Landscapes of Living and Dying

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Ferlinghetti's biting view of contemporary American life and culture is reflected in poems including An Elegy to Dispel Gloom, Holiday Inn Blues, Cloning at the "Hawk & Dove," and Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

A prominent voice of the wide-open poetry movement that began in the 1950s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has written poetry, translation, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration, and essays. Often concerned with politics and social issues, Ferlinghetti’s poetry countered the literary elite's definition of art and the artist's role in the world. Though imbued with the commonplace, his poetry cannot be simply described as polemic or personal protest, for it stands on his craftsmanship, thematics, and grounding in tradition.

Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers in 1919, son of Carlo Ferlinghetti who was from the province of Brescia and Clemence Albertine Mendes-Monsanto. Following his undergraduate years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he served in the U.S. Navy in World War II as a ship's commander. He received a Master’s degree from Columbia University in 1947 and a Doctorate de l’Université de Paris (Sorbonne) in 1950. From 1951 to 1953, when he settled in San Francisco, he taught French in an adult education program, painted, and wrote art criticism. In 1953, with Peter D. Martin (son of Carlo Tresca) he founded City Lights Bookstore, the first all-paperbound bookshop in the country, and by 1955 he had launched the City Lights publishing house.

The bookstore has served for half a century as a meeting place for writers, artists, and intellectuals. City Lights Publishers began with the Pocket Poets Series, through which Ferlinghetti aimed to create an international, dissident ferment. His publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl & Other Poems in 1956 led to his arrest on obscenity charges, and the trial that followed drew national attention to the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat movement writers. (He was overwhelmingly supported by prestigious literary and academic figures, and was acquitted.) This landmark First Amendment case established a legal precedent for the publication of controversial work with redeeming social importance.

Ferlinghetti’s paintings have been shown at various galleries around the world, from the Butler Museum of American Painting to Il Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. He has been associated with the international Fluxus movement through the Archivio Francesco Conz in Verona. He has toured Italy, giving poetry readings in Roma, Napoli, Bologna, Firenze, Milano, Verona, Brescia, Cagliari, Torino, Venezia, and Sicilia. He won the Premio Taormino in 1973, and since then has been awarded the Premio Camaiore, the Premio Flaiano, the Premio Cavour. among others. He is published in Italy by Oscar Mondadori, City Lights Italia, and Minimum Fax. He was instrumental in arranging extensive poetry tours in Italy produced by City Lights Italia in Firenze. He has translated from the italian Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Poemi Romani, which is published by City Lights Books. In San Francisco, his work can regularly be seen at the George Krevsky Gallery at 77 Geary Street.

Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind continues to be the most popular poetry book in the U.S. It has been translated into nine languages, and there are nearly 1,000,000 copies in print. The author of poetry, plays, fiction, art criticism, and essays, he has a dozen books currently in print in the U.S., and his work has been translated in many countries and in many languages. His most recent books are A Far Rockaway of the Heart (1997), How to Paint Sunlight (2001), and Americus Book I (2004) published by New Directions.

He has been the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Kirsch Award, the BABRA Award for Lifetime Achievement, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award. Ferlinghetti was named San Francisco’s first poet laureate.

Reviews

[Theo Logos · Rating 4 out of 5]

We’ve fallen into
Dante’s Inferno
burning for love
We’re trapped inside
Bosch’s Garden of Delights
groaning for love
We’re lost
in Burroughs’ loveless Soft Machine
with tongues alack
for love
Holiday Inn Blues

Ferlinghetti poems grin at you, half amused, no matter what. Is he dissecting and dismantling the American Dream and its empty promises? (Home, Home, Home/The Billboard Painters/Two Scavengers In A Truck, Two Beautiful People In A Mercedes) There’s that grin, peeking out at you. Is he revealing the futility of our longing and the tawdriness in our search for love? (The Love Nut/Holiday Inn Blues/The End Of Various Affairs/San Jose Symphony Reception) There’s Ferlinghetti’s grin with a wink. Perhaps even when musing on the fading of a rich, ethnic heritage, even then? (The Old Italians Dying)Ah yes, still that grin, a bit rye and sad.

Landscapes of Living and Dying was published in 1979 — the end of a cynical decade of self absorption. These poems are of their time, reflecting that retreat from idealism:

Sons of Whitman sons of Poe
sons of Lorca & Rimbaud
Who among you still speaks of revolution
in this revisionist decade?

Yet these are still Ferlinghetti’s poems, and no matter how bleak the times or subject, he cannot suppress that grin from his poetic voice.

Chaplin is dead but I’d wear his bowler
having outlived all our myths but his
the myth of the pure subjective
the collective subjective
the Little Man in each of us
waiting with Charlot or Pozzo
On every corner I see them
hidden inside their tight clean clothes
Their hats are not derbys they have no canes
but we know them
we have always
waited with them
They turn and hitch their pants
and walk away from us
down the darkening road
in the great American night

Adieu à Charlot (Second Populist Manifesto)

[Alarie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read A Coney Island of the Mind in 1970, my college roommate’s book. I loved it, but hadn’t gone back to him since. I love the easy flow of his writing, how it picks you up in its current and carries you along. I especially love his repetition. Repetition can be tricky. Too much and it’s simply boring. Just enough, especially when the sound complements the subject, can be pure magic. I identify with his politics, concern for the world and humanity, too. My main criticism is that using so much pop culture let a few poems die in the 70s.

Other poems may be even more relevant today, particularly “A Nation of Sheep” (you can tell just from the title) and “Rough Song of Animals Dying.” My personal favorite is “The Old Italians Dying,” which ends:

“The old Italians with lapstrake* faces
are hauled out of the hearses
by the paid pallbearers
in Mafioso mourning coat & dark glasses
The old dead men are hauled out
in their black coffins like small skills
They enter the true church
for the first time in many years
in these carved black boats
ready to be ferried over
The priests scurry about
as if to cast off the lines
The other old men
still alive on the benches
watch it all with their hats on.”

*way of overlapping planks in boat construction

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Favorites: Two Scavengers In a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes; The Love Nut; A Sweet Flying Dream; An Elegy to Dispel Gloom; The Old Italians Dying; The Billboard Painters

3.5 My first foray into Ferlinghetti. He writes accessibly and emotively, with Willams-style line breaks. But where Williams is more even-handed with his spacing, creating a latticework of lines, Ferlinghetti is okay letting it all blow and twist like a serpent of smoke. The poems are mostly observations of people in places: in bars, sitting on park benches, driving the streets or flying in the sky. The other ones are like the title claims: landscapes, little eco-logs as he calls them. These are more concerned with nature and sometimes man's outsized influence. But ultimately we are just another animal. I was left wanting a bit more, but I think that just means I need to check out another collection of his.

[Dani · Rating 3 out of 5]

These plays were a bit short of the mark for me. While unmistakably Ferlinghetti in their prosody, they felt, at times, like off-key echoes of Beckett. They were strange enough to be interesting, however, and I did enjoy reading them.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

The problem I find with picking up a collection of poetry by Lawrence Ferlinghetti is that so often the same poems appear in another collection, as was the case with many of the works printed in Landscapes of Living and Dying. The good news is that many of those poems had been mostly forgotten and were worth revisiting.

These poems are very representative of Ferlinghetti's style in the 1970s: he had become more manifestly political and every poem is packed full of allusions to other literary works and figures in pop culture (such as William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Miller, Dante, Homer, Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, Charlie Chaplin, Woody Guthrie, etc.). Much as one could argue that the young Marx was very different from the older Marx or that the young Dylan was more political and folksy than the older Dylan, it could be said that the younger Ferlinghetti was less political and perhaps more serious than the older Ferlinghetti, which isn't to suggest that one is in any way better or worse than the other.

What makes this collection unique among other collections of poetry is that many of the poems had already been published, in the news or op/ed sections of big daily papers across the country (from the LA Times and San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner to The New York Times, some also printed as broadsides). In doing this Ferlinghetti was answering his own call made in his first "Populist Manifesto" for a "new wide-open poetry/with a new commonsensual public surface."

I think it is fair to say that while the value of the poems in this collection vary widely (and this is always a subjective determination) that the best poem is "Adieu À Charlot (Second Populist Manifesto)," which I had read before but was delighted to rediscover. It could be said that Chaplin's Little Man, referenced in this poem, is the embodiment of Ferlinghetti's entire aesthetic. Ferlinghetti's poetry (especially his later work) is, like Chaplin's work, imbued with humor and pathos, but is always hopeful. It admits there is much to despair in the world, some of it comical in a certain light, some of it horrifying. But Ferlinghetti (the son of immigrants), rather than resigning, is always rallying on the side of the marginalized and dispossessed, encouraging us to be free and to pick ourselves up out of the dust and to walk off defiantly into the sunset, into the great unknown, because going forward -- in spite of it all -- is the only way, for any other alternative is to accept defeat, to give up one's freedom, and to resign oneself with hopeless despair to "the way it is."

[Robb Todd]

It felt appropriate to read this in San Francisco but it's hard to think of why anyone should read this collection. I just don't get it. And the rhyming ... sweet baby jezuz, enough with the pitiful rhyming!

But that's not all that's wrong with some of these poems. If you say there's nothing else to be said, you better stop writing after you say it. If you say it twice and still keep writing, I just don't know what to do with you. And then when you hit me over the head with stupid rhymes, I want to burn your book. No, I won't burn your book. I won't even throw it away. But I will leave it on the BART because maybe there's someone out there who likes bad poetry.

Here's a bitter taste:


"An Elegy To Dispel Gloom"

(After the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in San Francisco, November 1978)

Let us not sit upon the ground
and tell sad stories
of the death of sanity.
Two humans made of flesh
are meshed in death
and no more need be said.
It is pure vanity
to think that all humanity
be bathed in red
because one young mad man
one so bad man
lost his head.
The force that through the red fuze
drove the bullet
does not drive everyone
through the City of Saint Francis
where there's a breathless hush
in the air today
a hush at City Hall
and a hush at the Hall of Justice
a hush in Saint Francis Wood
where no bird tries to sing
a hush on the Great Highway
and in the great harbor
upon the great ships
and on the Embarcadero
from the Mission Rock
to the Eagle Cafe
a hush on the great red bridge
a hush in the Outer Mission
and at Hunter's Point
a hush at a hot potato stand on Pier 39
and a hush at the People's Temple
tries its wings
a hush and a weeping
at the Convent of the Sacred Heart
on Upper Broadway
a hush upon the fleshpots
of Lower Broadway
a pall upon the punk rock
at Mabuhay Gardens
and upon the cafes and bookstores
of old North Beach
a hush upon the landscape
of the still wild West
where two sweet dudes are dead
and no more need be said.
Do not sit upon the ground and speak
of other senseless murderings
or worse disasters waiting
in the wings.
Do not sit upon the ground and talk
of the death of things beyond
these sad sad happenings.
Such men as these do rise above
our worst imaginings.

[Diether · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Come dance the fuzz of your peaches!"

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ferlinghetti is at his best when is examining everyday life in quick, sequential snapshots, each line moving the poem forward from one frame to the next. My personal favorites in this collection are "The Billboard Painters" and "Home Home Home."