Appreciating Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Americus 1 on his 100th Birthday, 2019

Lawrence was my neighbor in San Francisco's North Beach for 25 years--1979 to 2004. He did me many kindnesses--as he did many others kindnesses. He offered to contact Joyce Johnson about a novel of mine and then wrote generous remarks about that novel ('Good Intentions proposes and explores that only kind of revolution that seems possible in these years of Reaganocracy.') He posted the lyrics of "Fat Snake's Tongue Has Got Talking-Heads" on a front window of City Lights Books. He flattered books of mine with their own kiosk upstairs in City Lights like the kiosks of Kerouac's and Ginsberg's books. He let me use his painting 'Unfinished Map of the United States' for an album-cover in 1996 and gave a cassette of himself reading poetry for the first Rebel Poets' album, Worlds Made Flesh.

In 2005 I reviewed Lawrence's book-length poem Americus 1 for the online publication Beyond Chron. In 2012 Lawrence wrote to me in New Orleans after puppetgov.com and my good friend Bill Jablonski had reposted the review.

Here's the poet's email:

'Thank you VERY much for the only really substantive review of AMERICUS Bk.I  that the book ever received.

I have forwarded it to my publisher, New Directions, and asked them to put you on their permanent review list.

//// P.S.  Your Permanent Contribution to North Beach is flourishing on Stockton street. It is now twenty feet tall! 

---Lawrence Ferlinghetti'

The 'Permanent Contribution' that Lawrence notes is (or perhaps was) an elm that I planted and replanted--oh, winds and rain afflicting the little trunk and sprouting leaves—oh, oft the shovel dug into that stamp of rocky earth) outside my flat at 1852 Stockton, nearby Filbert and below Coit Tower. Lawrence walked past the tree almost every day, it seemed, in his peacoat and Captain’s cap (the coldest Winter Mark Twain ever spent was Summer in San Francisco), his step still like a seaman’s and blue eyes on things faraway. He was then as he remains now, I think, September 5, 2022, Labor Day USA, a testament to alternatives for freedom and compassion.

Here's the review from 2005.

'AMERICUS, BOOK 1

Loosely and musically--for we must both see and hear lyricism that has signs in it--semiotic lyricism, say--the form of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's latest, ambitious, and throw-in-banners-of--morning-headlines-from-the-1890s-onward-along-with whiffs-of-Bronxville-basepaths Big Poem about America unfolds.

In part this book prompts pleased wonder.

How remarkable that someone 86, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's age now, can write with the vibrant detail and lilting flow of  many passages in Americus I.

How wonderful that he remains aroused enough to try this kind of epic--and remains untrammeled  enough to freely digress within it.

How valuable that we get to hear and see through a poet's raised perceptions ways of life that are long-gone or going fast.

How good it is that Lawrence Ferlinghetti is still singing and still swinging to hit home-runs!

Americus I spans the 20th-century from France's Dreyfus Trial (' "J'Accuse!" Screams Emile Zola' ) through the first Kennedy assassination and the mass coming of Hip. It's an autobiographical, historical, poetical and fundamentally spiritual survey. Like Whitman's 'Song ...' and Leaves ... and like many other precedents it cites (Pound's Cantos, Wolfe's novels, Olson's Maximus, Kerouac's Legend), Americus I wants to make sense of our United States 'America' at the same time as it presents and illuminates its wayfaring teller, its experience-celebrating I-voice, as everyday but mythic and emblematic character ('a wop and a yid in one / A kind of Don Quixote / tilting at sawmills and ginmills / A Euro man indeed / ...').

The poem of 12 sections is for me most effective when it's detailing autobiographical experience, or when it's lyrical to a songlike, abstract extreme. Its passages about boyhood stickball in Bronxville ('And the kids playing stickball / Their far cries echoing/ In this green meadow / with its worn baseball diamond /with rocks for bases/ ...') and young-manhood command of a 'diesel-powered wooden-hulled subchaser' on the English Channel late in the night before D-Day ('And in the very first light on the western horizon astern, they were just beginning to see a forest of masts rising up, ... a huge armada of thousands of great ships and troop transports and escort vessels ...') are vivid to breath-expanding degrees.

And its lines like song--combining personal romance with general history in poets' intrinsic tendency--embed into one’s mind like the remembered waves of a Joycean dream: 'While we made love / Late that night / In the fall of that year / Among the yellow fallen leaves / Under the linden trees / In Boston Common / In the fall of that year / Where now they are marching again / Wearing colored rags of flags again/ ...'

The book's empathic sensitivity also stands out. L. F. (Americus) registers as 'felt life' the trench-bound impasses of World War I, the first World War in which artillery shells decimated men and horses:  'Look look the horse has lost its head ... They keep coming and coming the brown troops the gray troops the black uniforms in steel helmets pointed helmets my god we're being run over ...'. He registers also the enduring hopefulness of our public's wishes just after World War II: 'There was still a garden / in the memory of America/ .../ In the sound of a nightbird / outside a Lowell window / In the cry of black kids/ in tenement yards at night / In the deep sound of woman murmuring / a woman singing broken melody/ in a shutted room/ in a wood house ...')

The book works much less well when it digresses from tactile experience into cultural survey. While sometimes clever, its notes on German Expressionists ('And Rottluff painted his rusty lust/ And Otto Mueller ate cruellers as his paintings grew crueller'); and on New York Abstract Expressionists ('with their primal nonobjective images / destroying the fine arts tradition / of their Euro fathers'); and on Proust ('a whole belle universe where we did wander enchanted within a budding grove along Swann's Way to a Guermantes soiree'); and on Mannahatta's motley mix ('Irish micks and potato farmers / dustbin pawnbrokers /midtown clothing-district rabbis / ...' ); and on 'alienated generations' who 'lived out their expatriate visions / here and everywhere'; and on the national totems fused into the mythic being of Lawrence Ferlinghetti / Americus himself ('He the journeyman poet / On the Open Road / He Abe the Railsplitter/ And Ahab the Whaler/ And Sinbad the Sailer/ ... ) penetrate much less to heart and mind.

These serial notes are strangely disconnected. They lack exact, spiritual or physical sensation. Their palimpsest of selectively shared experience misses the 'felt life', in short, that makes other passages in this book so affecting.

Americus, Book I (let's hope for a Book 2 and a Book 3!) closes chronologically with the national pall that followed the killing of John F. Kennedy 42 years ago—that murder of a President the trigger for violence in Vietnam and elsewhere, that first 1960s’ assassination in the USA germinating to more complete rebellion later in the decade.

Americus 1 from its first section to its last poses choices for we who are the public of this Nation.

What are we to have? What are we to make? Are we to make and have the embracing, egalitarian freedoms of Whitman and Chaplin that are beloved by Lawrence Ferlinghetti? Or are we to have what he calls  'totalitarian plutocracy' under 'Bush League Presidencies'?

Will our every day's subliminal headline continue to be Lawrence’s funny and so true: 'OUTMODED CAPITALISM/ THREATENS HUMANITY/ WITH MULTIPLE PERILS'?  

Will our oil-based, air-conditioned, everything's-gonna-be-made-out-of-plastic America be Olson's 'foul country where/ human lives are so much trash'  Will we continue to look back on something largely like Langston Hughes' 'past a mess of blood and sorrow'?

Or can our America yet be Lawrence Ferlinghetti's assertion for it:  'the greatest experiment on earth / with the greatest chance to create / a higher human being /... / at home on the two continents of America / made of many cultures and calamities'?

Can we like lightning yet leap forth?

Can we, we who make up the United States, let the world dance free by joining the positive potentialities that surround us, rather than destroying those potentialities?

Americus 1 closes with lyrical celebration through the verities of spontaneous writing. Again Lawrence Ferlinghetti sides with life. 'Yet still endless the splendid life of the world/ Endless its lovely living and breathing its lovely sentient beings seeing and hearing felling and thinking laughing and dancing ...', he writes. 'No end to the making of love to the sound of bedsprings creaking ... The waiting of lovers on station platforms the cawing of crows the myriad churning of crickets the running seas the crying waters rising and falling ... No end no end to the withering of fur and fruit and flesh so passing fair and neon mermaids sing each to each somewhere ... For there are hopeful choices still to be chosen ... And there is no end no end to the doors of perception still be be opened and the jet streams of light in the upper air of the spirit of man the outer space inside us / Shining! Transcendent! / ...'

We may respond to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his Americus: ”Bravo! Viva! Ride on!" Audiences of the future may sp respond to our good, gray, young-at-heart poet!'

(Americus 1 is available through City Lights Books.)

My 2012 appreciation of Lawrence for puppetgov.com of course lacks two subsequent links that I’d like to share here.

One is a voice named 'James' sensitively reading five poems by Lawrence as part of James' 'PoemsBeingRead' series on YouTube.

Another is a 2015 profile done by PBS that features Lawrence reading poetry and talking about how San Francisco has been ravaged by the invasive "Tech Boom." You can hear Lawrence speak several truths toward end of this video … truths that feel linked like the simple but profound coda of Beethoven's "Ode To Joy".

Then 96, he says: "There always hope in love ... Love can make a civilization bloom and hate can kill a civilization."

How true in 2015! How much more readily may we now register these simple contrasts of love and hate in the United States of 2018 … and 2022! We may ask who and what act behind the making of the attacks we needlessly suffer.