Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Bookstore, 2007. Photo by voxtheory. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Born	March 24, 1919 Yonkers, New York, United States
Died	February 22, 2021 (aged 101)
Occupation	poet, essayist, painter
Literary movement	Beat, New American Poets, Postmodernism
Influenced Bob Dylan

Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti (March 24, 1919 - February 22, 2021) was an American poet and a founder of the Beat Generation movement.

Life

Overview

Author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, Ferlinghetti is best known for A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions, 1958), a collection of poems that has been translated into 9 languages, with sales of over a million copies.

Youth

Ferlinghetti was born Lawrence Monsanto Ferling in Yonkers, New York on March 24, 1919. His mother, Lyons Albertine (Mendes-Monsanto) was of French, Portuguese Sephardic Jewish heritage. His father was born Carlo Ferlinghetti in Brescia, Italy, in 1872. He immigrated to the United States in 1892, and worked as an auctioneer in Little Italy, NYC. At some unknown point, Carlo Ferlinghetti shortened the family name to "Ferling," and Lawrence wouldn't learn of his original name until 1942, when he had to provide a birth certificate to join the US Navy. Though he used "Ferling" for his earliest published work, Ferlinghetti reverted to the original Italian "Ferlinghetti" in 1955, when publishing his debut collection of poems, Pictures of the Gone World.

Ferlinghetti's father died 6 months before he was born, and his mother was committed to an asylum shortly after his birth. He was raised by his French aunt Emily, former wife of Ludovico Monsanto, an uncle of his mother from the Virgin Islands who taught Spanish at the U.S. Naval Academy. Emily took Ferlinghetti to Strasbourg, France, where they lived during his earliest 5 years, with French as his primary language.

After their return to the U.S., Ferlinghetti was placed in an orphanage in Chappaqua, New York, while Emily looked for employment. She was eventually hired as a French governess for the daughter of Presley Eugene Bisland and his wife Anna Lawrence Bisland, in Bronxville, New York, the latter being the daughter of the founder of Sarah Lawrence College, William Van Duzer Lawrence. They resided at the Plashbourne Estate. In 1926, Ferlinghetti was left in the care of the Bislands. After attending various schools, including Riverdale Country School, Bronxville Public School, and Mount Hermon School (now Northfield Mount Hermon School), he went to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where he earned a B.A. in journalism in 1941. Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America. His sports journalism was published in The Daily Tar Heel, and he began publishing short stories in Carolina Magazine, for which Thomas Wolfe had also written.

World War II

In the summer of 1941, Felinghetti lived with 2 college mates on Little Whale Boat Island in Casco Bay, Maine, lobster fishing, and raking moss from rocks to be sold in Portland, Maine, for pharmaceutical use. This experience gave him a love of the sea, a theme that runs through much of his poetry. After the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Ferlinghetti enrolled in Midshipmen’s school in Chicago, and in 1942 shipped out as junior officer on J.P. Morgan III's yacht, which had been refitted to patrol for submarines off the East Coast.

Ferlinghetti was next assigned to the Ambrose Lightship outside New York harbor, to identify all incoming ships. In 1943 and 1944 he served as an officer on three U.S. Navy subchasers used as convoy escorts. As commander of the subchaser USS SC1308, he was at the Normandy invasion as part of the anti-submarine screen around the beaches. After VE Day, the Navy transferred him to the Pacific Theater, where he served as navigator of the troop ship USS Selinur. Six weeks after the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, he visited the ruins of the city, an experience that turned him into a life-long pacifist.

Columbia & The Sorbonne

After the war, he worked briefly in the mailroom at Time magazine, in Manhattan. The G.I. Bill then enabled him to enroll in the Columbia University graduate school. Among his professors there were Babette Deutsch, Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and Mark Van Doren. In those years he was reading modern literature, and has said he was at that time influenced particularly by Shakespeare, Marlowe, the Romantic poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and James Joyce, as well as American poets Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, and American novelists Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. He earned a master’s degree in English literature in 1947 with a thesis on John Ruskin and painter J.M.W. Turner.

From Columbia, he went to Paris to continue his studies, and lived in the city between 1947 and 1951, earning a Doctorat de l’Université de Paris, with a “mention très honorable.” His two theses were on the city as a symbol in modern poetry and on the nature of Gothic.

City Lights Books

After marrying Selden Kirby-Smith in 1951 in Duval County, Florida, Ferlinghetti settled in San Francisco in 1953, where he taught French in an adult education program, painted, and wrote art criticism. His earlist translations, of poems by the French surrealist Jacques Prévert, were published by Peter D. Martin in his popular culture magazine City Lights.

In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Martin founded City Lights Bookstore, the first all-paperbound bookshop in the country. 2 years later, after the departure of Martin, he launched the publishing wing of City Lights, City Lights Publishers, with his own debut volume of poems, Pictures of the Gone World, the initial release in the Pocket Poets Series. This volume was followed by books by Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Marie Ponsot, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, William Carlos Williams, and Gregory Corso. Although City Lights Publishers is best known for its publication of Beat Generation writers, Ferlinghetti never intended to publish the Beats exclusively, and the press has always maintained a strong international list.

City Lights Publishers expanded its list from poetry to include prose, including novels, biography, memoirs, essays and cultural studies. In 1972, City Lights published a collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (since republished in two volumes, Tales of Ordinary Madness and The Most Beautiful Woman in Town). Subsequently it took over publication of Bukowski's collection of Notes of a Dirty Old Man columns for Open City from the pornography publisher Essex House (publisher) in the early 1970s. Since then, it has published a sequel to Notes and a book of ephemera by Bukowski.

Other prose works include Neal Cassady's memoir The First Third, Edie Kerouac-Parker's memoir of her life with Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs's "Yage Letters" to Allen Ginsberg and other ephemera. It has also published political books by prominent authors, including Noam Chomsky, Tom Hayden, and Howard Zinn. Books published in translation include such authors as Georges Bataille, Bertolt Brecht, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The Howl trial

The 4th number in the Pocket Poets Series was Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Ferlinghetti was in attendance at the now-famous Six Gallery reading where Ginsberg first performed Howl publicly. The next day Ferlinghetti telegrammed Ginsberg: "I greet you at the beginning of a great literary career," subsequently offering to publish his work.

The book was seized in 1956 by the San Francisco police. Ferlinghetti and Shig Murao, the bookstore manager who had sold the book to the police, were arrested on obscenity charges. After charges against Murao were dropped, Ferlinghetti, defended by Jake Ehrlich and the ACLU, stood trial in SF Municipal court. The publicity generated by the trial drew national attention to San Francisco Renaissance and Beat movement writers. Ferlinghetti had the support of prestigious literary and academic figures, and, at the end of a long trial, Judge Clayton W. Horn found Howl not obscene and acquitted him in October 1957. The landmark First Amendment case established a key legal precedent for the publication of other controversial literary work with redeeming social importance.

In 2010, Andrew Rogers portrays Ferlinghetti in the film Howl.

The Beats

Although in style and theme Ferlinghetti’s own writing is very unlike that of the original NY Beat circle, he had important associations with the Beat writers, who made City Lights Bookstore their headquarters when they were in San Francisco. He has often claimed that he was not a Beat, but a bohemian of an earlier generation. A married war veteran and a bookstore proprietor, he didn’t share the high (or low) life of the beats on the road. Kerouac wrote Ferlinghetti into the character “Lorenzo Monsanto” in his autobiographical novel Big Sur (1962), the story of Jack’s stay (with the Cassadys, the McClures, Lenore Kandel, Lew Welch, and Philip Whalen) at Ferlinghetti’s cabin in the wild coastal region of Big Sur. Kerouac depicts the Ferlinghetti figure as a generous and good-humored host, in the midst of Dionysian revels and breakdowns.

Over the years Ferlinghetti published work by many of the Beats, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Diane diPrima, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, and Gary Snyder. He was Ginsberg’s publisher for over thirty years. When the Indian poets of the Hungryalists literary movement were arrested in 1964 at Kolkata, Ferlinghetti introduced the Hungryalist poets to Western readers through the initial issues of City Lights Journal.

Political engagement

Soon after settling in San Francisco in 1950, Ferlinghetti met the poet Kenneth Rexroth whose concepts of philosophical anarchism influenced his political development. He self-identifies as a philosophical anarchist, regularly associated with other anarchists in North Beach, and sold Italian anarchist newspapers at the City Lights Bookstore. A critic of US foreign policy, Ferlinghetti has taken a stand against totalitarianism and war.

While Ferlinghetti has expressed that he is "an anarchist at heart," he concedes that the world would need to be populated by "saints" in order for pure anarchism to be lived practically. Hence he espouses what can be achieved by Scandinavian-style democratic socialism.

Ferlinghetti's work challenges the definition of art and the artist’s role in the world. He urged poets to be engaged in the political and cultural life of the country. As he writes in Populist Manifesto: "Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds... Poetry should transport the public/to higher places/than other wheels can carry it..."

In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

Ferlinghetti was instrumental in bringing poetry out of the academy and back into the public sphere with public poetry readings. With Ginsberg and other progressive writers, he took part in events that focused on such political issues as the Cuban revolution, the nuclear arms race, farm-worker organizing, the murder of Salvador Allende, the Vietnam War, May ’68 in Paris, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico. He read not only to audiences in the United States but widely in Europe and Latin America. Many of his writings grew from travels in France, Italy, the Soviet Union, Cuba, Mexico, Chile, Nicaragua, and the Czech Republic.

Painter

Ferlinghetti began painting in Paris in 1948. In San Francisco, he occupied a studio at 9 Mission Street on the Embarcadero in the 1950s that he inherited from Hassel Smith. He admired the New York abstract expressionists, and his first work exhibits their influence. A more figurative style is apparent in his later work. Ferlinghetti’s paintings have been shown at various museums 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. In San Francisco, his work can regularly be seen at the George Krevsky Gallery.

Jack Kerouac Alley

File:PoetryIsTheShadowCastByOurStreetlightImaginationsByLawrenceFerlinghettiInJackKerouacAlley.jpg

One of his works is intact at San Francisco's Jack Kerouac Alley, which is right next door to the City Lights Bookstore.

In 1988, he was the initiator of the transformation of Jack Kerouac Alley, located at the side of his shop. He presented his idea to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors calling for repavement and renewal. Since 1991, young volunteers from the Adopt-An-Alleyway Youth Empowerment Project — a program run by the Chinatown Community Development Center — have maintained the good condition of the alley, which is a bridge between Chinatown and North Beach.

Last years

From 2009 on he served on the Honour Committee of IMMAGINE & POESIA, the artistic literary movement founded in Turin, Italy, with the patronage of Aeronwy Thomas (Dylan Thomas's daughter).

Ferlinghetti died of interstitial lung disease on February 22, 2021, at his home in San Francisco at age 101.

Writing

“	If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic. You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words....	”
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti. From Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames].

Though imbued with the commonplace, Ferlinghetti’s poetry is grounded in lyric and narrative traditions. Among his themes are the beauty of natural world, the tragicomic life of the common man, the plight of the individual in mass society, and the dream and betrayal of democracy. He counted among his influences T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings. H.D., Marcel Proust, Charles Baudelaire, Jacques Prévert, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Blaise Cendrars.

Ferlinghetti published many of the Beat poets and is considered by some as a Beat poet as well. Yet Ferlinghetti did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, as he said in the 2013 documentary Ferlinghetti: Rebirth of Wonder: "Don't call me a Beat. I was never a Beat poet."

File:Lawrence Ferlinghetti 2012 04.jpg

Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 2012 at Caffe Trieste

Ferlinghetti penned much of his early poetry in the vein of T.S. Eliot; as he told poet and critic Jack Foley, "Everything I wrote sounded just like him." Yet, even in his poems inspired by Eliot such as "Constantly Risking Absurdity," Ferlinghetti is ever the populist as he compares the poet to a trapeze artist in a circus and then to a "little charleychaplin man."

Critics have noted that Ferlinghetti's poetry often takes on a highly visual dimension as befits this poet who was also a painter. As Jack Foley states, Ferlinghetti's poems "tell little stories, make 'pictures'." Ferlinghetti as a poet paints with his words pictures full of color capturing the average American experience as seen in his poem "In Golden Gate Park that Day: "In Golden Gate Park that day/ a man and his wife were coming along/ ... He was wearing green suspenders ... while his wife was carrying a bunch of grapes." In the first poem in A Coney Island of the Mind entitled, "In Goya's Greatest Scenes, We Seem To See," Ferlinghetti describes with words the "suffering humanity" that Goya portrayed by brush in his paintings. Ferlinghetti concludes his poem with the recognition that "suffering humanity" today might be painted as average Americans drowning in the materialism: "on a freeway fifty lanes wide/ a concrete continent/ spaced with bland billboards/ illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness."

Ferlinghetti took a distinctly populist approach to poetry, emphasizing throughout his work "that art should be accessible to all people, not just a handful of highly educated intellectuals." Larry Smith, an American author and editor, stated that Ferlinghetti is a poet, "of the people engaged conscientiously in the creation of new poetic and cultural forms." This perception of art as a broad socio-cultural force, as opposed to an elitist academic enterprise, is explicitly evident in Poem 9 from Pictures of the Gone World, wherein the speaker states: "'Truth is not the secret of a few' / yet / you would maybe think so / the way some / librarians / and cultural ambassadors and / especially museum directors / act" (1–8). In addition to Ferlinghetti's aesthetic egalitarianism, this passage highlights two additional formal features of the poet's work, namely, his incorporation of a common American idiom as well as his experimental approach to line arrangement which, as Crale Hopkins notes, is inherited from the poetry of William Carlos Williams.

Reflecting his broad aesthetic concerns, Ferlinghetti's poetry often engages with several non-literary artistic forms, most notably jazz music and painting. William Lawlor asserts that much of Ferlinghetti's free verse attempts to capture the spontaneity and imaginative creativity of modern jazz; the poet is noted for having frequently incorporated jazz accompaniments into public readings of his work.

His poem, "Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes," is studied at GCSE level in England and Wales, as part of the collection of poems in the AQA Anthology.

Recognition

Ferlinghetti has received numerous awards, 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, and the ACLU’s Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award.

He won the Premio Taormino in 1973, and since then was awarded the Premio Camaiore, the Premio Flaiano, the Premio Cavour, among other honors in Italy.

Ferlinghetti was named San Francisco’s Poet Laureate in August 1998 and served for 2 years.

In 2003 he was awarded the Robert Frost Memorial Medal and the Author’s Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters

The National Book Foundation made him the recipient of its first Literarian Award (2005), given for outstanding service to the American literary community.

In 2007 he was named Commandeur in the French Order of Arts and Letters.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti 60 years of painting, a retrospective exhibition held in Italy in 2010 (Rome: February–April; Reggio Calabria: May - July) was a creative journey through the 20th century, reflecting on social and political issues and on the role of the artist nowadays.

In popular culture

The Italian band Timoria dedicated the song Ferlinghetti Blues (from the album El Topo Grand Hotel) to the poet, where Ferlinghetti himself speaks one of his poems. Recordings of Ferlinghetti reading want ads, as featured on radio station KPFA in 1957, were recorded by Henry Jacobs and are featured on the Meat Beat Manifesto album At the Center, mistakenly credited to Kenneth Rexroth. Ferlinghetti gave Canadian punk band Propagandhi permission to use his painting The Unfinished Flag of the United States, which features a map of the world painted in the stars and stripes, as the cover of their 2001 release Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes. Before this, the same painting was used for the cover of Michael Parenti's 1995 book, Against Empire, which was published by City Lights.

Ferlinghetti recited the poem Loud Prayer at The Band's final performance. Titled The Last Waltz, this concert was filmed by Martin Scorsese and released as a documentary which included Ferlinghetti's recitation. Julio Cortázar, in his Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963) references a poem by Ferlinghetti in Chapter 121.He appears as himself in the 2006 comedy film The Darwin Awards. Bob Dylan used Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto", on the Baseball show of Theme Time Radio Hour. Roger McGuinn, the former leader of the Byrds, referred to Ferlinghetti and "A Coney Island of the Mind" in his song "Russian Hill," from his 1977 album Thunderbyrd. Cyndi Lauper was inspired by A Coney Island of the Mind to write the song "Into the Nightlife" for her 2008 album Bring Ya to the Brink.

The Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps's 2008 marching show was entitled Constantly Risking Absurdity, with movements titled after various lines in Ferlinghetti's poem. The corps took second place at the Drum Corps International Finals. Aztec Two-Step is an American folk-rock band formed by Rex Fowler and Neal Shulman at a chance meeting on open stage at a Boston coffee house, the Stone Phoenix[1], in 1971. The band was named after a line from the poem "A Coney Island of the Mind" by Ferlinghetti. Bristol Sound band Unforscene used Ferlinghetti's poem "Pictures of the Gone World 11" (or "The World is a Beautiful Place...") in the song The Word Is on its 2002 album New World Disorder.

In 2011 Ferlinghetti contributed two of his poems to the celebration of the 150th Anniversary of Italian unification: Song of the Third World War and Old Italians Dying inspired the artists of the exhibition Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Italy 150 held in Turin, Italy (May - June 2011).

Publications

Poetry

• Pictures of the Gone World. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1955
  • enlarged edition, 1995.
• Tentative Description of a Dinner Given to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower. Golden Mountain Press, 1958.
• A Coney Island of the Mind. New York: New Directions, 1958.
• Berlin. Golden Mountain Press, 1961.
• One Thousand Fearful Words for Fidel Castro. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1961.
• Starting from San Francisco (with recording). New York: New Directions, 1961
  • revised edition (without recording), 1967.
• Penguin Modern Poets 5 (with Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg). New York: Penguin, 1963.
• Thoughts of a Concerto of Telemann. Four Seasons Foundation, 1963.
• Where Is Vietnam?. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1965.
• To F—- Is to Love Again, Kyrie Eleison Kerista; or, The Situation in the West, Followed by a Holy Proposal. F—- You Press, 1965.
• Christ Climbed Down. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 1965.
• An Eye on the World: Selected poems. MacGibbon & Kee, 1967.
• Moscow in the Wilderness, Segovia in the Snow. Beach Books, 1967.
• After the Cries of the Birds. Dave Haselwood Books, 1967.
• Fuclock. Fire Publications, 1968.
• Reverie Smoking Grass. East 128, 1968.
• The Secret Meaning of Things. New York: New Directions, 1969.
• Tyrannus Nix? New York: New Directions, 1969.
• Back Roads to Far Places. New York: New Directions, 1971.
• Love Is No Stone on the Moon. ARIF Press, 1971.
• The Illustrated Wilfred Funk. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1971.
• Open Eye, Open Heart. New York: New Directions, 1973.
• Director of Alienation: A poem. Main Street, 1976.
• Who Are We Now? San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1976.
• Landscapes of Living and Dying. New York: New Directions, 1979.
• Mule Mountain Dreams. Bisbee Press Collective, 1980.
• A Trip to Italy and France. New York: New Directions, 1980.
• Endless Life: Selected poems. New York: New Directions, 1984.
• Over All the Obscene Boundaries: European poems and transitions. New York: New Directions, 1985.
• Inside the Trojan Horse. Lexikos, 1987.
• Wild Dreams of a New Beginning: Including “Landscapes of Living and Dying” and “Who Are We Now?". New York: New Directions, 1988.
• When I Look at Pictures. Peregrine Smith Books, 1990.
• These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems, 1955-1993. New York: New Directions, 1993.
• A Far Rockaway of the Heart. New York: New Directions, 1997.
• San Francisco Poems. San Francisco: City Lights, 2001.
• How to Paint Sunlight: Lyric Poems and Others, 1997-2000. New York: New Directions, 2001.
• Poetry as Insurgent Art. New York: New Directions, 2005.

Plays

• Unfair Arguments with Existence: Seven Plays for a New Theatre (contains The Soldiers of No Country [produced in London, England, 1969], Three Thousand Red Ants [produced in New York, NY, 1970; also see below], The Alligation [produced in San Francisco, 1962; also see below], The Victims of Amnesia [produced in New York, NY, 1970], Motherlode, The Customs Collector in Baggy Pants [produced in New York, NY, 1964], and The Nose of Sisyphus). New York: New Directions, 1963.
• Routines (includes The Jig Is Up, His Head, Ha-Ha, and Non-Objection), New Directions (New York, NY), 1964.
• Three by Ferlinghetti: Three Thousand Red Ants, The Alligation, [and] The Victims of Amnesia(produced in New York, NY, 1970).

Novels

• Her (novel). New York: New Directions, 1960.
• Love in the Days of Rage (novel). New York: Dutton, 1988.

Non-fiction

• Howl of the Censor (trial proceedings, edited by J.W. Ehrlich). Nourse Publishing, 1961.
• Dear Ferlinghetti (With Jack Spicer). White Rabbit Press, 1962.
• The Mexican Night: Travel Journal. New York: New Directions, 1970.
• A World Awash with Fascism and Fear. Cranium Press, 1971.
• A Political Pamphlet. Anarchist Resistance Press, 1976.
• Northwest Ecolog. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1978.
• Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History from the Beginning to the Present. New York: Harper, 1980.
• The Populist Manifestos (includes “First Populist Manifesto”). Grey Fox Press, 1983.
• Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre (journal). San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1985.
• The Cool Eye: Lawrence Ferlinghetti Talks to Alexis Lykiard (With Alexis Lykiard). Stride, 1993.
• (With Christopher Felver) Ferlinghetti: Portrait. Gibbs Smith, 1998.
• What Is Poetry?. Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts, 2000.

Drawings

• Leaves of Life: Fifty Drawings from the Model. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1985.
• Life Studies, Life Stories: Drawings, City Lights (San Francisco, CA), 2003.

Translated

• Jacques Prevert, Selections from “Paroles”. San Francisto, CA: City Lights, 1958.
• (Translator with others) Nicanor Parra, Antipoems: New and Selected. New York: New Directions, 1985.
• (Translator, with Francesca Valente) Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roman Poems. San Franciso, CA: City Lights, 1986.
• (Translator, with others) Homero Aridjis, Eyes to See Otherwise. New York: New Directions, 2002.

Edited

• Beatitude Anthology. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1960.
• Pablo Picasso, Hunk of Skin. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1969.
• Charles Upton, Panic Grass. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1969.
• City Lights Anthology. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1974; reprinted, 1995.
• City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology. San Francisco, CA: City Lights,, 1995

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Audio / video

Lawrence Ferlinghetti - I Am Waiting

"Sometime During Eternity" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

5 Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Lunch Poems Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Recordings

• Poetry Readings in “The Cellar” (with Kenneth Rexroth). Fantasy, 1958.
• Tentative Description of a Dinner to Impeach President Eisenhower, and other poems. Fantasy, 1959.
• Tyrannus Nix? and Assassination Raga. Fantasy, 1971.
• The World’s Greatest Poets 1 (With Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg). CMS, 1971.

Film

• Author of narration, Have You Sold Your Dozen Roses? (film), California School of Fine Arts Film Workshop, 1957.

See also

• The Beat poets
• List of U.S. poets
• Beat Generation

References

• 50 poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti 50 images by Armando Milani, poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and images by Armando Milani ([1] GAM Editrice, 2010)
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti - Italian Tour 2005, photographs by Walter Pescara (Nicolodi, 2006 - special edition, not for sale)
• Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk)
• Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time, by Barry Silesky (Warner Books, 1990)
• Constantly Risking Absurdity: The Writings of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, by Michael Skau (Whitson, 1989)
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Poet-at-Large, by Larry R. Smith (Southern Illinois University Press, 1983)
• Ferlinghetti: A Biography, by Neeli Cherkovski (Doubleday, 1979)
• The Beats: A Literary Reference, by Matt Theado (Carroll & Graf, 2003)

Fonds

• Guide to the Lawrence Ferlinghetti Papers at The Bancroft Library

External links

Poems

• Lawrence Ferlinghetti 2 poems at Poems and Pickaxes
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti profile & 4 poems at the Academy of American Poets.
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti b. 1919 at the Poetry Foundation.
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti at The Beat Page: Biography & selected poems
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti at American Poetry

Audio / video

• Audio and video of reading at University of California Berkeley "Lunch Poems" series (December 1, 2005)
• Larence Ferlinghetti at YouTube
• Amy Goodman Interview (Transcript and streaming media)
• Video interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti about his paintings on KQED's Spark

Books

• Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Amazon.com
• Works by or about Lawrence Ferlinghetti in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

About

• Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Biography.com
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti at Literary Kicks
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti at The Soredove Press Limited Edition Poetry Chapbooks, Broadsides and Art
• "Lawrence Ferlinghetti, literary citadel of San Francisco, dies at 101" obituary at the Washington Post

Etc.

• City Lights Bookstore] in San Franciscos
• Proposed International Poetry Museum by Ferlinghetti friend Herman Berlandt