The American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died on Feb. 22 at age 101, drew on Jewish culture and history for inspiration in celebratory odes and at times of tragedy.
The Yonkers-born Ferlinghetti, whose mother, Clemence Mendes-Monsanto, was of Sephardic Jewish origin, was an avid painter in addition to his accomplishments as writer and editor.
One Ferlinghetti poem cites the Russian Jewish artist Marc Chagall to express cultural exuberance from disobeying maternal advice. Ferlinghetti’s poem, which takes its title from the first line, begins:
“Don’t let that horse/ eat that violin/ cried Chagall’s mother/ But he/ kept right on
painting/And became famous/ And kept on painting/ The Horse With Violin In Mouth/ And when he finally finished it/ he jumped up upon the horse/and rode away/ waving the violin…”
Jeff Adachi s New Book Uncovers San Francisco s Forgotten Past
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and titan of the Beat era, dies at 101 Elaine Woo © (Stacey Lewis / Stacey Lewis) Lawrence Ferlinghetti outside City Lights Bookstore in 2013. (Stacey Lewis)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was the opposite of the flamboyant literary bad boys drawn to the bohemian haven he nurtured in 1950s San Francisco.
Unlike Beat novelist Jack Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg, he was known for neither public drunkenness nor public nudity. Tall and lean, he swam daily and biked to work at City Lights, the San Francisco bookshop that became a landmark of intellectual freedom not long after he co-founded it seven decades ago.
AMY GOODMAN: Fifty years ago this week, Viking Press published Jack Kerouac’s novel
On the Road. The book was an immediate hit and remains one of the key works of the Beat Generation.
On the Road was a fictionalized account of Kerouac’s travels across the country in the late 1940s. He originally wrote the book over a three-week stretch in the early 1950s. Kerouac typed it on a scroll, single-spaced with no margins or paragraph breaks.
JACK KEROUAC: So Dean and I raced on to the East Coast. At one point we drove a 1947 Cadillac limousine across the state of Nebraska 110 miles an hour, beating hot-shot passenger trains and steel-wheel freights in one nervous, shuddering snap up of the gas. We told stories and zoomed East. There were hobos by the tracks, wino bottles, the moon shining on wood fires. There were white-faced cows out in the plains, dim as nuns. There was dawn, Iowa, Mississippi River at Davenport, Chicago by nightfall. “Ho, man,” said Dean to me as we stood in
Poet, Beat-era titan Ferlinghetti dies at 101
American Beat poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti, left, and Allen Ginsberg at the Albert Memorial in South Kensington, London, on June 11, 1965. (M. Stroud/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images/TNS) M. Stroud
Published: 2/23/2021 3:52:13 PM
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the San Francisco poet, publisher and bookseller who played a leading role in West Coast literary history as a champion of Beat writer Allen Ginsberg and co-founder of the legendary City Lights bookstore, has died at his Bay Area home.
Ferlinghetti died Monday evening, according to Starr Sutherland, a friend who is working on a documentary on the fabled bookstore. The cause was interstitial lung disease, his son Lorenzo told The Washington Post. Ferlinghetti was 101.
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