City Lights Bookstore (opened by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953); Pocket Poets series founded in 1955; Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is published here in 1957, after the famous Six Gallery reading immortalized in The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac.
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Excerpt from The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, documentary portrait by Jerry Aronson:
Scene enacts the quest for post-beat beatitude as an empowering source for writers and cultural-political activists and “dharma bums” who seek enlightenment & transformation “like a rolling stone”from one end of the country (New York City, Boston) and the world (London, Paris, Tangier, Mexico City) to the other (San Francisco):
Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg visit the grave-site of Jack Kerouac at his hometown in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1975 during the Rolling Thunder Review and they read Kerouac’s writings, poetry, and death as Jack’s spirit resurrects to empower them as “beatitude” (otherwise known in this course via a complex pun as Beat Attitude):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiH9QZzGc_s&feature=related
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“Subterranean” spaces of art, culture, poetry, and freedom, are sought for in various urban and bohemian undergrounds and alternative life-worlds for the Beats, from North Beach and the Castro to Greenwich Village East & West and London and Paris et al:
Ponder Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” in D.A. Pennybacker bio-documentary video Don’t Look Back (1967):
http://new.music.yahoo.com/Bob-Dylan/videos/view/Subterranean-Homesick-Blues--2141379
"The word 'Beat' came from Kerouac's original coinage, 'Beatitude' that meant a state of utmost bliss. To Kerouac, it was the idea that the downtrodden are saintly, thinking in a Buddhist context. These are the precursors of the counter-culture. The Beat messages were anti-war pacifism, demonstration against the war, anti-materialism, anti-technocracy...like the Luddites."
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Lyricizing Non-Lyrical Reality," interviewed by Aryanil Mukherjee for Kaurub (2005) [quoted in Beat Attitudes].
“It’s seeing the rooftops of Frisco that makes you excited and believe....” -- Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (PJK, 350).
On San Francisco as exactly such a exciting and inspiring literary and social-left vortex, see Beat Attitudes (pp. 20, 29, 45 et al)
“But if no second coming [in the post-Beats and, later, in us], then no first coming [in the Beats] either; unless we are born again, we are not born at all. Nothing happens for the first time.”
-- Norman O. Brown, “Resurrection,” Love’s Body (201) (1966).
The left-coast goddess muse activist from Carmel and Palo Alto, Joan Baez here singing Dylan’s beat-drenched song “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” from Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde (1966), the one he wanted the City Lights alley to appear on, the one that is now called “Jack Kerouac Lane” or something like that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fkx-elBdKi4
See passages from Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish (Paris 1957-New York City 1959) (San Francisco: City Lights Books (1961)).
Rob Wilson
TWELVE FOR KEROUAC
Departing Massachusetts out of the musty house
ancient eyes crawled past
diesels on the overpass NJ turnpike south just a
boy-of-my-generation longing to become Pei-Hsu scriptures
ex-radio godhead eyes
drifted westward cold mountain, road-drunk and sardonic
attacking dog-armies went past bird-loving masters
drooling over spaghetti, corn bread, beer munchies, I
sank onward to Inchon with my sillier self I
praised the Holy Ocean of Eternity spooning
out wisdom inside the (Seoul/soul)
seahorse’s delicate imagery of glue
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LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (b. 1919-- )
“Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day” in Santa Cruz is coming up on Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at the Del Mar Theater, 7:00 PM for a screening of a new film by Chris Felver called “Ferlinghetti” (see video flyer for this and the film trailer):
http://www.sparringwithbeatnikghosts.com
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LF born New York City to Paris/Sorbonne for doctorate then moves to San Francisco, 1950.
LF cofounds City Lights Books in 1953
Under editorship of LF, Pocket Poets Series in paperback started up in 1955, and Howl appears in 1957 and sells millions.
LF named first Poet Laureate of San Francisco (1998)
San Francisco Poems (2001), a compendium of essays and poems from prior works. Read Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Dog” (p. 37 in San Francisco Poems (2001), originally appeared in A Coney Island of the Mind (1958).
RCA Victor Dog images:
http://www.google.com/search?q=rca+victor+dog+images&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=J0p&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=EhmKTqSrCpPCsQKawpz_BA&ved=0CEMQsAQ&biw=1253&bih=582
The dog Nipper painting of “His Late Master’s Voice” (1898); it became the RCA Victor records logo as of 1900:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipper
RW on the urban poetics and politics of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco Poems (City Lights Foundation, 2001):
You can find at least 4 modes/genres of SF-based poetry at play in Ferlinghetti’s San Francisco Poems, which gathers 50 years of SF-based work from Pictures of the Gone World (City Lights Pocket Poets Number One, 1955) to How to Paint Sunlight (New Directions, 2001):
A) Paradise/Eden Almost Found or Realized/Lost in SF:
Earliest poem, “A North Beach Scene” (p. 32) shows this sensuous push towards “kingdom come” and the reign of a “renaissance of wonder”
See also “At the Golden Gate Park That Day” (p. 61)
“The Changing Light” (76) as epiphany of light and cloud and portrayal of SF exceptionality
“At the Golden Gate” (75) plover linked to Asian quest for finding a quasi-Buddhist state of bliss
B) LF affirms the mongrel multicultural queer plurality of SF: what he calls the “Far-out city on the left side of the world,” a poetic city, an edge, a frontier of social innovation and freedom beyond the white-settler Manifest Destiny frontier
See “Baseball Canto” (41): SF Giants as multicultural and mongrel mix undoing the white Anglo canon and forms with new inputs and modes and mixtures
“The Old Italians Dying” (44)
“Green Street Mortuary Marching Band” (68)
“The Great Chinese Dragon” (49)
C) Internal and counter-cultural exile and distance from US America and its hegemony of the “corporate monoculture” (p. 26), what Rexroth calls LF’s “disaffiliation” and “disengaging” the military-industrial “Social Lie” (p. 186); see also Ginsberg’s “America”
“To the Oracle At Delphi” (79): a jeremiad against US global empire of force and capital
“Great American Waterfront Poem” (59)
“The Dog” (37) as a poetic dissenter, urban flaneur, and free spirit enjoying life in this special “franciscan” city
D) SF is now marked by what LF calls “The Great [Class] Divide” tearing apart the older bohemian, labor friendly and artistic SF: class-divided antagonisms and segregations are given over to the boom-and-bust dynamism of the SF contado, as street people and scavengers collide against the palatial lifestyles of the wealthy urban oligarchy; see LF “Inaugural Address,” p. 10:
“I Saw One of Them” (73)
“Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes” (59)
“Yachts in the Sun” (78)
“The Artist” (67) with drunk and poor
See also the essay by Nancy Peter in touching on LF’s “Chaplinesque populism,” and post-hippy turns to more multicultural gender/ethnic diversity in SF publishing, pp. 211-213).
Week Three: October 12 (Wed):
Moving from Ferlinghetti to Ginsberg in larger socio-poetic contexts of City Lights bookstore and press, San Francisco “mongrel” left-coast culture and politics, the search for “beatitude,” forging a green queer plural “ecopoetics” within and against the imperial “contado”:
In Beat Attitudes as in prior works, L. Ferlinghetti remarks on the formative cultural vision of Kerouac, Ginsberg, & the Beats and its abiding SF and world cultural impact:
"There was a whole new school of poets brewing [at North Beach], and there were pioneering artists around the School of Fine Arts who later became famous as San Francisco Figurative painters and abstract expressionists. It was the last frontier, and they were dancing on the edge of the world."
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "The Poetic City That Was," in San Francisco Poems (26) (2001).
"The word 'Beat' came from Kerouac's original coinage, 'Beatitude' that meant a state of utmost bliss. To Kerouac, it was the idea that the downtrodden are saintly, thinking in a Buddhist context. These are the precursors of the counter-culture. The Beat messages were anti-war pacifism, demonstration against the war, anti-materialism, anti-technocracy...like the Luddites."
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Lyricizing Non-Lyrical Reality," interviewed by Aryanil Mukherjee for Kaurub (2005).
"Well, Kerouac had this idea that [the Beat Generation] was to do with the Beatitudes. He was in search of enlightenment. I think he thought he could find it through alcohol, which is probably why he drank so much."
-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti, comment to Justine Shapiro, Globe Trekker-- San Francisco (2000).
For a multitude of Lawrence Ferlinghetti images, early and late (see):
http://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1253&bih=582&q=ferlinghetti+kerouac%27s+grave&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2&oq=ferlinghetti+kerouac%27s+grave&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=s&gs_upl=2558l13675l0l15429l42l42l2l29l5l0l203l1651l0.10.1l11l0#hl=en&gbv=2&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=ferlinghetti&oq=ferlinghetti&aq=f&aqi=g1g-m1g-S8&aql=&gs_sm=s&gs_upl=18573l21259l4l23671l15l15l0l0l0l6l258l2463l0.7.6l15l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=9e90fce91eaebb5f&biw=1253&bih=582
The Diggers giving out free food and clothing in the Panhandle section of SF Haight Ashbury off Fell Street, “Summer of Love,”1967...
San Francisco Bay images as a huge “contado”, starting with Google images:
http://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1276&bih=697&q=san+francisco+bay&gbv=2&oq=san+francisco&aq=5&aqi=g10&aql=1&gs_sm=c&gs_upl=2697l5776l0l14178l13l13l0l7l7l0l175l787l1.5l6l0
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