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.

Dining on Irreverence in Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems

This post is maybe PG-13 or so. Not too bad. Some language and irreverence. It may bother some religious brothers, so stop now or read to the end.

John Ashbery calls what Frank O'Hara does as "free-associating.... speculative rumination." As one example, Ashbery points out "in 'Mary Desti's Ass,' a title whose meaning, I discovered accidentally in a bookstore, namely a book called Isadora Duncan's End by Mary Desti." But Ashbery doesn't see that as necessary to appreciating the poem, just demonstrating O'Hara's process.

O'Hara's irreverence knows [almost] no bounds. Reality, meaning, punctuation (and sentence structure), and God--even what he's doing (poetry) gets little reverence in terms of structure or titles. He could have left many without titles, but instead he titles several simply "Poem"--taking out the solemnity of the practice of poetry: homogenizing and abstracting.

From "On Rachmaninoffs Birthday": "Quick! a last poem before I go / off my rocker." With a heavy dose of humor, he makes the poems sound dashed off and even insults what he is doing as a measure of insanity (or maybe just himself).

Here's a typical attack on logic:

the final fatal hour of turpitude and logic demise
is when you miss getting rid of something delouse
is when you don't louse something up

and on morality (strangely, more stringent now than then):

oh shit on the beaches so
what if I did look up your trunks and see it

--the last two from "For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson."

He does love his pop culture references although he is merciless to it, too: "never argue with the movies" ("Fantasy"), "Lana Turner has collapsed!" ("Poem"),

About the only thing he takes seriously is art, honoring it in his own peculiar fashion. From "The Day Lady Died": "she whispered a song along the keyboard / to Mal Waldreon and everyone and I stopped breathing" and from "A Step away from Them": "My heart is in my / pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy."

The poem I'd like to dissect is one of the shortest: one of the dozen or so "Poem" poems. It begins, "Wouldn't it be funny" which many of his poems implicitly begin this way. It continues, "if The Finger had designed us" which calls up God with its capitalization and "finger" (a thing representing the whole) does appear in Exodus with Pharoah and the writing of the ten commandments as well as numerous uses regarding the manner one conducts sacrifices to God. A finger directs, points, and accuses. But there's another use of the finger that will be medically useful for people with the problem I'll describe below.

What if people, O'Hara speculates, don't poop for a week? (Now you may surmise what the finger is for.) People get fatter until Sunday morning and "ploop!" Of course, churches would be larger, noiser and smellier facilities although many would no doubt put the incense to good use.

You could stop there, but it has broader significance. That is what some do, is it not? We go to be cleansed once a week, thinking that's good enough for the rest of the week.

If you read the letters between Frank O'Hara and his publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, you'll note that O'Hara had little to do with the selection and ordering of the poems in his book although he gently insisted (without "insisting") on "Personal Poem" and "For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson." He wasn't even sure about the book title, which Ferlinghetti went with. So the book runs a temporary, working title that had more to do with their construction than any unifying theme. And maybe processs is what should be highlighted in O'Hara's work.

I'll conclude with passages from various poems about life and death. One critic opined that O'Hara's death was no accident. Here are some passages that suggest that may have been a possibility. Remember, though, that these are extracts that happen to form a pattern--not intentionally, but "all jumbled / together like life is a Jumble Shop" ("A Little Travel Diary"):

I only need one bullet preferably silver
if you can't be interesting at least you can be a legend

--Yesterday down at the Canal

willow trees they remind me of Desdemona
I'm so damned literary
and at the same time the waters rushing past remind me of nothing 

I'm so damned empty
what is all this vessel shit anyway
we are all rushing down the River Happy Times...
and we arrive at the beach
the chaff is sand
alone as a tree bumping another tree in a storm
that's not really being alone, is it, signed The Saw

--Poem en Forme de Saw

I just want to go on being subtle and dead like life

--"For the Chinese New Year & for Bill Berkson."

I can't even find a pond small enough
to drown in without being ostentatious

--"Memoir of Sergei O..."

"this various dream of living"
I am alive with you

--"St. Paul and All That"

oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

--"Steps"

I've never felt so wide awake

--"At Kamin's Dance Bookshop"

we are all happy and young and toothless
it is the same as old age
the thing to do is simply continue
is that simple
yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do
can you do it
yes, you can because it is the only thing to do....
we shall be happy
but shall continue to be ourselves everything continues to be possible
Rene Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible isn't it
I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don't believe it.

--"Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul"

I was initially dubious of the claim (whose, I cannot find now) since O'Hara was struck by Jeep on a beach (and O'Hara wrote of dying on the beach), but who knows. Interesting though. I have another essay somewhere on his more famous poems (different computer).

Banned Books: Black Spring by Henry Miller

I wanted a comparison of Tropic of Cancer (previous commentary) to Black Spring. Is one better than the other? They're both written by the same guy with a similar stylistic verve, yet one can see why one book might be preferred. Tropic of Cancer has a more personal feel, but it is also grimier. Black Spring has subject headings. I read someone call them stories, but I'm not sure they're that. If you take “The dreamers dream" quote below, it is a complete paragraph. It could stand alone, or be lumped with another "story" entirely. I suspect that one inspired another, yet I also suspect a completely new book could have been achieved by reshuffling. Perhaps Tropic of Cancer could have used an organizing principle, even if the organization were arbitrary. I'm sure academics have staked their careers on the organization.

It seems to me my initial impression was correct, in terms of savoring a passage and setting the book down. A movie will never be made out of his books*--or  at least not a faithful one based on the events since what are the events? Moreover, this book quotes and structurally a kind of Lewis Carroll's Alice-in-Wonderland surrealist logic. There is a dialogue but it doesn't feel like a real one (see the last quote). No, Miller may best read as a prose poet, as a writer of passages, as etcher of lyric essays. The books may cohere as a poet's as well. Note that Lawrence Ferlinghetti quotes Miller for the famed title of his collection, A Coney Island of the Mind.

Opening a Miller book is like opening a box packed with poets' toys. Karl Shapiro called Miller's work wisdom literature, and in some cases as in some of the quotes below, I believe he's correct.

Cool Quotes:

"I do not have to look in my vest pocket for my soul; it is there all the time bumping against my ribs, swelling, inflated with song."

“The dreamers dream from the neck up, their bodies securely strapped to the electric chair. To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance, each step, each gesture killing and recreating, death always a step in advance. To spit on the past is not enough. To proclaim the future is not enough. One must act as if the past were dead and the future unrealizable. One must act as if the next step were the last, which it is. Each step forward is the last, and with it a world dies, one’s self included. We are here of the earth never to end, the past never ceasing, the future never beginning, the present never ending. The never-never world which we hold in our hands and see and yet is not ourselves. We are that which is never concluded, never shaped to be recognized, all there is and yet not the whole, the parts so much greater than the whole that only God the mathematician can figure it out.”

"She's got millions of them inside her and they're all whirring around in there dying to get out. Whirrrr ... whirrrr. And if you'd just put a needle inside and puncture the bag they'd all come whirring out... imagine it... a great cloud of soul-worms... millions of them... and so thick the swarm we wouldn't be able to see each other.... A fact! No need to write about China. Write about that! About what's inside you..."

* Bold proclamation that has already turned out to be untrue after a few minutes. He's had four or five, but none of them are especially well received. This one for Tropic of Cancer got a 71 tomatoes from critics, 25 from the lay audience, and a 5.7 from IMDb, which rounds out to a so-so movie. The others, linked to here when the post is finished, fared slightly worse, but still within the so-so range. I do think Black Spring would be particularly difficult to film, so I won't edit out the statement. I don't see how a movie can capture Miller's strengths as a writer.

I discuss two other Henry Miller novels:

1. Tropic of Cancer and
2. Quiet Days in Clichy (his most filmed).