The Poetry of Ferlinghetti

Let us go then you and I

leaving our neckties behind on lampposts

Take up the full beard

of walking anarchy

looking like Walt Whitman

a homemade bomb in the pocket.

I wish to descend in the social state.

High society is low society.

I am a social climber

climbing downward

And the descent is difficult.

The Upper Middle Class Ideal

is for the birds

but the birds have no use for it

having their own kind of pecking order

based upon birdsong.

Pigeons on the grass alas.

--From “Junkman’s Obbligato” (“A Coney Island of the Mind,” 1958.)

****

I am waiting for my case to come up

and I am waiting

for a rebirth of wonder

And I am waiting for someone

to really discover America

and wail

and I am waiting

for the discovery

of a new symbolic western frontier

And I am waiting

for the American Eagle

to really spread its wings

and straighten up and fly right

and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety

to drop dead

and I am waiting

for the war to be fought

which will make the world safe

for anarchy

and I am waiting

for the final withering away

of all governments

and I am perpetually awaiting

a rebirth of wonder.

--From “I Am Waiting” (“A Coney Island of the Mind,” 1958).

****

I am a hill of poetry.

I am a raid

on the inarticulate.

I have dreamt

that all my teeth fell out

but my tongue lived

to tell the tale.

For I am a still

of poetry.

I am a playerpiano

in an abandoned casino

on a seaside esplanade

in a dense fog

still playing.

I see a similarity

between the Laughing Woman

and myself.

--From “Autobiography” (“A Coney Island of the Mind,” 1958)

****

All you Groucho Marxist poets

and leisure-class Comrades

who lie around all day

and talk about the workingclass proletarist,

All you Catholic anarchists of poetry,

All you Black Mountaineers of poetry,

All you Boston Brahmins and Bolinas bucolics,

All you den mothers of poetry,

All you zen brothers of poetry,

All you suicide lovers of poetry,

All you hairy professors of poesie,

All you poetry reviewers

drinking the blood of the poet,

All you Poetry Police--

Where are Whitman’s wild children,

where the great voices speaking out

with a sense of sweetness and sublimity . . .

Poets, descend

to the street of the world once more.

--From “Populist Manifesto” (“Who Are We Now?” 1976).

****

Oh the world is a beautiful place

to be born into

if you don’t much mind

a few dead minds

in the higher places

or a bomb or two

now and then

in your upturned faces

or such other improprieties

as our Name Brand society

is prey to

with its men of distinction

and its men of extinction

and its priests

and other patrolmen

and its various segregations

and congressional investigations

and other constipations

that our fool flesh

is heir to.

--From “The World Is a Beautiful Place . . . “ (“Pictures of the Gone World,” 1955)