COVER TO COVER with Jack Foley
Wednesday, March 27, 2019, 3:00 – 3:30 p.m., KPFA 94.1 FM
(available at the KPFA website)
Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in 1919. On March 24, 2019 he turned 100 years old. Today’s show is a celebration of Ferlinghetti’s career. On April 21, 1994, I interviewed Lawrence at City Lights. The subject of the interview was his then new book, These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems. Though the interview is almost a quarter of a century old, I think you’ll find it as fresh today as it was when it was first recorded. Partly because of the age of the recording and partly because it was recorded at City Lights and not in a studio the sound on the recording is not always perfect, but I think you will find it—even after all these years—still listenable. Lawrence was bright and aware throughout the interview and had much to say about both his career and life itself. He began as Lawrence Ferling, a young man who imitated T.S. Eliot in his poetry: “Everything I wrote sounded like him.” He was soon able to transcend both that influence and that name and to arrive at masterful work like this—work, Lawrence points out in the interview, people often find “too clear”:
Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he’s the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence
This is Jack Foley’s tribute to Lawrence. It will appear in Jack’s forthcoming book, When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs:
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI, PRIDE OF YONKERS, NY,
TURNS 100 ON MARCH 24, 2019
My name was Lawrence Ferling.
There are more allusions in my poetry
than there are in The Waste Land.
I am a painter and a publisher and a book
store owner. After
invading Normandy,
I came to San Francisco.
I published one of the greatest dirty poems of the twentieth century.
I took the phrase “a coney island of the mind”
from Henry Miller and made it
the title of my marvelous, hugely popular book of poems.
Like Jack Kerouac, I spoke French to my mother
except (but I didn’t know) she was my aunt.
I had an incredibly complex, confusing childhood
but was nonetheless a child of privilege.
I wrote painterly poems and “oral messages.”
I embraced the downtrodden, the lost, the outcast.
I denounced the government and “autogeddon”
(a word I took from Heathcote Williams)
but was a successful and eventually rich
businessman
My bookstore became a national monument.
I am a street in the city of San Francisco.
Vorrei ringraziare tutti—e anche i miei genitori immigranti.
I am Lawrence
Ferlinghetti.
I never knew my father.
PART ONE OF TWO. The second half of the interview will air, not on next Wednesday but on Wednesday, April 10.