Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1919–2021

On March 24, 1919, Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York. After spending his early childhood in France, he received his BA from the University of North Carolina, an MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the Sorbonne.

He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, including Poetry as Insurgent Art (New Directions, 2007); Americus, Book I (New Directions, 2004); A Far Rockaway of the Heart (New Directions, 1997); and A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions, 1958). He has translated the works of a number of poets, including Nicanor Parra, Jacques Prevert, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In addition to poetry, he is also the author of more than eight plays and three novels, including Little Boy: A Novel (Doubleday, 2019), Love in the Days of Rage (Overlook, 1988), and Her (New Directions, 1966).

In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin opened the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, California, helping to support their magazine City Lights. Two years later, they launched City Lights Publishers, a book-publishing venture, which helped start the careers of many alternative local and international poets. In 1956, Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg's book Howl and Other Poems, which resulted in his being arrested by the San Francisco Police for publishing “obscene work” and a subsequent trial that gained international attention. At the end, the judge concluded that Howl had "some redeeming social importance" and “was not obscene,” and Ferlinghetti prevailed. City Lights became known as the heart of the "Beat" movement, which included writers such as Kenneth RexrothGary SnyderAllen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, crediting Ferlinghetti with having helped spark the San Francisco literary renaissance of the 1950s and the “Beat” movement that followed, although he does not consider himself a “Beat” poet.

About his work, the critic Barbara Berman wrote, "Ferlinghetti is a tonic for a world thirsting for the loving outrage and energetic reverence that helped reignite and sustain the enterprise of bard-fueled citizenship."

In 1994, San Francisco renamed a street in Ferlinghetti's honor, and in 1998, he was named the first poet laureate of San Francisco. He is the recipient of many international awards and honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters, the Robert Frost Memorial Medal, and the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award, presented for "outstanding service to the American literary community,” among others. In 2003, he was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2007, he was named Commandeur of the French Order of Arts and Letters.

He died on February 22, 2021, in San Francisco, California.  

Selected Poems by LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

  1. The World Is A Beautiful Place

    by LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

    The world is a beautiful place
    to be born into
    if you don't mind happiness
    not always being
    so very much fun
    if you don't mind a touch of hell
    now and then
    just when everything is fine
    because even in heaven
    they don't sing

    all the time

    The world is a beautiful place
    to be born into
    if you don't mind some people dying
    all the time
    or maybe only starving
    some of the time
    which isn't half bad
    if it isn't you


    Oh the world is a beautiful place
    to be born into
    if you don't much mind
    a few dead minds
    in the higher places
    or a bomb or two
    now and then
    in your upturned faces
    or such other improprieties
    as our Name Brand society
    is prey to
    with its men of distinction
    and its men of extinction
    and its priests
    and other patrolmen

    and its various segregations
    and congressional investigations
    and other constipations
    that our fool flesh
    is heir to

    Yes the world is the best place of all
    for a lot of such things as
    making the fun scene
    and making the love scene
    and making the sad scene
    and singing low songs and having inspirations
    and walking around
    looking at everything
    and smelling flowers
    and goosing statues
    and even thinking
    and kissing people and
    making babies and wearing pants
    and waving hats and
    dancing
    and going swimming in rivers
    on picnics
    in the middle of the summer
    and just generally
    'living it up'
    Yes
    but then right in the middle of it
    comes the smiling

    mortician

  2. Wild Dreams Of A New Beginning

    by LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

    There's a breathless hush on the freeway tonight
    Beyond the ledges of concrete
    restaurants fall into dreams
    with candlelight couples
    Lost Alexandria still burns
    in a billion lightbulbs
    Lives cross lives
    idling at stoplights
    Beyond the cloverleaf turnoffs
    'Souls eat souls in the general emptiness'

    A piano concerto comes out a kitchen window
    A yogi speaks at Ojai
    'It's all taking pace in one mind'
    On the lawn among the trees
    lovers are listening
    for the master to tell them they are one
    with the universe
    Eyes smell flowers and become them
    There's a deathless hush
    on the freeway tonight

    as a Pacific tidal wave a mile high
    sweeps in
    Los Angeles breathes its last gas
    and sinks into the sea like the Titanic all lights lit
    Nine minutes later Willa Cather's Nebraska
    sinks with it
    The sea comes over in Utah
    Mormon tabernacles washed away like barnacles
    Coyotes are confounded & swim nowhere
    An orchestra onstage in Omaha
    keeps on playing Handel's Water Music
    Horns fill with water
    ans bass players float away on their instruments
    clutching them like lovers horizontal
    Chicago's Loop becomes a rollercoaster
    Skyscrapers filled like water glasses
    Great Lakes mixed with Buddhist brine
    Great Books watered down in Evanston
    Milwaukee beer topped with sea foam
    Beau Fleuve of Buffalo suddenly become salt
    Manhatten Island swept clean in sixteen seconds
    buried masts of Amsterdam arise
    as the great wave sweeps on Eastward
    to wash away over-age Camembert Europe
    manhatta steaming in sea-vines
    the washed land awakes again to wilderness
    the only sound a vast thrumming of crickets
    a cry of seabirds high over
    in empty eternity
    as the Hudson retakes its thickets
    and Indians reclaim their canoes

  3. Sometime During Eternity

    by LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

    Sometime during eternity
    some guys show up
    and one of them
    who shows up real late
    is a kind of carpenter
    from some square-type place
    like Galilee
    and he starts wailing
    and claiming he is hep
    to who made heaven

    and earth
    and that the cat
    who really laid it on us
    is his Dad

    And moreover
    he adds
    It's all writ down
    on some scroll-type parchments
    which some henchmen

    leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres
    a long time ago
    and which you won't even find
    for a coupla thousand years or so
    or at least for
    ninteen hundred and fortyseven
    of them
    to be exact
    and even then
    nobody really believes them
    or me
    for that matter

    You're hot
    they tell him

    And they cool him

    They stretch him on the Tree to cool
    And everybody after that
    is always making models
    of this Tree
    with Him hung up
    and always crooning His name
    and 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

    Only he don't come down
    from His Tree

    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

  4. Don'T Let That Horse

    by LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

    Don't let that horse
    eat that violin

    cried Chagall's mother

    But he
    kept right on
    painting

    And became famous


    And kept on painting
    The Horse With Violin In Mouth

    And when he finally finished it
    he jumped up upon the horse
    and rode away
    waving the violin

    And then with a low bow gave it

    to the first naked nude he ran across


    And there were no strings
    attached

  5. Constantly Risking Absurdity

    by LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

    Constantly risking absurdity
    and death
    whenever he performs
    above the heads
    of his audience
    the poet like an acrobat
    climbs on rime
    to a high wire of his own making
    and balancing on eyebeams
    above a sea of faces

    paces his way
    to the other side of the day
    performing entrachats
    and sleight-of-foot tricks
    and other high theatrics
    and all without mistaking
    any thing
    for what it may not be
    For he's the super realist
    who must perforce perceive

    taut truth
    before the taking of each stance or step
    in his supposed advance
    toward that still higher perch
    where Beauty stands and waits
    with gravity
    to start her death-defying leap
    And he
    a little charleychaplin man
    who may or may not catch
    her fair eternal form
    spreadeagled in the empty air
    of existence

  6. I Am Waiting

    by LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

    I am waiting for my case to come up
    and I am waiting
    for a rebirth of wonder
    and I am waiting
    for someone to really discover America
    and wail
    and I am waiting
    for the discovery
    of a new symbolic western frontier
    and I am waiting

    for the American Eagle
    to really spread its wings
    and straighten up and fly right
    and I am waiting
    for the Age of Anxiety
    to drop dead
    and I am waiting
    for the war to be fought
    which will make the world safe
    for anarchy

    and I am waiting
    for the final withering away
    of all governments
    and I am perpetually awaiting
    a rebirth of wonder

    I am waiting for the Second Coming
    and I am waiting
    for a religious revival
    to sweep through the state of Arizona
    and I am waiting
    for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
    and I am waiting
    for them to prove
    that God is really American
    and I am waiting
    to see God on television
    piped’ onto church altars
    if only they can find
    the right channel
    to tune in on
    and I am waiting
    for the Last Supper to be served again
    with a strange new appetizer
    and I am perpetually awaiting
    a rebirth of wonder

    I am waiting for my number to be called
    and I am waiting
    for the Salvation Army to take over
    and I am waiting
    for the meek to be blessed
    and inherit the earth
    without taxes and I am waiting
    for forests and animals
    to reclaim the earth as theirs
    and I am waiting
    for a way to be devised
    to destroy all nationalisms
    without killing anybody
    and I am waiting
    for linnets and planets to fall like rain
    and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
    to lie down together again
    in a new rebirth of wonder

    I am waiting for the Great Divide to ‘be crossed
    and I am anxiously waiting
    for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
    by an obscure general practitioner
    and I am waiting
    for the storms of life
    to be over
    and I am waiting
    to set sail for happiness
    and I am waiting
    for a reconstructed Mayflower
    to reach America
    with its picture story and tv rights
    sold in advance to the natives
    and I am waiting
    for the lost music to sound again
    in the Lost Continent
    in a new rebirth of wonder

    I am waiting for the day
    that maketh all things clear
    and I am awaiting retribution
    for what America did
    to Tom Sawyer
    and I am waiting
    for the American Boy
    to take off Beauty’s clothes
    and get on top of her
    and I am waiting
    for Alice in Wonderland
    to retransmit to me
    her total dream of innocence
    and I am waiting
    for Childe Roland to come
    to the final darkest tower
    and I am waiting
    for Aphrodite
    to grow live arms
    at a final disarmament conference
    in a new rebirth of wonder

    I am waiting
    to get some intimations
    of immortality
    by recollecting my early childhood
    and I am waiting
    for the green mornings to come again
    youth’s dumb green fields come back again
    and I am waiting
    for some strains of unpremeditated art
    to shake my typewriter
    and I am waiting to write
    the great indelible poem
    and I am waiting
    for the last long careless rapture
    and I am perpetually waiting
    for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
    to catch each other up at last
    and embrace
    and I am waiting
    perpetually and forever
    a renaissance of wonder

 
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