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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.” ....

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