August 13, 2010

Lawrence Ferlinghetti - A Coney Island of the Mind

Ferlinghetti was recommended to me by a friend and after reading a few of his poems, I wonder how I've never heard of him. Coney Island has been translated into several languages and sold over a million copies, which is unheard of for poets. Granted, it took 50 something years to pull it off, but it's still an accomplishment.

The book is split up into 3 sections, each quite different:

1. A Coney Island of the Mind. This is the one I'll talk about the most
2. Oral Messages. These are meant to spoken out loud and accompanied by jazz.
3. Poems from Pictures of the Gone World

In Coney Island, Ferlinghetti is at his best. It brims with a sexuality almost adolescent, undiscovered. His characters, never named, and barely described, are drawn to this vision of sex that is juvenile and full of wonder, but contained within: broken promises and unrelenting disappointment.

All of his poems have numbers, no titles, and 2 is significant for its description of Ferlinghetti's dystopic sexuality.

The poem takes place at the sea, with sailors bound for American shores in an ancient Athenian ship. They sail with purpose of destination, making for the promise of "demi-democracy," a play on words (frequent in this poem), probably referring to demi-god. They are beset with temptations and obstacles, as if they plow through a sea meant to obstruct their journey. Most tellingly, they pass near "patriotic maidens" who "ran along the shores/wailing after us/and while we lashed ourselves to masts/and stopt our ears with chewing gum."

If you ever read the Odyssey, you'll remember that Odysseus passes within sight of the island of the Sirens and commands his men to lash him to the mast while they stop up their ears and ignore his cries for release. If heard, the Siren song is irresistible and it lures men to seek them, driving their ships on the rocks and drowning. Odysseus, while lashed to his mast, cries desperately to be released so he may go to them, but his sailors don't hear him or the Siren's song and sail on, avoiding destruction.

What you see in this poem is the clash of the ancient and modern world, the old and the young. There is chaos to it. Cows are flying through the air "chanting Athenian anthems," discus throwers are reading Walden and "heliocopters from Helios" are "dropping free railway tickets." Random stuff. But sailing through it all, this ship bears on, reaching American shores where they "looked at each other/with a mild surprise/silent upon a peak/in Darien." Darien, I believe, refers to an affluent town in Connecticut, close to New York. Otherwise, I don't know the significance of it.

The end of the poem is quite anti climatic. "Mild surprise" and silence are hardly the reactions you would expect from sailors who have labored to reach these shores. The poem builds in intensity, rising in pitch but it drops suddenly, chopping the emotion away like suddenly waking from a dream. What is even more curious is Darien has no mountains. The elevation is nearly sea level. Ferlinghetti, intentionally or not, has drawn a perfect picture of the sexuality he describes, even, laments.

In many of the poems in Coney Island, sexuality is coupled with loss, sadness and even devastation. The end of 24 says, "still we laugh/and still we run/and still we throw ourselves/upon love's boats/but it is deeper/and much later/than we think/and all goes down/and our lovebuoys fail us/And we drink and drown." For Ferlinghetti, sex leaves us only with a broken promise. What it promises, is hard to describe, yet we all know. Transcendence. Happiness. Love. If you remember your youth, you remember the wonder of the opposite sex, of their bodies, of the pleasure you could feel. In Coney Island, wonder is what draws us to sex, the rocks we dash our lives upon, our broken-hearted despair, the sea we drown in.

With these broken promises is a lost innocence. In 26, he describes a "sensual phosphorescence/my youth delighted in" but which is "like a land of dreams...thru which desire/looks and cries." Ferlinghetti longs for a return to the sexual wonder of his youth, yet describes sex as an ultimately depressing pursuit. But still, against all reason, he longs and returns to the rocks.

After reading Coney Island I felt both a sadness and a certainty that Ferlinghetti speaks the truth. We have lost more than our innocence, but also our hope. We never long for sex alone. It represents more than the longing of our bodies but the longing of our souls to connect and love and hold. Sex fails us as certainly as we seek to have it.

What makes Ferlinghetti's poetry so beautiful is his honesty. In the Odyssey, the Siren's appealed not to Odysseus' physical longing, but his longing for truth. They sing to him,

"Come hither, as thou farest, renowned Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans; stay thy ship that thou mayest listen to the voice of us two. For never yet has any man rowed past this isle in his black ship until he has heard the sweet voice from our lips. Nay, he has joy of it, and goes his way a wiser man."

Ferlinghetti's poetry becomes its own island of the Sirens, the Coney Island of the Mind, calling us to the rocks, where we wreck our ship upon the rocks, "drink and drown."