Pen Pals with the God Father of Beat Poetry

What is Lawrence Ferlinghetti best known for?

The author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, painter, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies.

Making a name writing poetry may be one of the hardest things there is.

It's harder than climbing Mt. Everest naked or swimming the English Channel with one arm tied behind your back.

Yet, the iconic, literary game-changer, Lawrence Ferlinghetti did that and made history.

Ferlinghetti lived to be 101 years old.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti photo Attribution

My story with Ferlinghetti

He called his books "pocketbooks " because they fit into the back pocket of your jeans. And that's where you would find a copy of his books in my 17-year old life.

Favorites: "A Coney Island of the Mind," "Her," "Unfair Arguments With Existence," "Tyrannus Nix," "The Secret Meaning of Things," "Open Eye Open Heart," "Pictures of the Gone World," and his last book, "Little Boy."

Hooked on his surrealism and free verse attempts to capture the spontaneity and imaginative creativity of modern jazz. Poetry that lodged itself into the consciousness of the reader - generating awareness and change.

Bored, directionless, racist parents, Beat fan, in search of America. I got the courage and wrote the Godfather of the Beat Movement for writing advice. The man who saw to it Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" was published and forever changed modern poetry.

I addressed the letter to City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and licked the stamp.

Would he answer a long-haired, Acid Head, antiwar protestor radical like me?

A few weeks later, not only did he write back but we became summer pen pals.

The first letter I sent Ferlinghetti in 1971. Hand writing Ferlinghetti. - Image Author.

The poem Wilfred Funk by Lawrence Ferlinghetti - copied from the original letter.

12 years later, I mailed a copy of my poetry chapbook "Tomorrow Never Answers." City Lights sold out my first pressing in store.

Review of Tomorrow Never Answers, Twin City Reader, (1983).

45 years later, I sent Ferlinghetti a copy of my memoir "Guitarlo."

Ferlinghetti wrote back again

On Sep 13, 2016

Dear Arlo - Due to my glaucoma, I would not be able to read your book. So please don't send it. - -Lawrence Ferlinghetti

It would also be hard not to know the works of Ferlinghetti's circle. Including, Kenneth Rexroth. Kenneth Patchen, Marie Ponsot, Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Jack Kerouac.

He helped many writers known and unknown

Through his historic book store New City Lights. The Ferlinghetti Poetry Foundation, awards, reviews, writings, fans, the mighty pen lives on.

Thank you Lawrence Ferlinghetti for being a special friend to a lost teen in America.

Away above a Harborful . . .

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Away above a harborful

of caulkless houses

among the charley noble chimneypots

of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines

a woman pastes up sails

upon the wind

hanging out her morning sheets

with wooden pins

O lovely mammal

her nearly naked breasts

throw taut shadows

when she stretches up

to hang at last the last of her

so white washed sins

but it is wetly amorous

and winds itself about her

clinging to her skin

So caught with arms

upraised

she tosses back her head

in voiceless laughter

and in choiceless gesture then

shakes out gold hair

while in the reachless seascape spaces

between the blown white shrouds

stand out the bright steamers

to kingdom come

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Away above a Harborful…" from These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1955 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, www.wwnorton.com/nd/welcome.htm.

Source: These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1993)