Great poet inspires dreams

At 11:30 on Tuesday morning, my cell phone began crazily ringing with text notifications. I was in Golden Gate Park enjoying the midwinter break — a sunny, 70degree day in San Francisco.

“Larry!” one said. “Holy Ferlinghetti,” said another. “Sad about Larry” was a third. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the giant among poets worldwide, had passed at 101.

Ferlinghetti first came into my life when I was a freshman in high school. My father had just passed, and books and reading were my love and my escape. “The Coney Island of the Mind” was the first book of poetry that gave me an inkling that I, too, could commit words to paper. Free verse poems were taking their place in the literary canon. Ferlinghetti’s poems “broke open letters.”

Inspired by Ferlinghetti and a few other voices of the time, I began writing secretly, and then in earnest when I arrived in Berkeley at the tail end of the Beats. Ann Waldman, Jessica Hagedorn, Susan Griffin and Adrienne Rich were my muses then, but Lawrence’s voice was always among the first.

Sometime later I had established myself as a poet in the lively and still thriving poetry scene in San Francisco. After a bachelor’s at San Francisco State (where I studied with Stan Rice, Kathleen Fraser and Kay Boyle), I earned a master’s at Mills College, studying with the estimable Chana Bloch. My work had been published and, most importantly, I was “on the scene” being featured at the cafes and bookstores around the city. Jack Foley, the host of “Cover to Cover” on KPFA and the editor of “O Powerful Western Star” was mentoring me.

Still, working as an aspiring writer and a working mother was wearing thin. After much deliberation and soul searching, I left my corporate job to be a fulltime writer. At this point, I was blogging for the Huffington Post, writing book reviews and teaching poetry in the California Poets in the Schools program and Poetry Out Loud, a program for high school students founded by Dana Gioia, another corporate deserter, when he was chair of the National Endowment for the Arts.

During this period, over the course of one year, I had three dreams about Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I diligently recorded them, even if I had no idea why I was being treated to visitations by the master. The dreams haunted me. Why was Ferlinghetti making repeated appearances in my dreams? The first one was a simple, vague sighting. The second was direct, featuring myself encouraging a young child: “You gotta go to the Ferlinghetti School. It’s completely rad and totally cool.”

This was getting interesting but still, I had no plan to employ the nighttime messages. By the time Ferlinghetti himself showed up in the third dream, I thought I had better at least try to make sense of these missives. I sat for days attempting to craft the dreams into a compelling piece of art. I finally composed “The Ferlinghetti School of Poetics.” I took it out to open mics and submitted it as any selfrespecting poet does.

The poem took off like a rocket. First, it won Poets 11, a citywide poetry contest founded by San Francisco Poet Laureate Emeritus, Jack Hirschman. I even have thenMayor Gavin Newsom’s signature on my award certificate.

The poem went on to be published in literary journals around the globe — winning best poem for 2009 for Levure Litteraire, a French literary journal.

One morning, while cohosting “Dreams and Art,” an internet radio show founded by dream expert Kelly Sullivan Walden, I read the poem for the radio audience. Kelly’s husband, Dana Walden, a musician and filmmaker, insisted that we create a short film of the poem. We filmed on location at Beyond Baroque in Venice, in North Beach and the Santa Cruz boardwalk, a standin for Coney Island. The movie took off — winning honorable mention at the International Association for the Study of Dreams, showed at the Poetry Film Festival in Athens and premiered at the Beat Museum in San Francisco. It got nearly 12,000 views on YouTube. I was happy with its life, but this little story kept going. (Watch it at https://youtu.be/qEzV0SuMpd8.)

I was asked by journal editors for the poem. And I submitted the short film to a few festivals. In 2019, (the year Ferlinghetti turned 100) the film was screened at 20 international film festivals, including Cannes and Rome, England and Austria, and it won Best Poetry Film at the World Film Festival in Los Angeles. To date, the poems has been published 10 times.

But what was I saying that people wanted to hear? Like Ferlinghetti’s poems, the piece tackles big subjects. It looks at how artists go against the grain of societal norms and expectations, how living on the edge as an artist and taking risks, “being on the wire” of creativity has its costs. It speaks to memory, and my father, and how memories haunt, and comfort us. It addresses the healing power of art, the capturing of “fog drifting in from the sea on another sunny day.”

A: B: C:

A: B: C:

How much of the U.S. population has had the first of two vaccine doses?

A: 31%

B: 20%

C: 13%

What major memorial is under way in the Castro? A: Christopher Columbus

B: Harvey Milk

C: Robin Williams

The redwood forest is receiving permanent protection in what area?

A: Castle Park

B: Redwood Regional Park

C: Anderson Valley

Boeing has recommended that airlines ground which type of plane?

A: Boeing 777

B: The Batwing

C: Goodyear blimps

What is threatening California’s climate goals?