Search results for ""Author Lawrence Ferlinghetti""

These poems on European themes by the author of Her (his Paris novel) and the enduring A Coney Island of the Mind were mostly written during the last seven years and, in the poet’s words, are “transformations and transitions looking westward to America and beyond.” Flowing from France to Italy to the Netherlands, on to Germany, back to France, and finally toward America, they follow Ferlinghetti’s own recent journeying. The poems progress geographically and chronologically with a cohesive development of ideas and themes. In part he plays off T. S. Eliot’s “summarizing the past by theft and allusion” but captures the present as well in fleeting incidents of daily experience, and, in his powerful concluding poem “History of the World: A TV Docu-drama,” envisions a possible nuclear future. It is a view of our time and of where we are in it, seen by an eagle eye, told in Ferlinghetti’s inimitable everyman’s voice.

Read more less

'A brave man and a brave poet.' Bob Dylan'Utterly extraordinary.' Guardian'A torrent of textual splendor.' Los Angeles TimesFrom growing up as an orphan in 1920s New York, to serving in the Navy at the D-Day landings in Normandy, to a vagabond life drinking in Parisian cafes, to befriending America's greatest counter-cultural writers, Little Boy has seen it all. This is the story of one man's extraordinary life - a story steeped in the exhilarating energy of the Beats. It is a novel serving as the literary last will and testament of the iconic publisher and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti: a meditation on his one hundred years on the planet, rich in wisdom, emotion and memories.

Read more less

The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller's "Into the Night Life" and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950's—as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul.

Read more less

Beautiful hardcover edition of the beloved Ferlinghetti collection restored to the original version as it was originally conceived 60th anniversary of book's publication Ferlinghetti's travel journals, Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals (1950-2013), are expected to be published in September 2015 by Liveright/Norton. We'll collaborate on PR. 60th anniversary of City Lights Publishers -- this is the first book Lawrence Ferlinghetti ever published

Read more less

Here are all of Ferlinghetti's poems set in the city he has lived in for over half a century. He brings alive, with wit and lyricism, scenes of city life: a Giants baseball game, the Green Street Marching Mortuary Band, bohemian North Beach, Golden Gate Park, yachts on the Bay, and more. Also included are historic photographs, scattered prose pieces, and the text of his mischievous inaugural address with his vision of the city's history as a poetic center and suggestions for keeping it that way. Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a bookman, painter and author of poetry, fiction, essays and plays. His most recent books are How to Paint Sunlight (poetry) and Love in the Days of Rage (fiction).

Read more less

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Blasts contains blasts, blessings, and curses in the vortex of today, taking its cues from the original little magazine, Blast, published by Wyndham Lewis with Ezra Pound in 1914–15 that helped create the modernist movement in literature and the visual arts. In these fearless new poems, Ferlinghetti, America’s everyman bard, speaks for the poor, the forgotten, the beaten, and the bombed.

Read more less

A sequence of one hundred and one poems with recurrent themes, it includes various sections on love, art, music, history, and literature, as well as confrontations with major figures in the avant-garde before the arrival of the Beat generation. This edition now includes eighteen new poems from Ferlinghetti's "Pictures of the Gone World" which he publishes under his City Lights imprint. A self-styled "stand-up tragedian," Ferlinghetti has been called "the foremost chronicler of our times." If A Coney Island of the Mind was a generations vibrant eye-opener, A Far Rockaway of the Heart is a wake-up call for a new age.

Read more less

The Secret Meaning of Things has all the elements of his earlier poetry: lyrical intensity, wit, social concern, satirical bite, and above all a classical claritas. But it goes much further: there is a deepening of vision and a darker understanding of "our clay condition." The six long poems in The Secret Meaning of Things show a progressive continuity and clarity of perception that apprehends both the hard reality and luminous irreality in everyday phenomena. In "Assassination Raga"––on the death of Robert Kennedy––the glass through which the poet sees darkly is the television screen; the poem was first read on the night of RFK’s funeral at a mass memorial in San Francisco. "Bickford’s Buddha" is a meditation on "Observation Fever" in Harvard Square, while "All Too Clearly" finds a "touch of old surrealism/at a stoplight in La Jolla." "Through the Looking Glass" begins with an actual flight aboard a commercial airliner and moves through a psychedelic vision to a final flash of the Dance of Shiva, which in turn opens out into the worldview of "After the Cries of Birds." "Moscow in the Wilderness, Segovia in the Snow" comes out of Ferlinghetti’s travels to Moscow and across the steppes in the winter of 1967.

Read more less

The Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini was first and always a poet--the most important civil poet, according to Alberto Moravia, in Italy in the second half of this century. His poems were at once deeply personal and passionately engaged in the political turmoil of his country. In 1949, after his homosexuality led the Italian Communist Party to expel him on charges of "moral and political unworthiness," Pasolini fled to Rome. This selection of poems from his early impoverished days on the outskirts of Rome to his last (with a backward longing glance at his native Friuli) is at the center of his poetic and filmic vision of modern Italian life as an Inferno. "From all these refusals, we know what Pasolini stood against--political ideologies of all kinds, the complacency inherent in the established social order, the corruption of the institutions of church and state. If Pasolini could be said to have stood for anything it was for the struggles of Italy's working class--both the rural peasants and those barracked in the urban slums at the edges of Italian cities--whose humanity he evoked with great eloquence and nuance. But it is his refusals that animate his legacy with an incandescent rage, a passionate and profound fury that did not, as Zigaina suggests, cry out for death--but for just the opposite." -Nathaniel Rich, The New York Review of Books Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922 in Bologna. In addition to the films for which he is world famous, he wrote novels, poetry, and social and cultural criticism, and was an accomplished painter. He was murdered in 1975 at Ostia, near Rome.

Read more less

Lawrence Ferlinghetti lights out for the territories with Book I of his own born-in-the-U.S.A. epic, Americus. Describing Americus as "part documentary, part public pillow-talk, part personal epica descant, a canto unsung, a banal history, a true fiction, lyric and political," Ferlinghetti combines "universal texts, snatches of song, words or phrases, murmuring of love or hate, from Lotte Lenya to the latest soul singer, sayings and shibboleths from Yogi Berra to the National Anthem, the Gettysburg Address or the Ginsberg Address, that haunt our nocturnal imagination." This book is a wake-up call that breaks new ground in the grand tradition of Whitman, W.C. Williams, Charles Olson, and Ezra Pound, as Ferlinghetti cruises our literary and political landscapes, past and present, to create an autobiography of American consciousness.

Read more less

This collection of recent poems is graced with a short introduction by the poet in which he says, "All I ever wanted to do was to paint light on the walls of life." For more than fifty years Ferlinghetti has been doing just thatilluminating both the everyday and the unusual, all the while keeping true to his original dictum of speaking in a way accessible to everyone. He has been, and remains, "One of our ageless radicals and true bards" (Booklist) and his voice is well-known in many places around the world. He was one of the two American poets (the other being John Ashbery) chosen to participate in the 2001 Celebration of UNESCO's World Poetry Day in Delphi, Greece, where he along with his international confreres each poetically addressed the Oracle.

Read more less

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "one of our ageless radicals and true bards" (Booklist), has gathered here four decades of poetry in his inimitable everyman’s voice, including more than fifty pages of new work. The tone has deepened over the years, and he may now be seen as a true maestro in his field. Behind the irresistible air of immediacy and spontaneity lies much erudition and an antic imagination intent on subverting "the dominant paradigm." From his earliest books, including his landmark Coney Island of the Mind, Ferlinghetti has written poetry "in ways that those who see poetry as the province of the few and educated had never imagined. That strength has turned out to be lasting" (Joel Oppenheimer, N. Y. Times Books Review).

Read more less

"Printer's ink is the greater explosive."—Lawrence Ferlinghetti Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded the City Lights publishing house sixty years ago in 1955, launching the press with his now legendary Pocket Poets Series. First in the series was Pictures of the Gone World—and within a year, he had brought out two more volumes, translations by Kenneth Rexroth and then, poems by Kenneth Patchen. But it was the success and scandal of Number Four, Howl & Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg (1956), that put City Lights on the map, positioning the Pocket Poets Series at the forefront of the literary counterculture. A landmark sixtieth retrospective celebrating 60 years of publishing and cultural history, this edition provides an invaluable distillation of the energetic, iconoclastic and still fresh body of work represented in the ongoing series. Ferlinghetti has selected a handful of poems from each of the sixty volumes, including the work of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, Pasolini, Voznesensky, Prévert, Mayakovsky, Cortázar, O'Hara, Ponsot, Levertov, di Prima, Duncan, Lamantia, Lowry, and more, all of the Pocket Poets Series' innovative, influential, and often ground-breaking American and international poets.

Read more less

Published to celebrate forty years of City Lights publishing, which began with the letterpress printing of this book in 1955. It was Lawrence Ferlinghetti's first book, and it has been reprinted twenty-one times, having never been out of print. The original edition contained the first twenty-seven poems to which the author has now added eighteen new verses. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights Books, author of A Coney Island of the Mind and Pictures of the Gone World, among numerous other books, has been drawing from life since his student days in Paris where he frequented the Academie Julien and where he did his first oil painting.

Read more less

"To all those who have for several years sought to discredit the new American literature, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has just dealt a most powerful blow," wrote French critic Pierre Lepape in 1961 when Her was published in France as La Quatrieme Personne du Singulier. Calling it "a masterpiece of the young American novel," Lepape declared it was "the confirmation of a great American writer who, in the hall of American literary glories, takes the place left vacant by the death of Hemingway." Lepape went on to speak of the "incredible verbal virtuosity" by which the reader is led through this "laby-reve," and it is this image of the "labyrinth-dream" which relates Her to the anti-novels of the young French school of Robbe-Grillet and Butor. Being thus very far from the kind of novels produced by Ferlinghetti's immediate contemporaries (whether Beat or academic) this book has met with little but bafflement among American critics. With well over 50,000 now in print Her nevertheless continues to make its own way.

Read more less

Lawrence Ferlinghetti—legendary poet and best-selling author—collects here his travel journals. Traversing the latter half of the twentieth century to the present, Writing Across the Landscape positions Ferlinghetti as a major voice whose personal writings are now added to the fabric of twentieth-century literary history. The volume gives glimpses of figures like William Burroughs in London, Ezra Pound in Italy and Fidel Castro at the dawn of the Revolution. Readers will journey to Mexico, Morocco, Paris and Rome, as well as to post-Stalinist Russia on a harrowing journey on the Trans-Siberian Express. Embedded with new poems and Ferlinghetti’s pyrotechnic prose, Writing Across the Landscape evokes the people, places and political movements that have shaped our time.

Read more less

Sensual and glimmering, Lorenzo Chiera’s elliptical fragments evoke nights of bawdy excess in Trastevere (“City made of Roman ruins . . . / what a whorehouse!”), translated here by one of the most renowned poets of our time. In his preface, Lawrence Ferlinghetti describes the experience of reading Chiera for the first time: “We soon realize we are in the presence of a savage erotic consciousness, as if the lust-driven senses were suddenly awakened out of a hoary sleep of a thousand years, a youth shaken awake by a rude medieval hand, senses still reeling, drunk in the hold of some slave ship, not knowing night from day nor sight from sound, the eye and the ear and the nose confounding each other, not yet knowing which function each was to take up in the quivering dawn.”

Read more less

While famous for his celebrated novel, Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry always considered himself a poet. First published in 1962 and long out of print, Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry is the only comprehensive selection of his poetry to be published, and it remains the perfect introduction to his extensive poetic canon. Edited by Lowry's good friend, renowned Canadian poet Earle Birney, with the assistance of his widow, Margerie Lowry, the selection includes extraordinary poems written during Lowry's stay in Mexico, many of which are closely related to his novel. This new edition includes a "Publisher's Note" from Lawrence Ferlinghetti. "These poems would be worth keeping in print, if for no other reason, for their illuminations of Under the Volcano: 'See mind's petal / torn from a good tree, but where shall it settle / But in the last darkness and at the end?' Sometimes, as the images of "For Under the Volcano," they become 'palm-of-the-hand' versions of that masterpiece. Lowry is a poet of struggle--with life, and with the creative process. Here are his struggle's fruits: guilt, alcoholism, hopeless, self-deriding quest for salvation, which seems to be love, and, above all, self-destruction--but always accomplished with self-knowledge, enriched (in order to further torment itself) with compassion for all the beings that the poet, and us with him, are failing. His words are always sad and often beautiful."-William T. Vollman

Read more less

Lawrence Ferlinghetti—legendary poet and best-selling author—collects here his travel journals. Traversing the latter half of the twentieth century to the present, Writing Across the Landscape positions Ferlinghetti as a major voice whose personal writings are now added to the fabric of twentieth-century literary history. The volume gives glimpses of figures like William Burroughs in London, Ezra Pound in Italy and Fidel Castro at the dawn of the Revolution. Readers will journey to Mexico, Morocco, Paris and Rome, as well as to post-Stalinist Russia on a harrowing journey on the Trans-Siberian Express. Embedded with new poems and Ferlinghetti’s pyrotechnic prose, Writing Across the Landscape evokes the people, places and political movements that have shaped our time.

Read more less