Lawrence Ferlinghetti: An American Poet

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet best known as a leader of the beat movement of the 1950's. The beats were writers who condemned commercialism and middle-class American values. Ferlinghetti writes in colloquial free verse. His poetry describes the need to release literature and life from conformity and timidity. He believes drugs, Zen Buddhism, and emotional and physical love can open the soul to truth and beauty.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919. After spending his early childhood in France, he received his B.A. from the University of North Carolina, an M.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne. During World War II he served in the US Naval Reserve and was sent to Nagasaki shortly after it was bombed. He married in 1951 and has one daughter and one son. In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin began to publish City Lights magazine. They also opened the City Lights Books Shop in San Francisco to help support the magazine. In 1955, they launched City Light Publishing, a book-publishing venture. City Lights became known as the heart of the "Beat" movement, which included writers such as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Ferlinghetti is the author of more than thirty books of poetry. He has translated the work of a number of poets including Nicanor Parra, Jacques Prevert, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Ferlinghetti is also the author of two novels and of more than eight plays. In 1994, San Francisco renamed a street in his honor. He was also named the first Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 1998. In 2000, he received the lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle. Currently, Ferlinghetti writes a weekly column for the San Francisco Chronicle. He also continues to operate the City Lights bookstore, and he travels frequently to participate in literary conferences and poetry readings.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti writes in free verse, a style of poetry that does not follow traditional rules of poetry composition. In writing free verse, poets avoid such usual elements as regular meter or rhyme. Instead, they vary the lengths of lines, use irregular numbers of syllables in lines, and employ odd breaks at the end of each line. They also use irregular accents and rhythms and uneven rhyme schemes. But free verse is not free from all form. It does use such basic poetic techniques as alliteration and repetition. Free verse first flourished during the 1800's when the romantic poets adopted the style. Using the style effectively, the American poet Walt Whitman is often considered the father of free verse. In the early 1900's, a movement in poetry called imagism began using free verse. By the mid-1900's, free verse had become the standard verse form in poetry, especially in the works of such American poets as Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and William Carlos Williams.

At face value, Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Constantly Risking Absurdity" is an elaborate simile comparing being a poet to being an acrobat on a tightrope. It could be that a poet bases his musings on his own perception of reality, or truth. So, he "must perforce perceive taut truth," or, he has to have an accurate perception of reality on which to base his poetry--a common alphabet with which to write and be understood. A false perception of truth would provide an unstable pad from which to launch his ideas, therefore his poetry would not make sense to anyone but himself. It would seem absurd to anyone outside his head, like someone speaking a different language. Poetry, like art, or music, or language, or any fine art, is most importantly about communication. You cannot communicate if nobody knows what you are talking about. That word "taut" refers to "correct" truth, or a correct perception of reality, and is in keeping with the simile of the acrobat. The acrobat must correctly place his foot on the "taut"