![]() ![]() “Like the best books of its generation, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind has lost none of its luster over time. His book is a grab bag of undergraduate musings about love and art, much hackneyed satire of American life, and some real and wry perceptions of it: ‘I am in line/for a top job./I may be moving on/to Detroit./I am only temporarily/a tie salesman.'” “His program (as quoted on the back of his book) is ‘to get poetry out of the inner esthetic sanctum and out of the classroom into the street’ He puts it most honestly in his verse: ‘I am a social climber/climbing downward/And the descent is difficult.’ For like many writers who keep pointing to their bare feet, Ferlinghetti is a very bookish boy: his hipster verse frequently hangs on a literary reference. ![]() He now appears with some verse of his own which I find highly readable and ofter very funny. “Owner of the City Light bookshop (headquarters of the San Francisco literary movement) and publisher of the Pocket Poets Series (most notable entry, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl), Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been a leader in all that jazz about poetry on the West Coast. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |