Lawrence Ferlinghetti
(b. 1919)
A prominent voice of the Beat poetry movement of the
1950s whose primary aim was to bring poetry back to the people, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti has greatly extended that specific objective in his prolific career
as editor and publisher of the renowned City Lights Books press in San
Francisco. His literary production has embraced many areas: translation,
fiction writing, travelogues, playwriting, film narration, and essays. Yet his
impact and importance remain as a poet and as a voice of dissent which is
reflected in his describing his politics as “an enemy of the State.”
Following
graduation from the University of North Carolina and service in World War II,
Ferlinghetti received a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1948 and a
doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1951. From 1951 to 1953, when he settled in San
Francisco, he taught French in an adult education program. In 1953 he became
co-owner of the City Lights Bookshop, the first all-paperback bookstore in the
country, and by 1955 had founded and become editor of the City Lights Books
publishing house. City Lights served as a meeting place for Beat writers. His
press published and promoted Beat writings, and he himself encouraged them, in
the case of Diane di Prima, writing the introduction for her first collection,
This Kind of Bird Flies Backward.
Ferlinghetti’s
publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1956 led to his arrest on obscenity
charges. The trial that followed (he was acquitted) drew national attention to
the Beat movement and established Ferlinghetti as its prominent voice. In fact,
Ferlinghetti's own A Coney Island of the Mind was, along with Howl, the most
popular poetry book of the 1950s. Often concerned with political and social
issues, Ferlinghetti’s poetry set out to dispute the literary elite’s
definition of art and the artist’s role in the world. Though imbued with the
commonplace, his poetry cannot be dismissed as polemic or personal protest, for
it stands on his craftsmanship, thematics, and grounding in tradition.
Ferlinghetti
described his one novel, Her, as “a surreal semi-autobiographical blackbook.”
It deals with a young man’s search for his identity, although its
free-association experimentation proved baffling to critics.
Known
for his political poetry, he explains his commitment in art as well as life by
saying “Only the dead are disengaged.” Well aware of the incongruity of his
social dissent with his success as a publisher, Ferlinghetti, in an interview
for the Los Angeles Times, remarked on “the enormous capacity of society to
ingest its own most dissident elements....It happens to everyone successful
within the system. I’m ingested myself.”
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