Lawrence Ferlinghetti | |
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.jpg) Ferlinghetti in 1965 | |
| Born | Lawrence Monsanto Ferling (1919-03-24)March 24, 1919 Yonkers, New York, U.S. |
| Died | February 22, 2021(2021-02-22) (aged 101) San Francisco, California, U.S. |
| Occupation |
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| Alma mater | |
| Literary movement | Beat poetry |
| Years active | 1940s–2021 |
| Spouse | [1] |
| Children | 2[1] |
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti (néFerling;[2] March 24, 1919 – February 22, 2021) was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder ofCity Lights Booksellers & Publishers.[3] An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, 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.[4] When Ferlinghettiturned 100 in March 2019, the city of San Francisco turned his birthday, March 24, into "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day".[5]
Lawrence Monsanto Ferling was born on March 24, 1919, inYonkers, New York.[6] Shortly before his birth, his father, Carlo Ferling (né Ferlinghetti), a native ofBrescia, died of a heart attack;[3] and his mother, Clemence Albertine (née Mendes-Monsanto), ofPortuguese Sephardic Jewish descent, was committed to a mental hospital shortly after. Upon immigration to the United States, Carlo had shortened his surname, which Lawrence assumed and thus used it in his earlier works, until he knew his father's original surname through a birth certificate; By 1955, Lawrence then reverted his surname to Ferlinghetti.[3][7][8] Lawrence was raised by an aunt, and later by foster parents.[9] He attended the Mount Hermon School for Boys (laterNorthfield Mount Hermon) graduating in 1937, then theUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned aB.A. in journalism in 1941. He began his journalism career by writing sports forThe Daily Tar Heel,[10] and published his first short stories inCarolina Magazine, for whichThomas Wolfe had written.[11]
He served in theU.S. Navy throughoutWorld War II, as the captain of asubmarine chaser in theNormandy invasion.[12] In 1947, he earned anM.A. degree in English literature fromColumbia University with a thesis onJohn Ruskin and the British painterJ. M. W. Turner. From Columbia, he went to theUniversity of Paris and earned aPh.D. in comparative literature with a dissertation on "The City as Symbol in Modern Poetry: In Search of a Metropolitan Tradition".[13][14]
Ferlinghetti met his wife-to-be, Selden Kirby-Smith, the granddaughter ofEdmund Kirby-Smith, in 1946 aboard a ship en route to France. They were both heading to Paris to study at theSorbonne. Kirby-Smith went by the nickname Kirby.[13] Their marriage produced two children before ending in divorce.
He moved to San Francisco in 1951 and foundedCity Lights inNorth Beach in 1953, in partnership withPeter D. Martin, a student atSan Francisco State University.[15] They both invested $500.[16] In 1955 Ferlinghetti bought Martin's share and established a publishing house with the same name.[17] The first series he published was the Pocket Poets Series. He was arrested for publishingAllen Ginsberg'sHowl, resulting in aFirst Amendment trial in 1957, where Ferlinghetti was charged with publishing an obscene work—and acquitted.[18]
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If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times,
even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.
You areWhitman, you arePoe, you areMark Twain, you areEmily Dickinson andEdna St. Vincent Millay, you areNeruda andMayakovsky andPasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words....
— Lawrence Ferlinghetti. FromPoetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames].
Ferlinghetti published many of theBeat poets and is regarded by some as a Beat poet as well.[19] But he did not consider himself a Beat poet, as he said in the 2013 documentaryFerlinghetti: Rebirth of Wonder: "Don't call me a Beat. I never was a Beat poet."[19][20]
Ferlinghetti penned much of his early poetry in the vein ofT. S. Eliot.[21] Ferlinghetti told poet and criticJack Foley, "Everything I wrote sounded just like him."[21] Yet even in his Eliot-inspired poems such as "Constantly Risking Absurdity", Ferlinghetti is ever the populist as he compares the poet first to a trapeze artist in a circus and then to a "little charleychaplin man."[21]
Critics have noted that Ferlinghetti's poetry often takes on a highly visual dimension as befits this poet who was also a painter.[22] As Jack Foley notes, Ferlinghetti's poems "tell little stories, make 'pictures'."[23] Ferlinghetti as a poet paints with his words pictures full of color capturing the average American experience as seen in his poem "In Golden Gate Park that Day: "InGolden Gate Park that day/ a man and his wife were coming along/ ... He was wearing green suspenders ... while his wife was carrying a bunch of grapes."[22]
In the first poem inA Coney Island of the Mind entitled, "In Goya's Greatest Scenes, We Seem To See," Ferlinghetti describes with words the "suffering humanity" that Goya portrayed by brush in his paintings.[21] Ferlinghetti concludes his poem with the recognition that "suffering humanity" today might be painted as average Americans drowning in the materialism: "on a freeway fifty lanes wide/ a concrete continent/ spaced with bland billboards/ illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness."[24]
Ferlinghetti took a distinctly populist approach to poetry, emphasizing throughout his work "that art should be accessible to all people, not just a handful of highly educated intellectuals."[25]Larry Smith, an American author and editor, stated that Ferlinghetti is a poet "of the people engaged conscientiously in the creation of new poetic and cultural forms."[9] This perception of art as a broad socio-cultural force, as opposed to an elitist academic enterprise, is explicitly evident in Poem 9 fromPictures of the Gone World, wherein the speaker states:"'Truth is not the secret of a few' / yet / you would maybe think so / the way some / librarians / and cultural ambassadors and / especially museum directors / act" (1–8). In addition to Ferlinghetti's aesthetic egalitarianism, this passage highlights two additional formal features of the poet's work, namely, his incorporation of a common American idiom as well as his experimental approach to line arrangement which, as Crale Hopkins notes, is inherited from the poetry ofWilliam Carlos Williams.[26]
Reflecting his broad aesthetic concerns, Ferlinghetti's poetry often engages with several non-literary artistic forms, most notablyjazz music and painting. William Lawlor asserts that much of Ferlinghetti's free verse attempts to capture the spontaneity and imaginative creativity of modern jazz; the poet is noted for having frequently incorporated jazz accompaniments into public readings of his work.[27]
Soon after settling in San Francisco in 1951, Ferlinghetti met the poetKenneth Rexroth, whose concepts ofphilosophical anarchism influenced his political development. He self-identified as aphilosophical anarchist, regularly associated with other anarchists inNorth Beach, and sold Italian anarchist newspapers at theCity Lights Bookstore.[28] While Ferlinghetti said he was "an anarchist at heart", he conceded that the world would need to be populated by "saints" in order for pureanarchism to be lived practically. Hence he espoused what can be achieved by Scandinavian-styledemocratic socialism.[29]
In the early 1960s, Ferlinghetti was a supporter of theFair Play for Cuba Committee.[30] On January 14, 1967, he was a featured presenter at theGathering of the tribes "Human Be-In," which drew tens of thousands of people and launched what would become known as San Francisco's "Summer of Love". In 1968, Ferlinghetti signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse to pay his Federalincome tax as aprotest against the Vietnam War.[31]
In 1998, in his inaugural address as Poet Laureate of San Francisco, Ferlinghetti urged San Franciscans to vote to remove a portion of the earthquake-damagedCentral Freeway and replace it with aboulevard:
"What destroys the poetry of a city? Automobiles destroy it, and they destroy more than the poetry. All over America, all over Europe in fact, cities and towns are under assault by the automobile, are being literally destroyed by car culture. But cities are gradually learning that they don't have to let it happen to them. Witness our beautiful newEmbarcadero! And in San Francisco right now we have another chance to stop Autogeddon from happening here. Just a few blocks from here, the uglyCentral Freeway can be brought down for good if you vote for Proposition E on the November ballot."[32]
Alongside his bookselling and publishing, Ferlinghetti painted for 60 years and much of his work was displayed in galleries and museums throughout the United States.[33]
Ferlinghetti paintedThe beautiful Madonna of Sandusky Oh! hi! O! And friend during a 1996 visit to an art co-op inSandusky, Ohio, which was subsequentlyvandalized andcensored by a janitor the night after it was painted.[34][35] Ferlinghetti responded to this act by painting a humorous retort on areas of the canvas where censorship had occurred.[34]
A retrospective of Ferlinghetti's artwork,60 Years of Painting, was staged inRome andReggio Calabria in 2010.[36]
In 1987, he was the initiator of the transformation ofJack Kerouac Alley, located at the side of his shop. He presented his idea to theSan Francisco Board of Supervisors calling for repavement and renewal.[37]
Ferlinghetti died ofinterstitial lung disease on February 22, 2021, at his home in San Francisco, a month before his 102nd birthday. He was buried in his family plot at Bolinas Cemetery inBolinas, California.[38][3][39][40][41]
Ferlinghetti received numerous awards, including theLos Angeles Times'Robert Kirsch Award,[42] the BABRA Award for Lifetime Achievement, theNational Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters,[43] and the ACLUEarl Warren Civil Liberties Award.[44] He won the Premio Taormina in 1973, and thereafter was awarded the Premio Camaiore, the Premio Flaiano, the Premio Cavour, among other honors inItaly.[45] TheCareer Award was conferred on October 28, 2017 at the XIV edition of thePremio di Arti Letterarie Metropoli di Torino inTurin.[46]
Ferlinghetti was named San Francisco's Poet Laureate in August 1998 and served for two years. In 2003 he was awarded thePoetry Society of America's Frost Medal,[47] the Author's Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and was elected to theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters.[48] TheNational Book Foundation honored him with the inauguralLiterarian Award (2005), given for outstanding service to the American literary community.[49] In 2007 he was named Commandeur,French Order of Arts and Letters. In 2008, Ferlinghetti was awarded theJohn Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry.[50] This award is handed out by the National Italian American Foundation to honor the author who has made the greatest contribution to the writing of Italian American poetry.[33]
In 2012, Ferlinghetti was awarded the inauguralJanus Pannonius International Poetry Prize from theHungarian PEN Club. After learning that the government of Hungary under Prime MinisterViktor Orbán is a partial sponsor of the€50,000 prize, he declined to accept the award. In declining, Ferlinghetti cited his opposition to the "right-wing regime" of Prime Minister Orbán, and his opinion that the ruling Hungarian government under Mr. Orbán is curtailing civil liberties and freedom of speech for the people ofHungary.[51][52][53][54]
Frank Zappa namedropped Lawrence Ferlinghetti as one of the people who influenced his band's music, in the sleeve of his debut albumFreak Out! (1966).[55]
Ferlinghetti recited the poemLoud Prayer atThe Band's final performance; the concert was filmed byMartin Scorsese and released as a documentary entitledThe Last Waltz (1978), which included Ferlinghetti's recitation.[56] Ferlinghetti was the subject of the 2013Christopher Felver documentary,Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder.[57] Andrew Rogers played Ferlinghetti in the 2010 filmHowl.[58]Christopher Felver made the 2013 documentary on Ferlinghetti,Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder.[57]
In 2011, Ferlinghetti contributed two of his poems to the celebration of the 150thanniversary of Italian unification,Song of the Third World War andOld Italians Dying inspired by the artists of the exhibitionLawrence Ferlinghetti and Italy 150 held inTurin,Italy (May–June 2011).[59] On the book of lithographsThe Sea Within Us first published in Italy asIl Mare Dentro in 2012, Ferlinghetti collaborated with lithographer and abstract artistJames Claussen.[60][61]Julio Cortázar, in hisRayuela (Hopscotch) (1963), references a poem fromA Coney Island of the Mind in Chapter 121.[62]
Poet, playwright, publisher, and activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born Lawrence Monsanto Ferling on March 24, 1919 in Yonkers, New York.
GARY SNYDER: I began to see Lawrence and recognize who he was, chatting a little bit with him. I realized that he also wrote poetry. At that time his name was Larry Ferling. Later it became Lawrence Ferlinghetti, his real name.
2006 – special edition, not for sale
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