Victor’s postscript to the Ferlinghetti interview: I have since read A Far Rockaway of the Heart. It’s a damn good book....
To read or hear more of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s work on line:
- The Poetry Foundation page on Ferlinghetti has a number of his poems, including “Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15),” “Sometime During Eternity...,” “The Canticle of Jack Kerouac,” “Underwear” and more.
- “Bird With Two Right Wings” is in Poets On the Line #5.
- “Dog” is at Brian Nation’s “Boppin’ A Riff” site.
- A selection of new poems including “Pity the Nation,” “Are There Not Still Fireflies,” “Totalitarian Democracy,” “White Horse,” “Brainwashed Poet,” “Dragon’s Teeth,” “Speak Out!” and “History of the Airplane,” as well as his inaugural speech as San Francisco Poet Laureate are posted at the City Lights site.
- Google Video has a complete video recording of Ferlinghetti’s 2006 reading in the Lunch Poems series at UC Berkeley.
Books and recordings by Lawrence Ferlinghetti:
- Poetry As Insurgent Art (aphorisms and an essay on the nature of poetry, New Directions, 2007)
- Americus, Book I (miscellany of poems, verse essays, catalogues and collages, New Directions, 2005)
- Pictures of the Gone World (audio CD/DVD, Synergy Entertainment, 2005)
- Life Studies, Life Stories (drawings, City Lights Publishers, 2003)
- San Francisco Poems (poems, City Lights Books, 2002)
- How To Paint Sunlight: Lyric Poems & Others, 1997 - 2000 (poems, New Directions, 2001)
- Love in the Days of Rage (novel, Overlook Press, 2001)
- A Far Rockaway of the Heart (poems, New Directions, 1998)
- These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems, 1955 - 1993 (poems, New Directions, 1993)
- European Poems and Transitions: Over All the Obscene Boundaries (poems, New Directions, 1988)
- Wild Dreams of a New Beginning (poems, New Directions, 1988 — includes two previously published collections: Who are we now?, 1976 and Landscapes of living & dying, 1979)
- The Secret Meaning of Things (poems, New Directions, 1968)
- Starting from San Francisco (poems, New Directions, original publication 1961, reissue 1969)
- Her (novel, New Directions, 1960)
- A Coney Island of the Mind (poems, New Directions Paperback No. 74, original publication 1958, reissue 1974)
- Pictures of the Gone World (poems, City Lights Books Pocket Poets No. 1, original publication 1955, reissue 1995)
About Victor Infante:
Victor Infante was our Orange County Museletter correspondent until 2001, when he moved back to Worcester, Massachusetts and then became our New England correspondent. His collection of poems, Learning To Speak, was released by FarStarFire Press in 1999. His other feature articles for About Poetry are:
- “Raising Their Voices: Poets speak out against the war with Iraq.”
- “Remembering Marta Mitrovich,” memoir of a poet who lit the poetry fires in Orange County, California and died in the spring of 2002.
- “Poetry in Times Like These,” a meditation on poetry’s place and the debt of our art in the post-9.11.01 time of war and crisis.
- “The Center Cannot Hold: Slam, Academia and the Battle for America’s Bourgeoisie,” an essay on the generational cycles of poets and poetic institutions, class & politics in American poetry, slam poetry’s evolution into a new establishment.
- “Stranded: Poet Mark Strand Preaches Political Indifference at UCI,” a response to the effort to divorce poetry from politics.
- “But What If These Are Poetic Times?,” a commentary on the furor following LA Weekly’s fall 1999 review of local poetry.
