A Coney Island of the Mind
This is for you, dear poet of my youth, still 23 years and 21 days older than me (therefore 95), still here with the rest of us, enabling me to write this with a possibility it might reach you. I would say I’ve admired you from afar, but it’s not true, for I spent fifty years with a poem of yours dwelling at close quarters inside me:
to kingdom come
Here’s a link to you reading it yourself, 56 years after that inspired day when you put it in writing.
The images captured in those words have become part of my inner landscape of remembered moments. Now finally I possess all the poems in A Coney Island of the Mind, your anthology that millions have read, in many languages. And I learn from another source that you were the friend who encouraged George Whitman to start his bookshop in Paris, where amongst many kindnesses and encouragements to humanity he gave me shelter for several weeks in May and early June of 1962 (“Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.”) And I learn that it was you who started the City Lights Bookstore. If any publisher would handle my yet-to-be submitted work, posthumously or otherwise, I’d be honoured if it were City Lights (which is not, of course, the reason I pay homage to your inspiration).
It will take time to set out what your poems mean to me, but I’ll make a start in this post. You speak in simple appealing language. You celebrate the “Gone World”. Your poems shine with honesty and the celebration of moments, the sharing of same, without being obscure or addressing yourself to a literary elite:
The pennycandystore beyond the El
is where I first
fell in love
with unreality
Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom
of that september afternoon
What can I say about your poetry? There is no need, for it speaks for itself, finds its own readers, makes its dwelling within them, no need for me to do anything. Another time, any number of times, I may return to acknowledge how it has influenced me, even the poems I have not read till now, for they seem familiar, like echoes of the known. Perhaps it’s because they are imbued with your love for Walt Whitman, Apollinaire, Théophile Gautier, Yeats, Don Marquis (Archie & Mehitabel), Henry Miller or Joyce. Or perhaps they tap into the same archetypes which inspired those authors. Perhaps it’s because you wrote them in my teen years, when in dreams I might have flown across to San Francisco Bay; though I don’t retain any such recollection.
The main thing is, you celebrate life. And in nineteen-fifties America, where blindness to a vision such as yours predominated, you descended (poetically) to the underbelly, the street-litter, where dogs and homeless humans are free, as indeed are transcendent moments, said to be denied to all who can’t pass through the eye of a needle. For example this, from “Junkman’s Obbligato”, a series of poetic variations on the theme established by Yeats in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, with additional echoes of Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot:
Let us arise and go now
under the city
where ashcans roll
and reappear in putrid clothes
as the uncrowned underground kings
of subway men’s rooms.
. . .
Let us arise and go now
to the land of Manisfree.
Let loose the hogs of peace.
Hurry up please it’s time.
. . .
That was long ago. Last orders have still not been rung on that bell, and I hope there will be no hurry. Meanwhile, I hang out socks on my own clotheslines, and think of you, that day in ’51, on a rooftop in North Beach.
No comments?
Certainly those colorful socks alone warrant an observation or two.
An inveterate truthfulness compels me to confess that I have received by email an observation, from one of several readers who have never yet commented publicly and who writes à propos this post:
It strikes me that what Ferlinghetti did sounds perfectly your blog’s overall theme. He was portraying the element of the universal in the personal experience; in this case this element stood in contrast to what Foucault might have considered the episteme that obtained in the US of the Fifties. Ferlinghetti was reminding (in many cases, informing) his American readers of an entire vast area of the universal that said episteme by design excluded from awareness and thus from the realm of possible discourse.
You take this selfsame action although in a communicational milieu less amenable to the restrictions imposed by geographical/political epistemes; the Internet has transformed the nature and effects of zeitgeist–by widening its nature through inclusion and melding of multiple localized zeitgeists, and thus diminishing the deterministic effects of each of them in the formation of localized ones in favor of a generalized one that actually facilitates the perception of the falsehood of the personal-universal duality. At least that’s how it seems to me; that could all be just so much gibberish.
But I think it is not, and I think you are inclined to agree, else you would not have referenced Ferlinghetti’s work. I think you’ve come to recognize ever more clearly that this is just what makes the blog so powerful a tool for conveying perspectives such as yours, and why your literary wayfaring continues apace. I continue to find your perspective valuable and interesting, and I am as always available to support it as possible.
And the socks have other fans too. An acquaintance, who happens to be a funeral photographer by trade (! ?) says “thank you for the photo which I love and will inspire me every time I look at my own washing line.” words which I suspect may be flattery, designed to entice me into posthumously engaging her services.
The socks were a birthday present from my eldest son who grew up in my hippy years. They carried a proud label declaring them made of bamboo, which I thought would make them feel uncomfortable. But it only means that the viscose they are made of is sourced from bamboo rather than the usual woodpulp. But if you google “bamboo socks” you will discover that they have wonderful qualities you would have never dreamed of. Including biodegradability, which makes me keen to wear them as often as possible, before they revert to dust spontaneously in my sock drawer.
You seem to have disappeared from view.
Did you arise and go under the city? Will we see you again in this incarnation or will you emerge reborn.
Four Zoas, Page 65, (E 345)
I will arise Explore these dens & find that deep pulsation
That shakes my caverns with strong shudders. perhaps this is the night
Of Prophecy & Luvah hath burst his way from Enitharmon
When Thought is closd in Caves. Then love shall shew its root in deepest Hell
Yes, the only way I can return to view is by saying something. Which currently isn't happening. For the same reason, I am unable to explain why I am unable to say something, because it would involve saying something.
Apart from that small difficulty, everything is just fine. What Blake says about arising to explore dens might indeed be happening to me, but the words don't come, at any rate in a form worth publishing here. Sometimes there is a brief experience of Infinity, I can't call it anything else; and though it is brief, it spreads an aura across the other moments, and illuminates the days, and I wonder how it comes and goes of its own accord. All I can say—and this is woefully inadequate—is that one of the prerequisites for this kind of moment is having no agenda. That is a space I like to dwell in.
I thought of replying to your post on Blake and Milton, but it would have been an unworthy criticism of Milton. I shall not repeat the intended slur but refer you to this post http://perpetual-lab.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/tree-of-life.html.
But I would like to write something. Thank you for the prompt!
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“Yes, the only way I can return to view is by saying something. Which currently isn't happening. For the same reason, I am unable to explain why I am unable to say something, because it would involve saying something.”
*nodding in sympathy and agreement until my head falls off my neck*
If I can escape from the labyrinth of my own silence, I’ll attempt to tease you out of yours, by reference to one of your favourite bêtes noirs—John Gray, whose Straw Dogs initially rendered you speechless with rage. I quote: “I could say a few things about this, but I doubt any of it would be constructive.” When prodded you expressed your disgust eloquently enough, and made valiant contributions to the comments on that post. Now I’m reading his sequel, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, which takes his ideas to a deeper & more interesting level.
Words may emerge in due course. Brace yourself!
Thanks for pointing me toward your Milton post. I have not read Paradise Lost either except for snatches which may relate to Blake. Actually I haven't read much of what is considered the great literature of the English language. Milton's myth seems to have become a part of the collective unconscious even though it is not widely read. Perhaps the wisdom of the ages is distilled and subsequent generations just collect drops of the essence.
I am remembering distilling water in High School chemistry lab. Which leads to students of mine who tried to produce alcohol by distilling grape juice. I guess it essential not to leave out any steps along the way.
No bell
will be rung
or wrong'
for the passing
of the Public House.
Private tables
will chortle
over candelabras,
built from the bones
of us.
Brav
oh
Dav
oh
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I think some works of literature are hardly read except as school books.. And there are some which to me are of the very highest value which remain completely unknown to more than 99% of the English-speaking population, such as the novels of John Cowper Powys.
You've left me wondering what you were teaching those students, and what your reaction was to their attempted manufacture of brandy.