EA true poet gives himself his name. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, born in 1919 in New York State as Lawrence Monsanto Ferling, grew up partly in an orphanage, partly in the care of loyal wealth, in the USA and in France with relatives, re-Italianized, reeled the urgency with which the father, an Italian immigrant, had caught up with himself. Funnily enough, his friends called him Ferl. He, the eternal joker, certainly appreciated the irony.
In a way, Ferlinghetti was the Neil Young among the beat poets: undisputedly brilliant, lyrical of fluctuating quality, but whatever, always casual, dazzling, indestructible, and full of projects that went far beyond writing.
“I wish I had Ferlinghetti’s limitless, enjoyable, enthusiastic power,” wrote Jack Kerouac, author of “On the Road” in 1961. Today you have to say that; the epoch of beat literature is becoming more historical every year, all of them have long since disappeared, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Cassady. Only Ferlinghetti was still there, in his publishing bookstore “City Lights Bookstore” in the North Point district of San Francisco or, most recently, in recent decades, painting more and more in the Hunters Point Shipyard on the southeastern tip of the city.
The centenarian who founded a bookstore: Lawrence Ferlinghetti in front of City Lights in San Francisco
Quelle: REUTERS / Clay Mclachlan
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Then he wrote “IRAQ” in large letters across paintings made of black and fire. Subtlety was never his thing. About the light in his eternal home San Francisco, to which he came in 1951 after completing his doctorate in Paris (about the symbol of the city in modern literature), he once said that it doesn’t sparkle like the one on the Seine. In San Francisco there are non-stop shadows as if it were early morning all day. Apparently a climate in which not only contoured attitudes thrive, but in which one is only getting older very slowly.
Who could say of themselves until just now that they would have been arrested for publishing literature? Ferlinghetti could. That happened to him in 1956 with Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”, this poetic cathedral of the nascent hippie era with its proverbial beginning: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix. “Today there would be difficulties again, but for different reasons than then. In any case, after a sensational process for profanity, the publisher Ferlinghetti was acquitted.
Up until the very end he also wrote poetry himself. Neither in life nor in poetry did he ever do Joschka Fischer, go jogging and put on pinstripes. Ferlinghetti retained early convictions that capitalism was a mistake, narrow-mindedness stupid and looseness top. To prove it, he even pulled “Howl” through the cocoa in 1975, a sacred cow for the hippies, as I said. In his “Populist Manifesto” from 1975 it says: “We have seen the best minds of our generation / destroyed by boredom at poetry readings”.
– –From left to right (always to the left): Bob Donlon, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Robert LaVigne and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in front of the City Lights Bookstore in 1956
Quelle: Corbis/ Getty Images
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He did not accept other populists besides himself. When in 2012 the PEN Club wanted to award him a prize that somehow included the Hungarians, he refused; he doesn’t want anything to do with Orbán’s henchmen.
In 2015 the travel journal “Writing Across the Landscape” was published, covering the decades from 1960 to 2010. Only the year before last came the autobiography called “Little Boy”, without dots, a single rousing stream of consciousness in which nifty little neighborhood flies are sometimes totally bored on tables or, in Ron Winkler’s translation, “shine”.
Ferlinghetti even looked after insects when they didn’t like what is commonly considered poetry and fall asleep from the wasteland. It was the same with himself. In order to be printed in the “New Yorker”, he once said, what is needed above all is presumption and incomprehensibility. He didn’t have that on offer. “Is that blunt enough?” He liked to say about his work. In his perhaps most famous poem “I Am Waiting” from the ordering collection “A Coney Island of the Mind” from 1958 it says: “I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed / and I am anxiously waiting / for the secret of eternal life to be discovered / by an obscure general practitioner. “Unfortunately, no common family doctor has discovered the recipe for eternal life, at least not until now. It will one day be too late for Ferlinghetti, because he died on February 22nd at the age of 101 in, where else, San Francisco. But he is probably not too sad because as early as 1958 he continued to write: “And I am waiting / for the storms of life / to be over / and I am waiting / to set sail for happiness.”
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