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 more of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s work on the Net:

• “Constantly Risking Absurdity,” “Wild Dreams of a New Beginning,” “Seascape with Sun and Eagle” & “A Vast Confusion” are all posted on The Beat Page on Ferlinghetti.
• “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 “Totalitarian Democracy,” “White Horse,” “Brainwashed Poet,” “Dragon’s Teeth,” “Speak Out!” & “History of the Airplane,” as well as all of his Poetry As News columns and his inaugural speech as San Francisco Poet Laureate are posted at the City Lights site.

Books & recordings by Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

• Americus, Book I (miscellany of poems, verse essays, catalogues & collages, New Directions, 2005)
  ]
  
  
• Pictures of the Gone World (audio CD/DVD, Synergy Entertainment, 2005)
  
  
  
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti Live at the Poetry Center (audio CD, The Poetry Center, 2003)
  
  
  
• 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)
  
  
  
• What Is Poetry? (work-in-progress notes on the art of poetry, Creative Arts Book Company, 2000)
  
  
  
• 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 & 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 & the Battle for America’s Bourgeoisie,” an essay on the generational cycles of poets & 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.

• 1
• 2