A Cultural Icon Passes

(some LF artifacts from my own collection; you can tell I’m a fan; what his most important book looked like in the first edition–echoes of The Great Gatsby cover?; his splashy signature)

(sometimes we get very lucky; bought new,  his first signed book in this limited 50th anniversary ed.)

(all those wonderful poems read by The Author in 1999)

(a trip down Memory Lane to a memorable live Beat reading with a jazz quintet and the other granddaddy of the Beat scene Kenneth Rexroth)

(nicely done CD & DVD set; watch LF recording the poems)

(a 2010 excursion into Ferlinghetti’s world, writing, and life with many special guests and hardcore fans)

(the ultimate fun photographic glimpse into LF; author: Christopher Felver)

Obit: The longtime spiritual godfather of the Beats and insurgent-art poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021), 101.

LF is the famous co-owner of San Francisco’s City Lights Books since it opened in 1953 (still planning to reopen after the pandemic after fans’ massive donations). It was the first place in America where you could purchase paperbacks en masse and sit around the store casually reading its stock. It was also a famous publishing house which produced Beat books by Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Michael McClure.

Ginsberg’s Howl (IMHO, on a par with Eliot’s “The Waste Land” as the great 20th century poem) was initially censored and this led to Ferlinghetti being charged as a ‘dirty book’ publisher. This turned into a significant First Amendment case and Ferlinghetti was acquitted. (The trial over D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover was to follow soon after that.)

LF was a very witty, intelligent, culture-referenced, social-conscious poet who, ironically, considered himself less of a Beat poet than the last bohemian poet. His classic A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) was his most successful collection and the top-selling modern poetry book with over 1 million copies printed, including those in multiple languages in addition to English. (In passing, my favs in the book are “The world is a beautiful place”, “Sometime during eternity”, and “Constantly risking absurdity” and the long poems.)

LF was quite the interesting, funny, ironic guy and you can still videos online of him reading up to recently. He studied literature at the Sorbonne and his Master’s thesis was on John Ruskin and J.M. Turner, reflecting his interest in great visual art. (There are many allusions to famous paintings in his poems.) Like Eliot in “The Waste Land”, he also freely referenced previous high-culture figures and works.

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