Alan Olee Book Report

Last Tuesday 03-24-15 was American Beat Poet Lawrence Ferlingetti’s 96th birthday. 

His poetry has long been an inspiration to me and in fact it was his poetry that got me seriously interested in English poetry and caused me to further delve into German language poetry.  He wrote one of my all time favorite poems – I even set it to song long ago:

Lost Parents

It takes a fast car
to lead a double life
in these days of short-distance love affairs

when he has far-out lovers in
three different locations
and a date with each one
at least twice a week

a little simple arithmetic shows
what a workout he’s engaged in
crossing & recrossing the city

from bedroom to patio to swimming pool
the ignition key hot
and the backseat a jumble of clothes for different lifestyles

a surfboard on the roof
and a copy of Kahili Gibran or Rod McKuen
under the dashboard

next to the Indian music cassettes
packs of Tarot and the I-Ching
crammed into the glove compartment

along with old traffic tickets
and hardpacks of Kents
dents attesting to the passion
of his last lover

And his answering service
catching him on the freeway
between two calls or two encounter groups
and an urgent message left

with an unlisted number to call Carol
about the bottle of fine wine
he forgot to pick up
and deliver to the gallery
for the reception at nine

While she shuttles to her gynecologist
and will meet him later
between two other numbers
male or female

including his wife
who also called twice
wanting to know where he’s been
and what he’s done

with their throw-away children
who
left to their own devices
in a beach house at Malibu

grew up and dropped out into Nothing
in a Jungian search
for lost parents
their own age

Lawrence Ferlingetti from Who Are We Now? Published by New Directions

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.

In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin began to publish City Lights magazine. They also opened the City Lights Books Shop in San Francisco to help support the magazine. In 1955, they launched City Light Publishing, a book-publishing venture. City Lights became known as the heart of the “Beat” movement, which included writers such as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac.

Ferlinghetti is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, including Time of Useful Consciousness (New Directions, 2012); Poetry as Insurgent Art (New Directions, 2007); Americus, Book I (New Directions, 2004); San Francisco Poems (City Lights Books, 2002); How to Paint Sunlight (New Directions, 2001); A Far Rockaway of the Heart (New Directions, 1997); These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems, 1955-1993 (New Directions, 1993); Over All the Obscene Boundaries: European Poems & Transitions (New Directions, 1984); Who Are We Now? (New Directions, 1976); The Secret Meaning of Things (New Directions, 1969); and A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions, 1958). He has translated the work of a number of poets including Nicanor Parra, Jacques Prevert, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Ferlinghetti is also the author of more than eight plays and of the novels Love in the Days of Rage (Overlook, 1988) and Her (New Directions, 1966).

In 1994, San Francisco renamed a street in his honor. He was also named the first poet laureate of San Francisco in 1998. His other awards and honors include the lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle in 2000, the Frost Medal in 2003, and the Literarian Award in 2005, presented for “outstanding service to the American literary community.”

Currently, Ferlinghetti writes a weekly column for the San Francisco Chronicle. He also continues to operate the City Lights bookstore, and he travels frequently to participate in literary conferences and poetry readings. http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/lawrence-ferlinghetti

His WWII Experience

In the summer of 1941, he lived with two college mates on Little Whale Boat Island in Casco Bay, Maine, lobster fishing, and raking moss from rocks to be sold in Portland, Maine, for pharmaceutical use. This experience gave him a love of the sea, a theme that runs through much of his poetry. After the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Ferlinghetti enrolled in Midshipmen’s school in Chicago, and in 1942 shipped out as junior officer on J. P. Morgan III‘s yacht, which had been refitted to patrol for submarines off the East Coast.

Ferlinghetti was next assigned to the Ambrose Lightship outside New York harbor, to identify all incoming ships. In 1943 and 1944 he served as an officer on three U.S. Navy subchasers used as convoy escorts. As commander of the subchaser USS SC1308, he was at the Normandy invasion as part of the anti-submarine screen around the beaches. After VE Day, the Navy transferred him to the Pacific Theater, where he served as navigator of the troop ship USS Selinur. Six weeks after the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, he visited the ruins of the city, an experience that turned him into a lifelong pacifist.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Ferlinghetti