On today’s show, continuing his celebration of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack will read selections from his essay on the poet. The essay ends: Ferlinghetti remains, in his own phrase, a poet of “the splendid life of the world” (“Endless Life”)—a life which is always vanishing. The questions his work raises, however, are by no means trivial ones.Is poetry like painting, a visual art? Is it like music, an oral/aural art? Is the poet a public figure, and, if so, what kind of a public figure? How is it possible to create a space for art in a country where art is notoriously devalued (“In two hundred years of freedom / we have invented / the permanent alienation of the subjective / almost every truly creative being / alienated & expatriated / in his own country”—“Adieu à Charlot”)? What is the relationship between books and “the media”? How does one create an audience for poetry? What is the relationship of our ethnic identities to our “American” selves? (Immigration is a mode of “passage” and colors that theme in Ferlinghetti.) These are not dead issues but living perplexities, questions which any conscious poet continues to ask at this moment. Ferlinghetti’s work helps to create a powerful “space” in which some kind of clarification of these issues may be possible. At a recent exhibition of his paintings, he remarked, “I hope nobody gets the idea that just because it’s more institutional…that I don’t have some subversive intent, or that Eros is at rest.” To be sure, his vision is of a kind we call “Romantic.” But, as Robert Creeley suggests in Echoes, the problems the Romantics posited are still with us—we are all “Romantics”: “whatsover [is] ‘Rome’ [is] home.” These Are My Rivers is a fine exploration of the condition of America 1955-1993.
