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New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #9
Scoppi urla risate
Poeta, pittore, agitatore culturale, editore, all’età di quasi cento anni Lawrence Ferlinghetti (nato a New York il 24 marzo 1919) è ormai un’icona della controcultura americana. Dopo essere stato uno degli animatori della beat generation – primo editore dell’Urlo di Allen Ginsberg, amico di Jack Kerouac e Gregory Corso, autore di raccolte di poesie e testi teatrali – ha sempre portato avanti di pari passo l’attività letteraria e quella politica, animato da un pacifismo ecologista e anarchico che ne ha fatto una delle grandi voci critiche del sistema politico-economico degli Stati Uniti. È inoltre il fondatore di City Lights Bookstore, la leggendaria libreria indipendente di San Francisco che dal 1955 a oggi non ha mai smesso di essere un luogo simbolo della cultura alternativa.Nella sua più recente raccolta di poesie, questo grande «irregolare» della letteratura contemporanea leva ancora la sua voce contro le ineguaglianze, le guerre e la sopraffazione su cui si basa la prosperità dell’Occidente. Unendo lo slancio estatico di Walt Whitman agli echi della tradizione classica dà vita a poesie attualissime e senza tempo che ci richiamano con forza alla nostra umanità: lo sguardo di Ferlinghetti è sempre pieno di ardore e compassione, che si posi sulle ferite di un’intera nazione o su una semplice coppia di innamorati seduta su un molo.
- GenresPoetry
93 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 27, 2014
3 people are currently reading
61 people want to read
About the author
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
258 books649 followersA 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
March 3, 2014
It must be nice to be Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to know what is right and wrong so infallibly without having to give the matter any thought at all, not feeling the need to reassess your thoughts on the matter over the last thirty or forty years, and to continue churning out lines about how bad it is to think that capitalism is democracy, or that you can just slot environmentalism into your politics without considering that democracy and the protection of the environment are, in many ways, completely incompatible.
It must be nice, I guess, to go to sleep every night without worrying that the vaguely hippyish new-left 'anarchism' that you prefer is more or less identical to the capitalism that you claim to despise: each prefers to atomize societies, cultures, communities and institutions; each rejects the idea that there can be a common good; each considers the individual's desires to be prima facie good and right.
It must be wonderful, too, to be such a big name that you can keep writing derivative beat poetry, which occasionally rises to irony but is otherwise just a record of one person's thoughts and emotions put on a page in vague rhythms that virtually demand to be read as if every line was a question? because no thought is ever completed? and for whatever reason this is how poets read their poems? especially when they think they're performers?
That last was unfair; I've never heard him read. But otherwise this is an intellectually insulting rant. Much of what he hates deserves to be hated, but he has no reason to hate it other than a vague dislike of things that other people like. Might like to give that some thought.
It must be nice, I guess, to go to sleep every night without worrying that the vaguely hippyish new-left 'anarchism' that you prefer is more or less identical to the capitalism that you claim to despise: each prefers to atomize societies, cultures, communities and institutions; each rejects the idea that there can be a common good; each considers the individual's desires to be prima facie good and right.
It must be wonderful, too, to be such a big name that you can keep writing derivative beat poetry, which occasionally rises to irony but is otherwise just a record of one person's thoughts and emotions put on a page in vague rhythms that virtually demand to be read as if every line was a question? because no thought is ever completed? and for whatever reason this is how poets read their poems? especially when they think they're performers?
That last was unfair; I've never heard him read. But otherwise this is an intellectually insulting rant. Much of what he hates deserves to be hated, but he has no reason to hate it other than a vague dislike of things that other people like. Might like to give that some thought.
May 14, 2021
Although small in volume this collection has so many topics, questions and half-answers, as all of Ferlinghetti's work. It's brilliant, three poems in particular I will carry with me for some time to come. Lawrence Ferlinghetti does it again, one of the few authors who has yet to let me down.
March 7, 2017
A good, if short, collection of poems from Beat legend Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He's pretty angry in most of these, lamenting a newer, less-free, less-funky, less-fun San Francisco (and by extension, America) than the one of his youth and prime (though he was fairly angry then too).
He doesn't like gentrification, is basically what I'm saying, and it's hard to blame him if you've been down Market Street lately.
He doesn't like gentrification, is basically what I'm saying, and it's hard to blame him if you've been down Market Street lately.
March 4, 2025
Che scoperta meravigliosa Ferlinghetti!
I suoi componimenti arrivano come schegge impazzite, scariche di proiettili incessanti. Ho amato l'immediatezza dei suoi versi, la schiettezza di chi non si perde in inutili elucubrazioni.
Approfondirò sicuramente altro dell'autore.
“Cut down Cut down Cut down
Cut down your grass roots and too-wild weeds
Cut down cut down those wild sprouts your too-wild buds your too-wild shoots
Cut down your upstart vines and voices your hardy volunteers and pioneers
Cut down cut down your alien corn
Cut down your crazy introverts tongue-tied lovers of the subjective”
I suoi componimenti arrivano come schegge impazzite, scariche di proiettili incessanti. Ho amato l'immediatezza dei suoi versi, la schiettezza di chi non si perde in inutili elucubrazioni.
Approfondirò sicuramente altro dell'autore.
“Cut down Cut down Cut down
Cut down your grass roots and too-wild weeds
Cut down cut down those wild sprouts your too-wild buds your too-wild shoots
Cut down your upstart vines and voices your hardy volunteers and pioneers
Cut down cut down your alien corn
Cut down your crazy introverts tongue-tied lovers of the subjective”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 4, 2020
Che bella la passione, anche a 100 anni!
Ferlinghetti ci racconta il suo tempo, l’America capitalista e arrogante, la disumanizzazione, la disattenzione dell’uomo contemporaneo verso l’ambiente.
Le sue poesie, semplici ma incisive, arrivano subito al dunque, con un uso massiccio di termini negativi e metafore da guerra. Ma qua e là trovano spazio sogni e desideri, a sottolineare come c’è ancora per l’uomo lo spazio per immaginare un mondo diverso.
Ferlinghetti ci racconta il suo tempo, l’America capitalista e arrogante, la disumanizzazione, la disattenzione dell’uomo contemporaneo verso l’ambiente.
Le sue poesie, semplici ma incisive, arrivano subito al dunque, con un uso massiccio di termini negativi e metafore da guerra. Ma qua e là trovano spazio sogni e desideri, a sottolineare come c’è ancora per l’uomo lo spazio per immaginare un mondo diverso.
February 20, 2024
Il poeta più politico che io abbia mai letto. Attacca senza remore, condanna l’umanità che distrugge se stessa, il capitalismo-fascismo, e tutto quello che, dandoci un apparente progresso, riporta l’uomo al tempo delle caverne, dove forse pure c’era più purezza. Ferlinghetti va studiato, letto, portato in giro nello zainetto.
August 26, 2017
first half involving ironic and political beat poetry and honestly, being the person i am, i'm okay with that.
May 1, 2019
For me the poems were just ok. Not really rememamble but not terrible poetry.
June 8, 2019
I’ve been thinking for awhile that I need to read more of him and this little book confirmed that
November 13, 2019
Più un 3.5 - la mia preferita è la storia dell'aeroplano.
March 6, 2024
adored blind poet
May 13, 2025
La poesia è urla, denuncia! Grande Ferlinghetti!
April 26, 2019
Ferlinghetti è stato un esponente della Beat Generation di grande rilievo. Critica fortemente l'immobilismo umano dinnanzi alle catastrofi sociali, ambientali e politiche degli ultimi decenni. Condanna l'atteggiamento disinteressato nei confronti di un passato di cui la memoria occidentale sembra essere orfana. Il mio è un 3.5 figlio di un puro gusto personale che si scontra con determinate scelte stilistiche, ma di cui ne riconosco la grandezza e l'ovvia necessità.
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May 7, 2016Read this & other reviews at http://miscmss.blogspot.com/2015/04/f...
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Oops, read it here instead: http://miscmss.blogspot.com/2015/09/f...
December 9, 2015
Not as good as Pictures of the Gone World or Coney Island of the Mind, but still an interesting and topical collection.
December 15, 2025
Argomenti davvero interessanti, ho trovato alcune poesie geniali.
April 4, 2014
a manifesto of what youth looks like when it's old.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews