Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Subversive Art of Poetry: A Summer Reading and Writing Class

Where are Whitman’s wild children,
where the great voices speaking out
with a sense of sweetness and sublimity,
where the great, new vision,
the great world-view,
the high prophetic song
of the immense earth
and all that sings in it

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Populist Manifesto

Glory in the pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will.
Generate collective joy in the face of collective doom.
Liberate have-nots and enrage despots.
Don’t put down the scholastics who say a poem should have wholeness, harmony, radiance, truth, beauty, goodness.
Stash your sell-phone and be here now.
Don’t ever believe poetry is irrelevant in dark times.
Dare to be a non-violent poetic guerrilla, an anti-hero.
Temper your most intemperate voice with compassion.

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, selected lines from Poetry as a Subversive Art

Dear Friends,

This summer I invite you to join me in engaging the work and life of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, author of A Coney Island of the Mind (a million copies sold), publisher of world influential books (Allen Ginsberg’s Howl), owner of the Bay Area countercultural HQ, City Lights Books, a painter since the 1940s, and a translator (his translation of Jacques Prévert’s Paroles is a classic).

Ferlinghetti died earlier this year and I recalled first reading him with appreciation in the 1980s during the the Reagan administration (his selected poems collected in Endless Life). I later learned that he, too, had ventured to Nicaragua, target of Reagan’s terrorist wrath, like I and several friends from Louisville (Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre). I cheerfully purchased his paperbacks over the decades (published principally by New Directions) and always found new poems and perspectives to provoke and inspire me. I lived in Berkeley and Oakland in the 1990s and often visited North Beach to pop in at City Lights. Since 2015 I’ve done classes on poets such as Alice Walker, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, and Anne Waldman, and it’s high time I offer something on Ferlinghetti!

I imagine a group of us meeting weekly for two months, having equal time for reading, writing and sharing. I propose starting Monday 21 June at 7 p.m. Central Time. Each session should go for at least 90 minutes. If the only people interested in the class are from St. Louis, I will attempt to arrange a place for our sessions. If others from elsewhere in the USA and beyond are wanting to be a part of this, I am happy to utilize Zoom. Following is some useful info—

I strongly recommend you purchase LF’s Poetry as a Subversive Art.
During the summer I encourage you to go to City Lights online and order any City Lights Publishers book that looks interesting to you. You could start by browsing the Pocket Poet Series.
I may ask you to watch online (somehow) the 2009 documentary, Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder.
We will do free writing inspired by Ferlinghetti poems during class sessions as well as during the week. So, you’ll need a journal (a Fabriano or an old-fashioned $2 composition notebook) or a device, as you like.
I invite people to zero in on a creative cultural project you’d like to initiate during our class (or work on finishing one you have already started) .
Tuition is $125 and you can mail a check to me (4514 Chouteau Avenue, St. Louis, MO 63110) or use the following email at Paypal.

Let me know if you are interested:

markjchmiel@gmail.com

Feel free to forward this to any of our mutual friends who may be intrigued.

Palms together,

Mark

People

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

In [Marcel Proust’s] work we come across an absolute absence of bias, a willingness to know and to understand as many opposing states of the human soul as possible, a capacity for discovering in the lowest sort of man such nobility as to appear sublime, and in the seemingly purest of beings, the basest instincts. His work acts on us like life, filtered and illuminated by a consciousness whose soundness is infinitely greater than our own.
—Josef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp

Ferlinghetti Florilegium

endless the ever-unwinding
watchspring heart of the world
shimmering in time
shining through space

as if they were watching some odorless TV ad
in which everything is always possible

Where are Whitman’s wild children,
where the great voices speaking out
with a sense of sweetness and sublimity

Let us not sit upon the ground
and tell sad stories
of the death of sanity.

the ones with old pocket watches
the old ones with gnarled hands
and wild eyebrows
the ones with baggy pants
with both belt & suspenders

And every Peace Officer with dogs
trained to track & kill

One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you

The voice knocked me down, so soft, so tin, so frail, so stubborn still.

and was a loud conscientious objector to
the deaths we daily give each other
though we speak much of love

I could not imagine her carrying
a carbine

They lower the body soundlessly
into a huge plane in Dallas
into a huge plane in Los Angeles
marked ‘United States of America’

And let our two selves speak
All night under the cypress tree

and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder

Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool

Yes
but them right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician

—Endless Life: Selected Poems
New Directions, 1981

Wartime during Life/1

Matthew Teo Mathieu, Robert MacArthur, & Sheetal Ray

What Catches Our Attention (And What Doesn’t)

Reshma observed
About a group of doctors she works with

“They talk all about Lady Gaga
But nothing about the wars we’re in”

For Robert

To Whom It May Concern,

I had Mr. Robert MacArthur in my Social Justice course from the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University in the fall semester of 2005. He and I have met a couple of times after that course and we have exchanged occasional correspondence when he no longer lived in St. Louis. Continue reading “Wartime during Life/1” →

Political Holiness

Pedro Casaldáliga & José-Maria Vigil, Political Holiness: A Spirituality of Liberation

Those who struggle for utopia, for radical change, saints marked by the liberating spirit, are all of a piece; they carry faithfulness from the root of their being on to the smallest details that others overlook: attention to the littlest, respect for subordinates, eradication of egoism and pride, care for common property, generous dedication to voluntary work, honesty in dealings with the state, punctuality in correspondence, not being impressed by rank, being impervious to bribes….Detailed everyday faithfulness is the best guarantee of our utopias. The more utopic we are, the more down-to-earth! (p. 58)

March 24, 1995 marks the 15th anniversary of the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. Two weeks before he was murdered while celebrating liturgy, Romero acknowledged the likelihood of a violent death but he was convinced, “I will rise again in the Salvadoran people.” Now widely cherished as a saint by the poor throughout Latin America, Romero indeed proved to be an inspiration to innumerable unknown Christians as well as a few famous ones — such as the Salvadoran Jesuit intellectuals — who suffered the same fate of persecution and martyrdom for their work on behalf of a new society. [1]

Political Holiness is an up-to-date examination of the spirituality that defined Romero and the continental cloud of witnesses that continues to defy institutionalized injustice with Christian hope. [2] The authors are well qualified to share the fruits of their reflections on their experience: Vigil has long labored as a theologian in Nicaragua, while Brazilian Dom Pedro has been one of the most courageous of Latin American bishops and, like Romero, he has been perennially threatened with death because he has championed the rights of the poor over the privileges of rich landowners. This book is a deceptively simple and quite compelling manual and guide to the dominant fundamentals, themes, and issues of the spirituality that has emerged in full force in the last several decades in the southern hemisphere. For specialists and students in spirituality, it is bound to provoke deeper reflection on spirituality, and Christian spirituality. Continue reading “Political Holiness” →

Solidaridad/1

In the mid-1980s while working at St. William Church in Louisville, I was involved with the Sanctuary Movement. The church offered hospitality to a couple from El Salvador, Manuel and Maria Elena. They were the first Salvadorans I’d ever met. Many years later, Steve Kelly, S.J had been working in El Salvador, but he was booted out of the country by the military. Mev Puleo traveled to El Salvador in 1993, working with Crispaz, and interviewing her friend Ann Manganaro.

Beginning in the early 2000s while teaching theology at Saint Louis University, I had students who took a semester abroad in the Casa de la Solidaridad in San Salvador, El Salvador. Years after I left SLU, I’d hear from former students about someone coming back after the semester in Central America. I was happy to visit with these people who often had their worlds turned upside down.

Prudence and Parrhesia

A library I once spent time in
Is named in honor of Pope Pius XII

He was nothing if not prudent
And prudence is a virtue much of the time Continue reading “Solidaridad/1” →

The Way It Looked in 1969

Now the age of 101, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has composed poetical works about most U.S. presidents since the administrations of Eisenhower in the 1950s. I recall with appreciation his poem “Tale Tale of the Tall Cowboy” during the Reagan years (published in Harper’s), as friends and I were working in the Sanctuary Movement (for Salvadoran refugees), on the Pledge of Resistance (to end US support of terrorism against the people of Nicaragua), as well as Witness for Peace delegations in Nicaragua.

I was the age of nine in 1969 when New Directions published his short book, Tyrannus Nix? At that early stage of Nixon’s presidency, the prophetic Ferlinghetti zeroed in on the man who would soon be known for the bombing of Cambodia, the Enemies List, and the Watergate scandal.

Ferlinghetti is seriously playful in this cultural intervention, and I happily share the following themes and excerpts to give you a glimpse of political skewering from more than fifty years ago.

Direct speech—I’ve got to hand it to you old family friend… why don’t you open the Doors of Perception … will you ever invite the Living Theater to your House…and probably all the time longing to be loved by the same people who loved and hated Kennedys…

Political critique—Nixon Nixon I’m singing you this baseball Diamond Sutra from way out there in New Left Filed in the International League… the Vietnam albatross…Are you Machiavelli smiling… DDT is killing the pelicans and their eco-system is our own…War is good business Invest your son … look Fidel Castro in the eye and tell him without the benefit of electronic aides that your government does not believe his truths while a lizard crawled out of your eye Continue reading “The Way It Looked in 1969” →

A Hierarchy of Human Life?

Nawal El Saadawi, The Essential Reader

In his poem “Cosmopolitan Greetings,” Allen Ginsberg urged: Stand up against governments, against God. This expresses the life and work of Nawal El-Saadawi.

I am African from Egypt, not from the Middle East. The Middle East is a term used relative to London so that India becomes the Far East. 331

I am a humanist and socialist and I am against classism, racism, all kinds of discrimination and if God is unjust, I am against him too. I cannot abide injustice. I might have been a minister or a dean of a medical college, if I could accommodate injustice. 331

She is intent in her writing in breaking “the cultural chains that imprison the mind” [48]. One fundamental chain is expressed tersely: “God above, husband below,” which means to women and girls: do as you are told. Continue reading “A Hierarchy of Human Life?” →