Book Description
Lawrence Ferlinghetti Live at The Poetry Center, recorded October 17, 2002 at The Poetry Center, Ballroom of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ferlinghetti narrates to following poems: Blind Poet, Baseball Canto, Driving a Cardboard Automobile Without A License, #12, #25, #28, The Art World, Oh You Gatherer, How to Paint Sunlight, Yachts in Sun, from Big Sur Light, Dictionaries of Light, Library Scene Manhattan, Dirty Tongue, Blood of the Bag Lady, The Freights, Over the High Sierras, Into the Interior, Allen Ginsberg Dying, Oracle at Delphi, History of the Airplane, Are There Not Still Fireflies ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

An Interview with 6 Previously Unpublished Poems
This book of interview contains the most political interview of Ferlinghetti to date. San Francisco poet and artist, Soheyl Dahi digs in deep into the political genesis of Ferlinghetti from the time of his visit to Nagasaki two weeks after the bomb was dropped; his stuggle against censorship and to the current state of affairs. The book contains 6 previously unpublished poems by Ferlinghetti and all of them have a political bent. A highly readable and relevant book for our turbulant times. ... Read more

Book Description
Word count: 5228. ... Read more

Book Description
Lawrence Ferlinghetti Live at The Poetry Center, recorded October 17, 2002 at The Poetry Center, Ballroom of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ferlinghetti narrates to following poems: Blind Poet, Baseball Canto, Driving a Cardboard Automobile Without A License, #12, #25, #28, The Art World, Oh You Gatherer, How to Paint Sunlight, Yachts in Sun, from Big Sur Light, Dictionaries of Light, Library Scene Manhattan, Dirty Tongue, Blood of the Bag Lady, The Freights, Over the High Sierras, Into the Interior, Allen Ginsberg Dying, Oracle at Delphi, History of the Airplane, Are There Not Still Fireflies ... Read more

Book Description
"The more I make love, the more I want revolution; the more I make revolution, the more I want to make love."In Paris, in May of 1968, revolution, and love are very much in the air. The barricades are going up, the students of the Sorbonne are taking to streets alive with the graffiti of revolt, and the Odeon is ablaze with speechmaking.

For Annie, a young American painter, and Julian, her Portuguese lover, a banker and anarchist, the events of that Paris spring form the backdrop against which their love affair is played. Annie sees the world through an artist's eyes; she is reckless in her passions, wanting and needing love with other people. There is none of this fanciful nonsense for Julian, an anarchist disdainful of the entire human race, who thinks even the enragé students storming the streets of Paris with there posters proclaiming "open the windows of your heart" and "revolution is the ectsasy of history" to be hopelessly naïve and sheeplike. Ferlinghetti charts the progress of love unfolding against those heady and momentous days when the pampered children of the bourgeoisie tried to find common cause with workers who despised them, "when Julian and Annie were in the heat of their love and reason."

Love in the Days of Rage is a work of lyricism and commitment, painting and politics, passion and intellect-a work to set beside the great expatriate novels of earlier generations. ... Read more

Book Description

Published to celebrate forty years of City Lights publishing, which began with the letterpress printing of this book in 1955.

It was Lawrence Ferlinghetti's first book, and it has been reprinted twenty-one times, having never been out of print. The original edition contained the first twenty-seven poems to which the author has now added eighteen new verses.

Customer Reviews (3)

New Pictures
"Pictures of the Gone World" had not been so fully praised as Ferlinghetti's next book of poems, "A Coney Island of the Mind". The only reason I can come up with is the extensive use of surrealist imagery and references to other poets, painters, sculptors etc., that the poems are full with. But in "Coney Island" there is a similar creative procedure--even the line order is "floating", as in "Pictures", so why is this book less known than "Coney Island"? It is probably not a matter of quality; probably more people feel attracted to read a book about Coney Island than one with a title which at first sight doesn't seem to say too much about its content.
The poems incuded in "Pictures" are nevertheless great. This collection of verse is probably one of the most representative works during the Beat generation, along with Ginsberg's "Howl and other poems" (also published in City Lights Books) and Kerouac's "On the Road". Ferlinghetti succesfully intertwines surrealistic and dadaistic tendencies with oral speech, complex verbalization processes such as ekphrasis, which show the poet's skills at his best.
This second edition brings us 18 new poems, which every Beat fan must get. Some of these new poems are quite remarkable, such as "Surfers are poets too", and there are some "addenda" to the previous ones. For example, no. 6 includes a whole new stanza, and words in no. 1 have been changed. This 1995 edition is also a collector's item, for it was published to celebrate 40 years of City Lights publishing.

Word snap-shots of life
I am embarassed to say that I picked this book up on my last visit to City Lights (several years ago) but I never actually read it. Other than for a piece or two in an anthology, I had never read Ferlinghetti, period. Having enjoyed the hospitality of the upstairs poetry room, that seemed somehow ill-mannered of me.

Simply put, I liked this collection. The images and meanings are more subtle than a lot of poets with Beat roots. He can really paint a word picture to put you in the scene. You instantly soak up the nuances of the whole. Then maybe he'll nudge you, ever so slightly, into seeing the absurdity in it. Or perhaps he'll interject a reminder of your own mortality in a simular subtle way. It is appropriate that one of the poems deals with Edward Hopper. I get that Hopperesque quality of an observer in an existential urban landscape with much of the collection.

About the only difference that I detected from the first 27 poems (written by 1955) and the 18 new ones (new in 1995) is a difference in rhythm. The older poems have much more of that classic coffee house beat- at least in my head. Of yes, he also uses the term "cyberpunk" in one of them.... But the word painting, and sense of subtle absurdity, is still right on the money.

refreshingly fresh and innocent and playful and insightful
This has to be my favorite volume of poetry to date (yet I am still young and have much to read).I found it "refreshing" and "light" if you will, yet at the same time taking on some real insight.My favorite poems in the volume include "Heaven"; which I take as almost a poetic criticism OF poetry, and "London"; which takes on issues of physical beauty.All the poems in here I enjoy immensely.Well worth your small investment. (Plus it has historic value being the first in the legendary Pocket Poets Series. ... Read more