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Review by Tom Pynn
And
there is no end no end to the doors of perception still to be opened and the
jet streams of light in the upper air of he spirit of man in the outer space
inside us
Shining!
Transcendent!
Into
the crystal night of time
In the endless
silence of the soul
In
the long loud tale of man
In his endless
sound and fury
signifying everything
--
Since arriving on
the
To summarize the past by theft and
allusion
As the above implies, the
book length poem depends heavily on remembering, but the act of memory as we
all know seldom moves in a linear or even single direction. Time is memory and memory is history and
history is in flux: A poem is a
phosphorescent instant illuminating time.
Hence, Ferlinghetti takes us from medieval
The labyrinth on the floor of
and
a
on
a
full
of gumball goombahs on rollerskates
Cry of a black singer
in
a beat-up
The poet’s lines often exemplify the
jazz-style poetics that came into vogue after the end of World War II and
continue to inform American poetics since then.
A voice developed not as Wordsworth considered as “emotion recollected
in tranquillity,” but emotion recollected in emotion. The
images in a poem should be jamais vu, not déjà vu. As poetry that aims at presenting life as
nearly as it can—a graph of consciousness
at best—it speaks in a breathless tone that sounds like the catalogues of
sights and smells and sounds of Whitman’s lyrical opus Leaves of Grass: All the
images of / the splendid life of the world / down the rivers of windfall light.
No need to write a great epic
Having written above that
“Walt Whitman your greatest soul speaker
with
his ‘barbaric yawp’
sounding
for the first time
free
from the past
the
voice of the people of
at
once joyous and tragic
passionate
and calm
intimate
as a lover
An American epic, after
modernism, will be a combination of comedy and tragedy (pace James Joyce), what
Cornel West, in his appreciation of Whitman and Melville (Democracy Matters), calls “tragicomic hope.” Herein lies the democratic vista, the deep roots of democracy. Ferlinghetti, as do the Beats/San Francisco
Renaissance/Black Mountain poets et al, opt for the kind of turn to an American
epic as presented in Williams’
in
which he heard
the
plash and eddy
the
profane refrain
of
American speech.
In Americus there is also Olson’s surgent Maximus—O Gloucester—that takes to task those
who would disobey the figures of the
present dance, and does not shy from the bardic
demand of taking the state to task in
this foul country where / human lives are so much trash. In addition to these important elements of an
American epic, Ferlinghetti adds liberal doses of humour in case we get too serious. Humour is the extra dimension that allows a fuller
expression of the maze and amaze of life. From Socrates’ “Ï drank what?" to Ferlinghetti's irreverent
parody of Wordsworth's sonnet “The World is Too Much With Us Late and Soon,” as getting and spending / we lay waste our
trousers; to a letter signed by J. G. Seemily,
Public Affairs Officer; Ferlinghetti’s humour cracks open the smug privilege of stiff-lipped
academic verse while bringing in the everyday idiom of contemporary America.
For
all of Pound’s erudition, the Cantos
can only reach those few steeped in the histories of human culture; thus, they
fail the test of a new American epic. A poem, he writes, can be made of common household ingredients. It need not be composed of esoterica only a handful (the cultural oligarchy) can
understand. Americus I stoops low to conquer and in doing so de-mystifies culture
and poetry thereby allowing a democratic poetry to take shape, one that would
give voice to the fullness of human experience, both joy and woe, and would not
allow the power junkies and war mongers and their crimes to escape criticism by
transforming them in the rarefied air of high culture. As Kerouac invoked The Shadow and LeRoi Jones the Green Lantern in their respective works, so
does Ferlinghetti include references to pop icons
Charlie Chaplin, Seabiscuit, and rap music. This is not to say that Ferlinghetti
does not grant the hallmarks of American culture their respective places in his
epic. On the contrary, Ferlinghetti’s work has always been marked by an
extraordinary litany of and allusiveness to Western icons such as Plato, Michaelangelo, Wordsworth, Joyce, etc. In combining the remnants of high culture
with common household ingredients, he
demystifies the former and elevates the latter to effect
a democratic inclusiveness that expands consciousness of life in all its
manifestations.
It has been an on-going
emphasis of the Beats to take back poetry from the fossilized academics and put
it back into the streets where poetry, as Kerouac wrote in "The Origins of
Joy in Poetry," can freely sing—wham
bam the true blue song of man.
Poetry, Ferlinghetti writes in the book’s
third section, is the shook foil of the
imagination, the
Perpetual revolt against silence
exile and cunning.
It is a guillotine for accepted ideas.
It is a lawless, insurgent enterprise.
To write a Republic then—
How would an American epic sound if
it doesn’t depend upon the stock elements of Western literature? What would be the sound from the ground of
poetry composed as insurgent art? Williams suggests that as Europeans came over
from the old world, they should enter the
new world naked, spring forth upon a
new place. Instead, they opted for the same old conventions while
simultaneously expecting things—politics, art, religion—to be different.
As Mark Twain suggested
when he had Huck light out for the territory, Americans are always searching
and moving. Never satisfied, we view
life as an unfinished film, a naive
optimism that as through the wrong end of
a telescope we see the myriad antic figures forever disappearing over the far
horizon As if the quivering meatwheel tape (we would
like to think) could never break,
as
if they would always be
full
of light
made
of light
shimmering
among
the sere and yellow leaves
In the autumn of that year.
Where and who is
Take heed,
take heed / all of you who still should be / the gadflies of the state
For Ferlinghetti,
poetry has always been an insurgent art.
In the larger poetry scene in
And the poet
as the bearer of
Eros
as the bearer of
love
and pleasure and
joy
and total freedom
must by
definition
be the natural
born
non-violent
enemy of the State,
which would eat
your liberties!
Ferlinghetti knows first hand having been a Naval officer in the Splinter Fleet of mine sweepers during
WWII and having seen the devastation of the atomic bombing of the Japanese
people, that war is always INHUMAN WAR.
In the book's sixth poem, Ferlinghetti
descries the 20th and 21st centuries' extraordinary
escalation in the inhumanity of war--General
says "
Is not some gross national happiness
still possible?
Even
as America ate its young,
there still lingers the hope of a true American Awakening to come to birth from
the wide womb of
On
this shore, we shall raise our monuments of stones,
of wood, of mud,
of color, of labor, of belief, of being,
of life, of love,
of self, of man expressed
in
self-determined compliance, or wilful revolt,
secure in this
avowed truth, that no man is our master,
nor can any ever
be, at any time in time to come.
Americus
I also speaks to
this vision of hope: and there is a
garden / in the memory of
A hopefulness without frontiers
We are all too familiar with the
rhetoric of frontiers, a rhetoric masking the conquering lust that has driven
us over the edge of humanity on countless occasions. We know, too, that it has always ended badly
for combatant and non-combatant--when did we ever take this distinction
seriously? South of the border, And
Cortes came, and
North of the Border too
Our God the greatest White Father
told the white
men under his command
to take the
Indians' land
because that was
their manifest destiny
And they did then set forth
with the great
obscene hunger of
the territorial imperative.
Even in the hopeful and visionary
sounding rhetoric of Kennedy's new frontier of space exploration, there is a
sinister hunger gnawing at our freedom.
The poet calls us to sanity, benevolence, and love by turning toward the
things of this world. The poet should see through world-colored
glasses. What does the poet see? The coils of longing myriad
endgames of the unnameable.
The
poet calls us to see the same things he/she sees: Yet still endless the splendid life of the world
Endless its lovely living and
breathing its
lovely sentient beings seeing and hearing
feeling and
thinking laughing and dancing sighing and
crying through
endless afternoons endless nights
The hopefulness of an end to war is
an important part of Ferlinghetti's vision: For there will be an end to the dogfaced gods in wingtip shoes and Gucci slippers in