Customer Reviews

Poetry as Insurgent Art

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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.

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.

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.

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. The surrealists were great at opening up the world to the deep song that transcended rationality, but when they took their imaginings into the actual world, the world we live in, they just became fellow travelers of the grey Marxists who have no imaginations at all.
Can poets walk through walls and show others how to walk through walls? In the imagination, yes; in the shared public world of desks and tress that we live in, no, not so far anyway. As in At the Heart poets can point directions but do not, and perhaps should not, provide an exact map.

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.

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.

This is the best work of art that I've seen in a long time. Wonderful.