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 among these poems (nothing too arcane for a 'net search to remedy, though). Ironically, it is the "popular" and contemporary allusions 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.
He writes with a down to earth working class attitude and a wry sense of humor. Accompanying the humor his poems often include a cold splash of water in your face dose of reality. I prefer to give you some examples of his poetry and let you decide what his style is. The book is short but poetry gets a lot of meaning and impact out of a few words. I only started reading poetry regularly about seven years ago after getting some very good anthologies from my Library of America subscription. I have grown to enjoy the different way that language is used in poetry and I am working to make it a bigger part of my reading diet.
One of my favorite poems is titled "Dog" and has some lines that have a way of constantly going through my mind.
"The dog trots freely in the street
and has his own dog's life to live
and to think about
and to reflect upon
...........
a real realist
with a real tale to tell
and a real tail to tell it with"
How can you forget, a real tale to tell and a real tail to tell it with?
Ferlinghetti's description of the life of a poet.
"Constantly risking absurdity
and death
wherever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making"
The cold splash of water in your face.
" Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter........
Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world news
from the usual unreliable sources
real dead"
This is the kind of book I save a five star rating for. I will keep this by my bed so I can read a poem or two when I feel the need.
4.5 stars- well earned!
The title poem, "a kind of circus of the soul," in 29
"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.