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  • Travel JournalsAmerica 1960, California 1961, Mexico 1982
  • Lawrence Ferlinghetti (bio)
Keywords

Big Sur, Mexico, poetry, Beats, travel, journals, counterculture, trains, the West, Jack Kerouac


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Lawrence Ferlinghetti is well known as a poet and artist, publisher of fellow Beat writers, and cofounder of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. But his extensive notebooks in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, cast new light on the man behind the persona. In fall 2015, Ferlinghetti’s Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals 1960–2010 will be published by Liveright. “I wrote these peripatetic pages for myself,” Ferlinghetti explains in the introduction, “never thinking to publish them.” His journals were selected and edited by Giada Diano and Matthew Gleeson, who recommended their publication to the author. At more than 500 pages and spanning fifty years, Writing Across the Landscape is sweeping in its scope; VQR has excerpted entries that are singular in focus yet representative of the whole. To best reflect the historical record, the original spelling and punctuation have been retained.

Though he is known as an outspoken writer and activist, Ferlinghetti’s unguarded frankness in the following entries comes as a revelation at many turns, from brotherly words about his friend Jack Kerouac to off-putting complaints about the “defunct men” and “ugly girls” on cross-country trains, from the embrace of nature and meditation at his Big Sur cabin to a surrealistic castration tale written in Mexico. He records his travels in words and drawings with a raw openness that is uncommon in our age of polished sound bites. To understand the history of modern American literature, one must read the Beats. And, to understand the Beats, one must read Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

—VQR [End Page 226]

AMERICA! AMERICA! March–November 1960

Train to Burlington, Vermont—Wednesday morning, March 30—forty-one yrs old and in my right wrong mind. … And the Boston & Maine with conductors that look like Calvin Coolidge. Springfield, Northampton, Greenfield, East Northfield, and on, into Vermont. White River Junction & a hundred Dartmouth students get off. On, through the wet snowhills & melting rivers, spring coming, through the long dark afternoon, the whole white landscape melting into black. Dusk descending over Vermont mountains, and night upon us as the diesel twocar train rocks silent into Essex Junction. …

My poetry reading here at the Vermont Conference, and my topic “Love and Death.” What do I know of the mystery of either? The conference also addressed by a spokesman for Dr. Teller, an atomic physicist—Mr. Christofilos (Christ & filosopher), who spoke the opposite of what Christ would have said—a militarist. … Boom boom.

Question by serious student before huge crowd at University of Vermont conference: “Sir, how do you stand as to fornication?”

Answer: “As for fornication, I very seldom stand; I lie down.”

Second question: “Do you really think Christ is dead?”

Answer: “The way the world acts today, you would think so. He’s not here tonight, is he? I don’t see him.”

Voice from back of auditorium: “Here I am.”

New York, N.Y., April 1

With Jack Kerouac at midnight we stumble down East 2nd Street, and suddenly out from a broken tenement front rushes a whole living room upside down with dark Puerto Ricans carrying sofas tables and armchairs on their heads upside down, growling at us as they run past and around the corner.

And what am I doing with him here anyway, sometime in eternity? Yeah, well, it’s a long story, as everything is. I am not my brother’s keeper but I do feel a kind of older brother empathy with him. … Well, Jack has nothing to do with Beat or beatnik except in the minds of thousands who read On the Road thinking he’s some sort of crazy wild rebel whereas really he’s just a “home boy” from little ol’ Lowell and certainly no rebel. And I keep telling him to stop wandering around the planet and go back home to Lowell Mass. and stay there, even though it would probably not work out, with him staggering around bars and not finding any “home” … and old...

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