Witty and profound, Ferlinghetti’s words will live on
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was everything a poet should be — witty and quirky and profound.
And, oh yes, durable. Ferlinghetti was 101 when he recently died at his home in San Francisco.
The cause was interstitial lung disease, his son told the Associated Press.
“Lawrence probably started hundreds of thousands of people reading his poetry,” poet and essayist Michael Mcclure told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003. “They read his poetry first and then they went on to read more poetry.”
To appreciate Ferlinghetti, we must appreciate the era from which he sprang. He was part of the Beat Generation, among the greatest outpourings of creativity in American literature. The writers were hip and irreverent, their prose and poetry approximating the freewheeling rhythms of jazz, a style that was casual but disciplined.
The Beats produced bona fide classics — “Howl,” “Junkie” and, perhaps the greatest of them all, “On the Road,” by Jack Kerouac. These works created a new language for American literature, rambling but controlled, ideally suited to their spirit of freedom and adventure. They influenced artists as diverse as Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe and Bob Dylan, along with the rap artists of a later generation.
Ferlinghetti never reached the heights of fellow Beats like Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg or William Burroughs. But that is like saying that T.S. Eliot was no Shakespeare. Ferlinghetti was a huge talent in his own right, his words bursting with the joy and daring of nonconformity; he referred to our vehicle-driven culture as “Autogeddon.”
A poet and novelist who never considered himself a Beat, he wrote more than 30 books, including his masterpiece, “A Coney Island of the Mind.” The final work, amazingly, came out in 2019 — “Little Boy,” a novel. Publishers called it “his last literary will and testament,” although fans hoped he would keep writing.
“Ferlinghetti maintains an unrelenting mental deluge, scraping the furthest edges of his memory and imagination,” Craig Morgan Teicher wrote in his review for NPR.
Ferlinghetti was also a publisher and a bookseller, running the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. He stood trial in 1956 for publishing and selling “Howl,” the Ginsberg classic. Critics called it obscene, but the judge ruled that it had “redeeming social significance.”
The bookstore was located across the alley from the Vesuvio Cafe, the bar where Kerouac loved to hang out, sometimes staying beyond last call. Ferlinghetti rarely joined him. He was less flamboyant than his more celebrated Beat mates, never engaging in acts of public drunkenness.
“I was,” he once said, “sort of the guy minding the store.”
Ferlinghetti made a brief appearance in “The Last Waltz,” a film that documented the final concert of the legendary rock group, The Band. He wore a Mao jacket and a bowler hat, but he looked like a priest, a funky priest. It was, perhaps, appropriate garb for the poem he recited — a parody of The Lord’s Prayer.
“Oh, man!” he said, closing the poem.
The recitation reflected an irony he displayed throughout his career — a reverence toward the language that he wielded to express an irreverence toward society, sparked by the nonconformity at his core. He did it through satire that seemed almost mild, the criticism no less effective for its generosity. The message was clear.
“We’ve lost a great poet and visionary,” Nancy Peters, coowner of the City Lights Bookstore, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Lawrence was a legend in his time and a great San Franciscan.”
True. He loved the town, but his influence spread beyond those narrow confines. And it will continue to, as long as people cherish vibrant writing and clear, bold thinking.