World Walkabout

I suppose the most astonishing thing about Lawrence Ferlinghetti is, that at the age of 96, he is still writing engaged poems as politically and progressively inclined as ever. New Directions recently published his Time of Useful Consciousness (2012), the second part of a longer work in progress called Americus (2005). Just as Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (1956) became the best-selling poetry book of a generation, Ferlinghetti’s own A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), with its insouciant bravado and cheer, has passed the million sales mark. That’s a rare occurrence for a book of poems in these United States. And so is Writing across the Landscape (2015).

Ferlinghetti’s poems have usually reflected his life, but these journals offer a fuller view. Ferlinghetti had a perilous start in life: his Italian father died six months before his birth and his Sephardic Portuguese-French mother was committed to an asylum a few months after. Fortunately, he was adopted by the daughter of the man who founded Sarah Lawrence College and was raised in Bronxville—an elite suburb north of New York City. He was sent to prep schools and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Enlisting in the Navy after Pearl Harbor, he served as an officer on subchasers—escort vessels that dropped explosives on German submarines. He participated in the invasion of Normandy, and then continued to serve in the Pacific. On the G. I. Bill, he studied at Columbia University and then went to France in 1947 to study at the Sorbonne where he received a doctorate. In 1951, in San Francisco two years later, he began working with Peter Martin on his magazine, City Lights (named after Chaplin’s film) and where Ferlinghetti’s first translations of Jacques Prévert appeared. So he began his literary career by translating and editing a little magazine.

With Martin, Ferlinghetti started a paperbound bookstore—a novel idea after the war as the book market was changing—located between North Beach and Chinatown. Also called City Lights, it was intended as a gathering place to foster intellectual inquiry and activity. At the same time, he created a small-press publishing outlet with the same name, which—like Barney Rossett’s Grove Press—was based on the notion that freedom of speech needed advocacy. One of its focal points became Beat related publications like The Yage Letters (1963), an epistolary exchange between Burroughs and Ginsberg from the Amazon basin, and Neal Cassady’s The First Third (1971), a somewhat awkward, strained account of the Beat catalyst’s early years.

Another project, now in its sixtieth year, was the Pocket Poets Series. Ferlinghetti wanted to publish poetry in an inexpensive format that could reach working classes rather than the more elite audience that patronized poetry. The Pocket Poets Series issued funny looking little square paperbacks that could be easily slipped into a pocket. The first book he published in this series was his own Pictures of a Gone World (1955)—a mixture of elegy and optimism influenced by the innovativeness of Apollinaire, Prévert and E. E. Cummings. The series exploded, so to speak, with its fourth item, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the censorship trial that ensued.

Ferlinghetti’s intention—in the tradition of the French engage writers like Camus or Sartre—was to provoke, to discover unknown new voices, and to create an “international, dissident, insurgent ferment,” to challenge the political (or economic) given the comfortable assumptions of a culture that seemed bound by its affluence and commodities. City Lights Press became the model for a small-press alternative in America. This was important at a time when bigger, more commercial publishers were selling their assets to Europeans, collapsing their trade divisions, consolidating or disappearing.

Some of Writing across the Landscape is the result of Ferlinghetti’s publishing efforts, “tracking down some author for an undiscovered masterpiece,” or reading his own work at poetry festivals in Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris or Mexico City. These travel journals were drawn...