In His 96^th Year- A Lawrence Ferlinghetti Of The Mind

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Zack James 

Recently after viewing a documentary which was part biopic and part cultural artifact about the life, times and work of self -described San Francisco anarchist poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti Josh Breslin, an old time corner boy from up in textile mill-town Olde Saco in Maine who spent most of his working career working as a journalist wrote up his thoughts about the film. I had, before he left to go retire back up in Olde Saco into the small house his late mother had left him, worked with him as an assistant, a go-fer really, a go-fer for his daily quotient of coffee, booze and whatever other stimulant I could find in the wilds of student-infested Cambridge. I also was a guy, a guy a couple of generations younger that Josh, who he would bounce ideas off of and see if they stuck as he called it, stuck with millennials like me who would except in books or on films be clueless about the things that concerned him.

Josh had known some of Ferlinghetti’s younger circle when he lived on in California at various times earlier in his life before heading back East about twenty years ago to settle into Cambridge. That then younger circle consisted of some of the remnants of the 1950s “beat” generation who knew Jack Kerouac, maybe attended Allen Ginsberg’s famous introduction to serious beat poetry with his landmark Howl, mostly local San Francisco-known poets, who Ferlinghetti was instrumental through his connection with the famous and iconic City Lights Bookstore in getting published and getting some publicity for their works and performances. Add into the mix some residue refugees who survived the summer of love 1967-Haight-Ashbury-Fillimore West counter-cultural explosion that ripped through the West Coast like a tornado in the mid to late 1960s and stayed in Frisco. Add in too some semi-literary lights that Josh met when he spent a couple of years, actually more like three, on Captain Crunch’s yellow brick road converted school bus going up and down that West Coast at a snail’s pace along with a revolving crew of the adventurous, the half-mad, the forsaken and the by vocation homeless. That latter part of the melting pot was connected to Ferlinghetti by Captain Crunch himself, a wild man, real name, Winston Jackson, Yale Class of 1957, who were friends. So Josh knew a goodly part of the Ferlinghetti story well before he saw the documentary.      

One night when Josh was bouncing ideas around with me over a couple of shots of Johnny Walker Red, his favorite whiskey which I too acquired a taste for, he noted that Ferlinghetti brought a certain sense of wonder to his circle and all who have come in touch with him. Wonder a commodity Josh said in short supply these days when everything is cookie-cutter spelled out for you, everything is totally 24/7/365 hyped to you in the media so whatever was meaty in the story, tragedy or human interest got so beaten down that after a couple of days you no longer wanted to hear word one about the damn subject.  He asked me, as he did quite a bit toward the end of his career in Cambridge, to write down stuff as he declaimed (his word) what was on his mind. Here’s what I gathered in from his remarks and you can sift out whether his was blowing smoke, which he was capable of, or had a few decent insights into something gone awry in our society:     

“Yeah, you know at some very young age, well before puberty, most of us get our natural stock of wonder beaten out of us, wonder at the world, wonder about why this is this way and that is that way, and the funny makeup of the nature of the universe, hell, just plain ordinary vanilla wonder. That is why poets, good and bad, are precious commodities in restoring the human balance, in letting us once more check in on the wonder game which their words, their particular scheme of words since they have not had their sense of wonder beaten out of them (no matter how hard in individual cases someone might have tried to do so, poets and poetry not seen as a worthy profession and subject for “from hunger” corner boys and the like).

Every self-respecting radical or progressive in some other field like, for example, Karl Marx in political theory, Picasso in painting, John Holmes in physics, has treasured their friendships with the poets, and rightly so no matter how quirky they get. That quirkiness and the precious commodity of wonder get a full workout by one self-described anarchist poet, Lawrence Ferlinghett as his life’s story unfolds in the documentary under review, Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth Of Wonder.      

Today perhaps not as many people outside of the San Francisco Bay area may be as familiar with the work of the still very much alive and active Ferlinghetti, although A Coney Island of the Mind is one of the best-selling poetry collection ever, and this film makes some amends for that short-coming. Of course the Ferlinghetti name might become more familiar in some circles if you put the name with the City Lights Bookstore that he founded and which is still going strong today as a central haven for creative spirits in the area. Or for legal buffs and aficionados his connection with the “pornography” freedom of expression suit brought in the 1950s around publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. That connection between poet and bookstore owner get plenty of exposure here as it should since it is hard to think of say Allen Ginsberg or Gregory Corso two poets active in that same period combining those two skills.

This film, since it doubles up as a short biopic as well as cultural artifact gives plenty of information about the long bumpy ride for Ferlinghetti to first begin unleashing his poetic visions and then tie those words into a new left-wing (anarchist-tinged if anybody is asking) way of looking at society. Not so strangely a lot of his emergence as a poet and central cultural figure was connected when he hit San Francisco in the early 1950s. If  he had found himself in let’s say Cleveland at that time things might have turned out very differently for Frisco along with the Village in New York were oases against the prevailing cookie-cutter, keep your head down, Cold War red scare night where the misfits and renegades found shelter and kindred.        

Of course beside the poetic vision and the bookstore as cultural expression Ferlinghetti, as the film also makes clear, was one of those behind the scenes players who make new cultural explosions happen. He was, although not a “beat” poet himself (his take on the question when asked, endlessly asked and even a slight glance reading of his poems fortifies that position, they are outside the beat framework as to rhythm and sensibilities) and although he was not a “hippie” poet either he was a central figure in both movements as be-bop beat gave way to acid-etched hippie-dom. That “hippie” movement of the 1960s having produced very few literary lights and many fewer poets, poets whose poems are still readable without blushing unlike Ferlinghetti’s or Ginsberg’s which still burn the pages.

Something I did not know since I was on the road a lot in those days and did not keep up with his doings was how many places like May 1968 in Paris and 1959 in Cuba Ferlinghetti had been involved with which surely affected the weight of his more political poems. In the end his prolific run of poetry in all sizes and shapes, especially the now classic A Coney Island of the Mind will be the legacy, will be that little slice of wonder future generations will cling to, cling to for dear life.