Pen Pals with the God Father of Beat Poetry
A True Story
Happy Birthday Lawrence Ferlinghetti
What is Lawrence Ferlinghetti best known for?
The author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, painting, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies.
Making a name and writing poetry may be one of the hardest things there is.
It’s harder than climbing Mt. Everest naked or swimming the English Channel with one arm tied behind your back.
Yet, the iconic, literary game-changer, Lawrence Ferlinghetti did that and made history.
Ferlinghetti lived to be 101 years old.
My story with Ferlinghetti
He called his books “pocketbooks “ because they fit into the back pocket of your jeans. And that’s where you would find a copy of his books in my 17-year-old life.
Favorites: “A Coney Island of the Mind,” “Her,” “Unfair Arguments With Existence,” “Tyrannus Nix,” “The Secret Meaning of Things,” “Open Eye Open Heart,” “Pictures of the Gone World,” and his last book, “Little Boy.”
Hooked on his surrealism and free verse attempts to capture the spontaneity and imaginative creativity of modern jazz. Poetry lodged itself into the consciousness of the reader — generating awareness and change.
Bored, directionless, racist parents, Beat fan, in search of America. I got the courage and wrote the Godfather of the Beat Movement for writing advice. The man who saw to it Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” was published and forever changed modern poetry.
I addressed the letter to City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and licked the stamp.
Would he answer a long-haired, Acid Head, antiwar protestor radical like me?
A few weeks later, not only did he write back but we became summer pen pals.
12 years later, I mailed a copy of my poetry chapbook “Tomorrow Never Answers.” City Lights sold out my first pressing in-store.
45 years later, I sent Ferlinghetti a copy of my memoir “Guitarlo.”
Ferlinghetti wrote back again
On Sep 13, 2016
Dear Arlo — Due to my glaucoma, I would not be able to read your book. So please don’t send it. — -Lawrence Ferlinghetti
It would also be hard not to know the works of Ferlinghetti’s circle. Including, Kenneth Rexroth. Kenneth Patchen, Marie Ponsot, Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Jack Kerouac.
He helped many writers known and unknown
Through his historic book store New City Lights. The Ferlinghetti Poetry Foundation, awards, reviews, writings, fans, the mighty pen lives on.
Thank you Lawrence Ferlinghetti for being a special friend to a lost teen in America.
Away above a Harborful . . .
Away above a harborful
of caulkless houses
among the Charley noble chimneypots
of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines
a woman pastes up sails
upon the wind
hanging out her morning sheets
with wooden pins
O lovely mammal
her nearly naked breasts
throw taut shadows
when she stretches up
to hang at last the last of her
so white washed sins
but it is wetly amorous
and winds itself about her
clinging to her skin
So caught with arms
upraised
she tosses back her head
in voiceless laughter
and in choiceless gesture then
shakes out gold hair
while in the reachless seascape spaces
between the blown white shrouds
stand out the bright steamers
to kingdom come
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Away above a Harborful…” from These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1955 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, www.wwnorton.com/nd/welcome.htm.
Source: These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1993)
