National Poetry Month: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I'll be the first to admit that Lawrence Ferlinghetti's greatest contribution to American poetry is not as a poet but rather as a publisher. Ferlinghetti ran the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, the home of the Beat poets. Without Ferlinghetti, important books like Gregory Corso's Gasoline may not have been published. His most famous publication, of course, is Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems, which brought national attention when Ferlinghetti was forced to defend the book in an obscenity trial, one he won in a landmark victory for the first amendment.

While his work as a publisher and book store entrepreneur is important, Ferlinghetti's poetry is also quite good. His second volume, Coney Island of the Mind, has one of the most fantastic titles I know of, a great description of how poetry is a neural carnival. The words inside it give a good blend of the natural and surrealist worlds. Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto" was featured on Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour and is an intriguing piece of work. In it, the speaker imagines reading Pound's Cantos in the stands at Yankees' Stadium and having minority baseball players knock the ball through its pages; this poem is the most playful attempt I've read of someone trying to come to terms with Pound's World War II era politics.