Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1919-2021 [by Michael Palma]

For a number of years the editors of Italian Americana gave the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. The following citation appeared in the Summer 2008 issue to announce the awarding of that year's prize to Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

At a time when the most exciting event in the biographies of many poets is the achievement of tenure, Ferlinghetti’s life has been rich, colorful, exceptional and non-academic. He was born in Yonkers, New York, on March 24, 1919. His father, Carlo Ferlinghetti, who had been born in Brescia in 1872 and emigrated to the United States twenty-two years later, died before his son was born. The poet’s mother, Clemence Albertine Mendes-Monsanto, was of French and Sephardic-Portuguese descent. When Ferlinghetti was two years old, his mother was hospitalized, and he was separated from his four older brothers and taken by an aunt to Strasbourg, France, where he lived for several years, learning French as his first language. Upon their return to New York when he was six, he was briefly placed in an orphanage, until his aunt became a governess to a wealthy older couple in Bronxville, New York. After they suffered financial losses in the stock market crash of 1929, the young Ferlinghetti was sent to live with yet another family. He graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1941 with a degree in journalism, and joined the Naval Reserve after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of that year. He was present at the Normandy invasion in June 1944, aboard a submarine-detecting vessel that was part of the protective screen for the landing craft. After V-E Day, he was assigned to the Pacific theater, and saw the ruins of Nagasaki two weeks after the dropping of the second atomic bomb, an experience that profoundly influenced his subsequent lifelong pacifism.

Ferlinghetti continued his education after the war, earning a master’s degree in English literature in 1947 from Columbia University—where his professors included Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, and Mark Van Doren—and a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1950. In 1953 he settled in San Francisco, and in that same year he founded the City Lights Bookstore with Peter Martin. Two years later they established City Lights Publishing, which continues to flourish and has by now issued some two hundred titles. Its first publication, and the first volume in the highly influential Pockets Poets Series, was Ferlinghetti’s first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone World. The fourth volume in the series, published in the fall of 1956, was the first book of another young poet—Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, which led to Ferlinghetti’s arrest and trial on charges of publishing and selling obscene materials. The case, which ended in October 1957 with his acquittal, was a landmark in the struggle for freedom of expression in the United States.

In the intervening half century, Ferlinghetti has continued an extraordinarily varied life and career that are consistently resistant to easy characterization. A family man and a respectable citizen, a practical and extremely successful businessman, he has also been a constant champion of freedom and tolerance, of experimental writers from all parts of the globe, and of progressive social causes. Despite his fame and success, he has been unswervingly open and generous to younger writers. Without ever compromising his artistic vision or pandering to expectations—his work is as culturally allusive as T. S. Eliot’s—he has been an immensely popular poet: his second collection, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), has sold nearly one million copies. In his ninetieth year, he remains as vigorous as ever; his most recent volume of poetry, Americus: Book I (2004), is his most ambitious work.

Along with his writing, bookselling, and publishing, Ferlinghetti has been a painter for sixty years, and his work has been shown in various galleries and museums in the United States and Europe. Reading in clubs and cafes, often with jazz accompaniment, he was a pioneer in the art of performance poetry. In addition to sixteen collections of verse, he has published two novels, Her (1960) and Love in the Days of Rage (1988); two volumes of short plays, Unfair Arguments with Existence (1963) and Routines (1964); and a travel journal, The Mexican Night (1970). He has also published translations of Jacques Prévert (Paroles, 1958) and Pier Paolo Pasolini (Roman Poems, 1986; with Francesca Valente); Prévert—in the abundance and variety of his work, in its wit and rhythmic verve, and its ability to appeal equally to cultivated readers and a broader public—is the poet that Ferlinghetti himself most closely resembles. Ferlinghetti’s own writings have appeared in a number of languages; in Italy alone, there have been translations of his novels, his plays, and five volumes of his poetry. Among the many awards that he has received are the Robert Frost Memorial Medal, the Authors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award from the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1994 a street in San Francisco was renamed in his honor, and in 2003 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

There are longer poems in the body of Ferlinghetti’s work—political manifestoes, ironic denunciations, interweavings of personal history with the sweep of twentieth-century events, elegies (including the “The Old Italians Dying,” from 1979’s Landscapes of Living & Dying), and travelogues (among them a number of Italian scenes, especially in the 1988 collection European Poems and Transitions). But it is in the lyric form that he has made his most characteristic mark. In a typical Ferlinghetti text, short lines carry the reader’s eye back and forth across the page as the poet’s eye—often a bit askance—plays easily over the surfaces of the universe, propelled by swift rhythms, frequent rhymes, echoes of the poetic storehouse of the English language, and an exuberant delight in language itself. As The Village Voice observed early in his career, “Ferlinghetti is an unabashed romanticist, drunk on the experience of wonder, mercilessly satirical of anything that stands in the way of awe.” A fine example of his various strengths is this poem from Pictures of the Gone World:

It was a face which darkness could kill
                                                               in an instant
   a face as easily hurt
                                     by laughter or light

       ‘We think differently at night’
                                            she told me once
lying back languidly

                                   And she would quote Cocteau

‘I feel there is an angel in me’ she’d say
                                                   ‘whom I am constantly
                                                                                       shocking’
       
        Then she would smile and look away
                   light a cigarette for me
                                                         sigh and rise
and stretch
                  her sweet anatomy
                                               
                                                 let fall a stocking

Comments

[Terence Winch]

Thank you, Michael, for this excellent appreciation.

[Steve Luttrell]

This is a wonderfully written and Great testament to a
Man who was a true gift to art and literature !

[Sarah Arvio]

Hello Michael--lovely..

[Gerard Malanga]

Hi Michael,

Simply a sublime piece of writing on Lawrence Ferlinghetti's work. Thank you Thank you. Gerard.

[B. Amore]

Exquisite tribute, Michael - you certainly captured the complexity and depth of his spirit. I lived some years in SF- right around the corner from City Lights, my favorite haunt. Often saw Ferlinghetti at a quiet North Beach cafe we both frequented. Grateful for his legacy, and for YOU who do so much to keep the Spirit of Poetry alive. Mille Grazie- B. Amore

[Tim Mayo]

Thank you, Michael, for this literary obit. It is lovely.

[Louisa Calio]

Michael,
A wonderful window into an amazing poet and man. You did him justice. Bravo. Louisa

[john petrillo]

Hi Michael, It was wonderful to read this article, so beautifully written. It's been far too long since I've communicated with you. Hopefully I'll see you at the next reunion. John Petrillo