Haunted and inspired by dreams of Ferlinghetti
Joan Gelfand
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1970Sam Falk / New York Times 1970
At 11:30 on Tuesday morning, my cell phone began crazily ringing with text notifications. I was in Golden Gate Park enjoying the midwinter break a sunny, 70-degree day in San Francisco.
“Larry!” one said. “Holy Ferlinghetti,” said another. “Sad about Larry” was a third. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the giant among poets worldwide, had passed at 101.
Ferlinghetti first came into my life when I was a freshman in high school. My father had just passed, and books and reading were my love and my escape. “The Coney Island of the Mind” was the first book of poetry that gave me an inkling that I, too, could commit words to paper. Free verse poems were taking their place in the literary canon. Ferlinghetti’s poems “broke open letters.”
Poetry Daily,
and elsewhere. Matty is a Vice Presidential Fellow at the University of Utah where he is pursuing a PhD in English. He currently serves as the Managing Editor of
Quarterly West and the Wasatch Writers in the Schools Coordinator.
INTRODUCTION
Write patiently and read generously. The sustainable poet quickly learns patience, whether that be in the writing process and the arc of an individual poem or the hellscape that is the submissions process. As a young writer, I allowed my desire for affirmation or belonging to lead me to submit work that I now (and perhaps then) understand was not ready. Most of that work was mercifully rejected, but some of those poems found homes, and now I have some not-entirely-horrific-but-fairly-sloppy ditties living out there in the dark expanse of the digital ether. Perhaps that’s one of the many reasons I’ve embraced a practice of reading generously. To read generously is not to automatically support a writer or their work or to