Jack Foley’s essay on Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “The Splendid Life of the World,” appeared in both Poetry Flash and in Jack’s book, O Powerful Western Star.
On today’s show, continuing his celebration of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack will read selections from the essay. The essay begins,
“I gave it to my students and they adored it. I wanted them to like it. But they adored it.”
Thus a teacher friend of mine on Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, first published in 1958 and still in print. Ferlinghetti himself remarks that poets often complain about his work’s clarity: “It isn’t opaque enough, it’s too easy to understand.” I answered that people were mixing him up with another poet. They were expecting him to be Ezra Pound, and he wasn’t Ezra Pound; he was Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
But of course one may ask: Who is Lawrence Ferlinghetti?
These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems 1955 -1993 offers us a chance at least to raise that question if not to answer it. Ferlinghetti’s previous selected poems, Endless Life, appeared in 1981. Since that book there have been a novel, Love in the Days of Rage (1988) and a very interesting book of verse, Over All the Obscene Boundaries: European Poems & Transitions (1984)—“transitions,” not “translations.” Ferlinghetti’s friend, the poet Phillip Lamantia, described this last book as “the best you’ve ever written,” and a sizeable selection from it is included here.
At three-hundred-some pages, and with some fifty pages of new work, These Are My Rivers is a significant production. (The gorgeous cover, designed by Sylvia Frezzolini, is from one of Ferlinghetti’s paintings.) Ferlinghetti is already the subject of two biographies, one by Neeli Cherkovski, one by Barry Silesky. What can we find out about him—and, by extension, about ourselves, his audience—from this book? The question is not whether his poetry is “clear” but whether it is powerful, whether it still has meaning for us.
The title, These Are My Rivers, is particularly appropriate to work by this Italian-American poet whose first language was French and whose internationally-famous bookstore, City Lights, is located in the midst of San Francisco’s North Beach, with its still thriving Italian culture. “These are my rivers” is a phrase from Giuseppe Ungaretti:
Ho ripasato [sic, misprint for ripassato]
le epoche
della mia vita
Questi sono
i miei fiumi…
Ferlinghetti, who has been learning Italian in recent years, translates this as “I have revisited / the ages / of my life / These are / my rivers….” More than a “selected poems,” the book announces itself as a genuine retrospective, a look at “le epoche / della mia vita.” The word “ripassato” can be translated as “revisited,” but its etymology is closer to “I have passed through again.” What kind of “life” passes through these poems? What does this volume say about Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s career?
PART ONE OF TWO