Continuing with two themes in reading this book—-honoring writers who have recently died (Felinghetti died at the age of 101 in February, 2021) and reading California authors while on the West Coast—-I found it in a small bookstore in Carmel that was celebrating its 53rd year.

Ferlinghetti was a prolific poet, a leading spokesman for the Beat generation, and the founder and owner of one of San Francisco’s classic locations, City Lights Books.  A fascinating man with honors galore for his extensive writing and political activism.  A poet laureate of San Francisco, he was instrumental in the renaming of a street next to his bookstore, Jack Kerouac Way.

This slim volume collects five works.  Three of them date from the 1970’s, an essay criticizing modern poetry as ‘prose masquerading as verse’ and two of them written in prose poetry populist manifestos urging poets to be Whitmanesque and forsake convention in addressing the real problems of 20th C America.

The first two pieces, Poetry as Insurgent Art and What is Poetry are collections of one or two line aphoristic observations about the art of poetry.  Each of the 66 pages contains one or more pearls of wisdom and beautiful phrases capturing the essence of poetry.  I stopped taking notes after the first dozen pages yielded more than a dozen references.  Here’s one from Insurgent: “Fill the dark abyss that yawns behind every face, every life, every nation.” and this one from What is Poetry:  “It is private solitude made public.”

This is a wonderful little book, filled with references to other poets (he loves Whitman, Sandburg, Lindsay, Stevens, Hughes, Ginsberg, and Lawrence and has no time for Eliot, Pound, Moore, Shapiro, or Williams), lyrical observations on the how older generations have ‘lived out their expatriate visions’ (e.g. from Hemingway and Henry Miller all the way through Dylan and Baez), and aphoristic comments about poetry that will provide thought-provoking material for many years.  Any lover of poetry will be delighted and provoked by this book. Read it!