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

 

 

 

 

Readerwriters

During this active seedtime, Emerson was also reading in all directions. He read systematically only for a particular project. He read current books and old books…And from almost everything he read he culled phrases, details, facts, metaphors, anecdotes, witticisms, aphorisms, and ideas. He kept this energetic reading and excerpting up for over forty years; the vast system of his personal notebooks and indexes — including indexes to indexes — eventually reached 230 volumes, filling four shelves of a good-sized bookcase. The notebooks were in part his storehouse of original writing and in part a filing system, designed to store and I’ve him access to the accumulating fruits of this reading on every topic that ever interested him throughout his life.
——Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire  

He started with jottings, perceptions, phrases, short bits often written on the backs of envelopes or other scraps of paper, and often while out walking. Later, back in his room, he would expand the jottings in a notebook or, sometimes, a letter. Later still, he would work up a lecture or an essay, or return to a familiar subject, pulling together bits, some of which could be quite a few years old. He kept indexes for his notebooks so he could find things in what became an increasingly multivolume writer’s storehouse of material.
—Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind 

Ginsberg Variations

“Catch yourself thinking.”
—Allen Ginsberg, “Cosmopolitan Greetings”

Catch myself gossiping.
Catch myself kvetching.
Catch myself zoning out.

Catch myself sneering.
Catch myself smirking.
Catch myself looking away.

Catch myself signaling.
Catch myself signing off superciliously.
Catch myself about to tell a quarter-truth.

Share the Wealth with Annie Cosby … When Writing’s The Easy Part: Lessons from Writing, Publishing & Loving Novels

Writing is difficult. Really, really difficult. Growing up, I always thought that would be the hardest part of my dream of becoming an author. Actually finishing a book, a book people would want to read, that’s supposed to be the hardest part … right?

In the six years since I published my debut novel, I’ve learned a lot. A lot about writing, a lot about publishing, and even more about the person I am and the person I want to be — or, let’s be honest, don’t want to be. There’s a lot of heartache in sharing stories from your head with anyone who’d like to read them, but a lot of joy, too. I’d like to share a few of the lessons I’ve learned thus far, like how to tell if your brother actually reads your work, what not to say on a call with a literary agent, and how people really feel about cliffhangers.

Annie Cosby is an author and copy writer from St. Louis. After living in Ireland for a few years, she now resides with her husband and their Rottweiler mix on the street where she grew up. Her first book, the start to the young adult fantasy series Hearts Out of Water, was recommended by USA Today‘s HEA blog.

You can find her writing, reading, and fangirling over books on Instagram and Twitter @AnnieCosby, or at https://www.facebook.com/authorAnnieCosby/ and AnnieCosby.com.

Join us!
Sunday 24 January
7:00 pm Central Time
Via Zoom
Email markjchmiel@gmail.com for URL

 

Mentshes/5

Sign Up
by Lindsey Trout Hughes

Hi, Mark!

I hope this note finds you well. I saw your post last week about the spring writing course. I asked Katie Consamus over coffee if she’d like to take it with me and be my writing partner. Wouldn’t you know, she had already signed up! So here I am, hoping to jump on this train, too.
Let me know what you need from me to proceed. I’m very much looking forward to revisiting you and Mev.

Best from Brooklyn,

Lindsey

Summer 2016
by Lindsey Trout Hughs

I posted something on Facebook today
a gut response to that horror in Florida

and anyway it seems to be helping some hurt people
in a small way

and I wouldn’t have posted it
had I not taken your class

so many thanks to you
and now I’ll go cry some more

before I go write out this rage
like a motherfucker

 

Writing to Wake Up 2020: A Winter Course in Creativity and Community

Writing is essential to my life, like breathing. I can live without a husband but I cannot live without writing. By writing I become one with the world and with myself.
—Nawal El Saadawi

What I discovered that autumn at Stinson Beach was that each morning, after the routines of dressing and feeding the kids, and eating breakfast, I would simply and without forethought find myself at the window looking out at that small garden and writing [my play]. So that it simplemindedly dawned on me over time that maybe that was all there was to it: maybe, just maybe, a writer was nothing more than someone who wrote. Gratuitously, and sometimes aimlessly, sat down and wrote—often without design.
—Diane di Prima

So I try to write during those ‘naked moments’ of epiphany the illumination that comes every day a little bit. Some moment every day, in the bathroom, in bed, in the middle of sex, in the middle of walking down the street, in my head, or not at all. So if it doesn’t come at all, that’s the illumination . . . . So I try to pay attention all the time. The writing itself, the sacred act of writing, when you do anything of this nature, is like prayer. The act of writing being done sacramentally, if pursued over a few minutes, becomes like a meditation experience, which brings on a recall of detailed consciousness that is an approximation of high consciousness. High epiphanous mind.
—Allen Ginsberg

I just want to continue to do what I’ve always done, which is to write, to think about these things. I’m searching for an understanding. Not for my readers, for myself. It’s a process of exploration. It has to further my understanding of the ways things work. So in a way it’s a selfish journey, too. It’s a way of pushing myself further and deeper into looking at the society in which I live.
—Arundhati Roy

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.
— Jack Kerouac

Even with all our sophisticated technologies and modes of communication, who feels as though there is enough time? And yet, especially this year, we need time, as community activist Grace Lee Boggs has said, to “grow our souls”: Time to think, to explore, to share, to listen; time to be, and, as Thich Nhat Hanh would say, to inter-be with ourselves, each other, and the world.

The True Secret of Writing (and Reading and Sharing)

In the Writing Our Own History course, I share some gleanings from my reading. For example, the following passages are from Natalie Goldberg’s book, The True Secret of Writing: Connecting Life with Language. Maybe one of them will ring true to your experience.

 

Our lives are not linear.

Silence can be the door to listening, which is one of the great cornerstones to writing.

My job has been to spread the writing gospel.

Writing comes from your true life, not from being polite, cautious, censored.

Hearing someone else’s tribulations encourages you to read yours, too. A solidarity forms.

Why do people come to writing classes? They want to write, want connections, spiritual longing drives them, urge for meaning. Yearning manifests through writing.

I consider Allen Ginsberg the grandfather of the writing practice lineage.

It’s something you choose to do on a regualr basis with no vision of an outcome; the aim is not improvement, not getting somewhere. You do it because you do it. You show up whether you want to or not.

What is really extreme in our society is talk, nonstop, all the time, to communicate, to cover up, divert, share, hide, lie, fill time, waste time, idly, languidly, incessantly. I do not think silence is holy. It’s another perspective, a way for our chatty society to stretch.

An Alphabetical List

The following is an alphabetical list of topics and/or possible chapter titles for a book I was working on in 2011. At this stage, it was autobiographical. It eventually morphed and became the novel, Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine. Some of what’s below found a home there…

A Little Taste/ [Detention]
A Little Taste
Accompaniment/1
Accompaniment/2
Accompaniment/3
Activist
Administrative Detention
Ahlan wa-sahlan
Aide-Memoire
Aide-Memoire
Al-Hamdulilah
Al-Quds
Al-Quds
Allah
American Activists
Analogies/1
Analogies/2
Analogies/3
Anger/1
Anger/2
Anger (or, Fury)
Anti-Semitism/1
Anti-Semitism/2: Review of Finkelstein
Apartheid
Apartheid
Apathy
Arabic [see Lexicon]
Arabic lessons
Arabic expression for Profession of Faith, What Israel wants, there is no God but Israel
Aspiration/1
Aspiration/2
Asymmetry

Plunging into the Work

Conversations with Christopher Isherwood
Edited by James J. Berg and Chris Freeman
University of Mississippi Press, 2001

One summer a few years ago I went on a binge of some of Christopher Isherwood’s books, particularly the ones dealing with his commitment to Vedanta.  They were informative and inspiring,  from his translation work on the Gita to his recollections of his guru.  I also read with appreciation this book of interviews over the course of his career, even though I have yet to read his fiction, perhaps the most famous of which are his stories from his Berlin years, which later led  to the musical and film, Cabaret.  What follows are some excerpts that may be pertinent to you, given your interests in  “writing your own history.”

More and more, writing is appearing to me as a kind of self-analysis, a finding-out something about myself and about the past, and about what life is like, as far as I’m concerned; who I am; who these people are; what it’s all about. 5 

[T]he chief discipline I have is the plunge into the work. If I get an idea of any kind for my writing, I try to sit down at the typewriter… and just make a stab at it, almost with the freedom of free association on an analyst’s couch, just saying: it doesn’t matter what this is but just pour it out.  28

And I feel a sort of disturbance, a sort of itch, to write about something, and then I ask this other part of myself, “Well, why do you want to write about it? Tell me, tell me what’s so interesting?”  28

You’d find [Aldous Huxley], after seeming so distant and shy, deep in conversation with the most unlikely people about their professions and problems and being very knowledgeable about them and, what is more, really anxious to learn more from these people and really succeeding in learning more and constantly adding to his stock of knowledge.  33

The Writing Life/1

Writing down My Bones, Sao Paulo, Brasil, 1990; photo by Mev

 

 

 

At My Wake, Someone Will Hear Someone Else Say…

“He was always telling me to share my writing…”
“You, too? He said that to me, like… weekly!”

“Weekly? He’d badger me daily for a fortnight until I gave up.”
“He was relentless.”

“Verdad. Yep, he could be a pain, but when I think about it now, he was on to something.”
“How many times did he quote someone the scripture, ‘Don’t put your light under a bushel basket’?”

Seven people within a earshot raise their hands…

 

 

 

One-Liners Randomly Culled from My Marked-up Copy
of Natalie Goldberg’s Writing down the Bones

I have taught over 100 courses since 2001, and I assigned Writing down the Bones in almost all of them. I never tire of hearing the students read aloud her chapters, which contain lines like the following…

We were willing to commit ourselves to a whole day of writing each week because writing, sharing, and friendship are important.

Many of us don’t know, don’t recognize, avoid our deep dreams.

To begin with, write like you talk, nothing fancy.