A Wake with Lawrence Ferlinghetti on Green Street

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti passed away this year on February 22, 2021, one month shy of reaching 102. He seems to have been producing new material for quite a while. He published a novel in 2019. While it could have been a trunk novel, it's still interesting that a man was capable of producing work that people would publish over a century of living. Apparently, not so much today, but that's another story.

The poem in question (posted online here) is untitled although this website calls it "Green Street"; however, note the formatting does not match the one I read.

My interest in it is how parallels other genres like science fiction. Also, my interest in it was how difficult it was to read it. I had a book of poems to read in spare moments, and for some reason my mind kept slipping off the poem. Probably I was distracted, not ready to focus. I don't blame the writer until I hunker down and focus.

This happens in most genres. There are moments in narrative when your concentration has to be 100% there. In science fiction, usually that's weighted at the front, the steep learning curve for learning how the world works. In mysteries, it's at the end when shifts and surprises can come fast. In poetry, it can be the whole poem. In literary fiction, it's similar, but it's often more nuanced although some experimental stuff may require most of your attention.

Here's the opening line:

The Green Street Mortuary Marching Band

What's tricky here is this pile up of nouns and adjectives, and what modifies what. "Green" is, in some senses, the most ordinary of these words. It most likely modifies "Street", but that doesn't help much because it could have been named because all the houses were green, or maybe it was covered vegetation, or maybe it was named after someone named Green, and have nothing to do with the color at all. It could also refer to being young, inexperienced, naive or unripe. It's also possible that Green could modify "Mortuary" or "Marching Band" or the whole. Alternately, or in addition, Wallace Stevens added on (at least within the field of poetry) a sense of spice, of creativity, and of color in "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" (excerpted here, see link for full poem):

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,

"Street" could mean just a paved avenue, or someone or something raised on or near the street as in "street kids" or "street dogs"--a sense of looking down one's nose can be heard in that. It could also refer to homelessness.

"Mortuary" adds the actual place but also the sense of death and passing on. "Marching" is interesting in that it could serve as part of a verb team (was marching) or a verbal clause (marching in place), but here it's an adjective like "Green," sort of.

"Band" unites the whole--in both definition and action.

Now that's a lot of information to process in one line. You might come up with more. It could be that mortuary marching bands have a place in our society. Maybe this famous one comes to mind:

But for most of us it lies outside our experience. And that jarring sensation between mourning (often the passing of elderly) in a mortuary and celebrating in a marching band (often composed of youth) creates the energy in this poem and in the above movie clip.

It's this energy that drives SF, too. When Elizabeth Bishop misread "mammoth" as "man moth," she wrote a poem. Jack Vance took that strange combination of words and tried to create a different reality.

I recommend reading the whole poem at the link.