A manifesto, essay, and discourse on the value of poetic thought in the modern age.
In 1953 Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded the first paperback bookstore in the United States. In over five decades City Lights, the bookstore and publisher, has become a Mecca for millions. Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind (ND, 1958) is a number one best-selling volume of poetry by any living American poet. Now, New Directions is proud to publish his manifesto in a paperback edition.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Short and inspiring, but rarely surprising, this collection of remarks, aphorisms and exhortations about the nature and purpose of poetry began in the late 1950s, when Ferlinghetti was just coming into his own as a Beat poet and publisher of City Lights Books. After 50 years of revisions and additions, his claims may not strike experienced readers as fresh—and some may even seem clichéd: The state of the world, his first page declares, calls out for poetry to save it. On the other hand, Ferlinghetti's very large body of fans (he is one of the bestselling 20th-century American poets) should find reason and justice in these eternal verities, couched in up-to-date lingo: Poems are e-mails from the unknown beyond cyberspace, for example. Beginning teachers of creative writing should also find Ferlinghetti's instructions of use: Read between the lines of human discourse. Two groups of aphorisms make up most of the volume, to which Ferlinghetti adds a short essay and two 1970s poems. Modern Poetry Is Prose encourages young writers to discover the dark spirit of earth and blood; Populist Manifesto #1 hopes Whitman's wild children, however pressed down by modernity, will soon Awake and sing in the open air. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
The poet, publisher, and activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti, born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919, has received the Robert Frost Memorial Medal and the first Literarian Award of the National Book Foundation. He is the subject of Christopher Felver’s new film documentary, Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder.
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More About the Author
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights Books, author of A Coney Island of the Mind and Pictures of the Gone World, among numerous other books, has been drawing from life since his student days in Paris where he frequented the Academie Julien and where he did his first oil painting.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
By S. Ihad
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
More bon mots from the old bard of San Francisco. To this day Ferlinghetti gets confused for a Beat poet. He is in fact a Bohemian poet and artist who only published the Beats. In this book his words are few but to the point. You want to keep this in your back pocket at all times. Who knows when you're gonna need some emergency wisdom!? He is one of the best poets alive and the title of Lawrence of America is well-earned for a man who single-handedly changed the literary landscape of this country. Thank you Lawrence! May the lights of all the cities of the world shine upon you.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By Amy Talent
Format:Hardcover
Ferlinghetti's little book is full of big inspiration. It is a call to take poetry off the page and live the words. Buy extra copies for your friends and loves, for this is essential reading.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This great little book - small enough to carry in one's back pocket, like a New Testament or the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao - is my new Manifesto. "Poetry deconstructs power. Absolute poetry deconstructs absolutely." Happy deconstructing.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
No whimps please. This mature and professional tour de force, details the good and bad and the ugly efforts to produce a poem .......by we Americans.
By Rock
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Ferlinghetti leads with powerful words and images, calling poets and humans in general to live life fully and engaged. I have used much of this in my writing classes. Good advice, and poetry, for anyone.
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
The masters of power (masters of nothing else) have seized the word "Insurgent" to use in Iraq because they wouldn't want us ordinary folk to see the native fighters as freedom fighters or as revolutionaries. Ferlinghetti's slim hardback is a call for peaceful, nonviolent change through poetry, which acts as restorer of the free and original imagination that can lead to new ways of seeing the world and living. He calls for a poetry of world wide vision that shines like the sun everywhere, but lives through the concrete. He calls for a poetry that has a spiritual dimension, that stands before the great mystery, but questions all ideologies and creeds. He wants not spoken word but singing word, he wants poetry out of Starbucks and beyond worrying about bucks, poetry on the streets and in the pool halls and kitchens with the pots and pans. He wants poetry that speaks to the people, and thus he includes in the volume his two populist manifestos that first appeared in newspapers. We live in a time of crisis, and poets better speak up and not listen to the doom and gloomers who seek to dismiss poetry by reducing it to your singular ego and its problems.
He says it all beautifully, in lines of poetic prose often full of allusions, lines that just about anybody can understand. I may be wrong, but to me he seems to seek what Kerouac sought in his book length poem, Mexico City Choruses, a re-imagined world that lives in the moment between the reader and the poem. How that re-imagining is then carried into the world is not explained, and left to the individual. There are surrealist overtones to this work. Ferlinghetti lived in France and got a PhD there.... Read more ›
He says it all beautifully, in lines of poetic prose often full of allusions, lines that just about anybody can understand. I may be wrong, but to me he seems to seek what Kerouac sought in his book length poem, Mexico City Choruses, a re-imagined world that lives in the moment between the reader and the poem. How that re-imagining is then carried into the world is not explained, and left to the individual. There are surrealist overtones to this work. Ferlinghetti lived in France and got a PhD there.... Read more ›
Format:Hardcover
Ferlinghetti never ceases to amaze. The volume may be slim, but it is rich with Beat philosophy, true to the Cause. This is a must for fans of the Beat poets.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By J. A. Buhrer
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is the best work of art that I've seen in a long time. Wonderful.
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