RIP Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Lance minimum goad Newberry
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I'm thinking about Roarshock on this one.
I've never been much (at all) into poetry, but Ferlinghetti was such a San Francisco institution that I've always been aware of him. He did some cool and "important" things, he influenced a lot of people and he lived a good long life.
A person could do a whole lot worse.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/lawrence-ferlinghetti-de...
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Ferlinghetti was a larger
Ferlinghetti was a larger-than-life character whose accomplishments include founding founded City LIghts Bookstore in North Beach, getting arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl", and reading one of his own poems at The Last Waltz.
The Lord’s Last Prayer
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Our father whose art’s in heaven
Hollow be thy name
Unless things change
Thy kingdom come and gone
Thy will will be undone
On earth as it isn’t heaven
Give us this day our daily bread
At least three times a day
And lead us not into temptation
Too often on weekdays
But deliver us from evil
Whose presence remains unexplained
In thy kingdom of power and glory
Oh Man!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dmIt81JkAg
Top of Page Bottom of Page PermalinkFull Name: .44 Smokeless
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Baseball Canto"
Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn,
reading Ezra Pound,
and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the
Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto
and demolish the barbarian invaders.
When the San Francisco Giants take the field
and everybody stands up for the National Anthem,
with some Irish tenor's voice piped over the loudspeakers,
with all the players struck dead in their places
and the white umpires like Irish cops in their black suits and little
black caps pressed over their hearts,
Standing straight and still like at some funeral of a blarney bartender,
and all facing east,
as if expecting some Great White Hope or the Founding Fathers to
appear on the horizon like 1066 or 1776.
But Willie Mays appears instead,
in the bottom of the first,
and a roar goes up as he clouts the first one into the sun and takes
off, like a footrunner from Thebes.
The ball is lost in the sun and maidens wail after him
as he keeps running through the Anglo-Saxon epic.
And Tito Fuentes comes up looking like a bullfighter
in his tight pants and small pointy shoes.
And the right field bleechers go mad with Chicanos and blacks
and Brooklyn beer-drinkers,
"Tito! Sock it to him, sweet Tito!"
And sweet Tito puts his foot in the bucket
and smacks one that don't come back at all,
and flees around the bases
like he's escaping from the United Fruit Company.
As the gringo dollar beats out the pound.
And sweet Tito beats it out like he's beating out usury,
not to mention fascism and anti-semitism.
And Juan Marichal comes up,
and the Chicano bleechers go loco again,
as Juan belts the first ball out of sight,
and rounds first and keeps going
and rounds second and rounds third,
and keeps going and hits paydirt
to the roars of the grungy populace.
As some nut presses the backstage panic button
for the tape-recorded National Anthem again,
to save the situation.
But it don't stop nobody this time,
in their revolution round the loaded white bases,
in this last of the great Anglo-Saxon epics,
in the territorio libre of Baseball.
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^That one seems tailor-made
^That one seems tailor-made for Lance.
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I like the names, hell I
I'd never seen that.
I like the names, hell I might have been at that game as a kid, but as usual the poetry eludes me.
Is he talking about how the classic white All-American game is being played by latins & blacks?
Or is he just enjoying a Giants game and waxing poetic?
Either way, it's always nice to see a Tito Fuentes reference.
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> the classic white All
> the classic white All-American game is being played by latins & blacks
Sounds like you nailed it to me, Lance. Our national pastime as liberator: the territorio libre of Baseball.
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RIP Lawrence -- 101 years
RIP Lawrence -- 101 years strong!
Always enjoyed visits to City Lights over the years.
Here's the NYT obit: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/obituaries/lawrence-ferlinghetti-dead...
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Roarshock Reads Ferlinghetti
Roarshock Reads Ferlinghetti on February 23, 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjTfPz6IoiI
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Sweet reading, Roarshock.
Sweet reading, Roarshock.
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Nice hat David.
Nice hat David.
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Sweet reading, indeed.
Sweet reading, indeed.
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RIP
RIP
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(No subject)
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^ Michael McClure, Bob Dylan,
^ Michael McClure, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Julius Orlovsky, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Thanks you all. The reading I
Thanks you all. The reading I am looking forward to is from the stage at the next Zoner Jam.
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Since Ezra was mentioned,
Since Ezra was mentioned, here he is reading Canto 1, I always found this pretty spooky
https://youtu.be/2fUEYs3TsFA
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Jorma Kaukonen's Thoughts on
Jorma Kaukonen's Thoughts on Lawrence Ferlinghetti...
When I moved to the Bay Area in Northern California in 1962, I settled in Santa Clara where I was to go to school. San Francisco was a Mecca to me back then. The whole Beat headspace had been calling my name for years. Santa Clara was a backwater, but San Francisco was less than fifty miles away. As soon as I was able to find a like-minded spirit with a car, we saddled up and headed north up the 101.
North Beach had been calling my name for a long time. Coming back from the Philippines some months before, a stop at an English-speaking bookstore in Tokyo had outfitted me with some Henry Miller books… hard if not impossible to find in the States back then. At City Lights Bookstore there on Columbus Avenue in North Beach, all things were possible from The Rosy Crucifixion to Black Spring. That was 59 years ago, and at that callow age all things were still possible.
A couple or so years later in 1966, Jefferson Airplane would play a show at the Fillmore Auditorium. That in itself would not be that interesting. In some respects, the Airplane was almost like a band in residence. I lived up the street from the Fillmore in the Western Addition and the other band members did not live far away.
Anyway, the ‘opening’ act that night was Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the young Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky. Lawrence read, then Andrei read… then Lawrence read the English translations of the work that Andrei had just manifested. Hard to imagine an unformatted ‘rock’ show like that today. Bill Graham wasn’t into cookie cutter shows, that’s for sure! Bill would die in 1991, Andrei in 2010 and Lawrence in 2021.
As Lawrence said, ‘The greatest poem is lyric life itself.
Fair winds and following seas brother! – Jorma Kaukonen, Feb. 23, 2021
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Gary Snyder remembering
Gary Snyder remembering Lawrence Ferlinghetti
https://www.kerouac.com/gary-snyder-warmly-remembering-lawrence-ferlingh...
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti reciting the poem 'Loud Prayer' at 'The Last Waltz'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE_8WK3tBuE