On Tuesday, March 24, Lawrence Ferlinghetti turns 90. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “[San Francisco] Mayor Gavin Newsom has declared that March 24 will henceforth be called ‘Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day,’ in honor of his ‘enormous contributions to our city’s life and culture,’ while the bookstore staff invites everyone to send along birthday wishes, via e-mail, to: lfbirthday@citylights.com.”
I first read Ferlinghetti in 1967. I’d picked up a battered copy of Pictures of the Gone World in a tiny bookshop in the basement of a now long-defunct Northwest Denver coffeehouse called Muddy Waters of the Platte, and remember (or seem to remember) standing in the murky room filled with the fragrance of cement and old brick, reading this poem:
Sarolla’s women in their picture hats
stretched upon his canvas beaches
beguiled the Spanish
ImpressionistsAnd were they fraudulent pictures
of the world
the way the light played on them
creating illusions
of love?I cannot help but think
that their ‘reality’
was almost as real as
my memory of todaywhen the last sun hung on the hills
and I heard the day falling
like the gulls that fell
almost to landwhile the last picknickers lay
and loved in the blowing yellow broom
resisted and resisting
tearing themselves apartagain
again
until the last hot hung climax
which could at last no longer be resisted
made them moanAnd night’s trees stood up
I was 17 and not long acquainted with “the last hot hung climax,” but it wasn’t the deliciousness of that line that got me. It was the last: “And night’s trees stood up”. Whatever some Freudian-Jungian-Reichian shaman might have to say about that image, for me it was and still is beyond analysis, and the deep shock of it is still fresh forty-plus years later.
Pictures of the Gone World cost me a single 1967 quarter—the best 25¢ I’ve ever spent. And I plan to send the grand old man an email telling him so.
Thanks for sending the link back here from <A HREF="http://lilliputreview.blogspot.com/2009/03/lawrence-ferlinghetti-90-lyrical-years.html" REL="nofollow">the Issa post about LF</A> – great stuff.<BR/><BR/>Don
You’re right about that last line,<BR/>but why? Trees don’t go horizontal just because it’s night.<BR/>Guess you could call it pumping the obvious.