Ferlinghetti’s “San Francisco Poems”, incorporates poetry from 1955 to 2001. He focuses much of his energy on the mood and tone by setting up descriptive scenes with very powerful language. He uses fog, the park, and city lights throughout the collection to instill dramatic images into the readers mind and in a way romanticize about the city, all of its wonder and mystery: “And then the veil of light of early evening/And then another scrim/when the new night fog floats in/And in that vale of light/the city drifts anchorless upon the ocean”. In his earliest poem, “A North Beach Scene”, Ferlinghetti paints a beautiful picture of the city from the harbor. He tropes San Francisco as an island, an urban Eden approaching “kingdom come”. This divine or poetic- sense of the city seems to permeate throughout his works, as he constantly describes the city with such vivid detail that the scenes come alive for the reader. Ferlinghetti embraces the idea of San Francisco as a ‘contado’, even in his older years his feeling regarding the city and what it stands for don’t seem to change. He saw San Francisco as the cutting edge of social innovation and was able to capture these ideals within his poetry.
Ferlinghetti’s ability to write such accessible poetry made the themes he deals with more tangible to the reader. I believe that it is this accessibility that really make his words come alive. In “Two Scavengers in a Truck, Two Beautiful People in a Mercedes”, Ferlinghetti uses a pretty common scenario (two cars stopped at a light) to illustrate a much more powerful point. He encapsulates the beauty of a moment, “And the very red light for an instant/ holding all four close together as if anything at all were possible”. Here he seems to allude to the idea of the stop light as an equalizer, holding both vehicles (the garbage truck and the Mercedes) savoring this instant, this promise.
2 comments:
Cat, good observations to start... LF's San Francisco is a beautiful and mighty place, with an sense of "island"ness, divinity, as you say, or specialness. Your reading of the "Scavengers" makes me wonder what other tensions LF writes about, in addition to the wondrous things. What sorts of conflicts or contradictions does one have to understand or confront in order to get a sense of romantic San Francisco? What marginalized or minority groups (contados) do we have to think about?
Expanding on the first comment, some of the tensions I see in Ferlinghetti's works appear in poems like "Baseball Canto" and "The Artist". In "Baseball Canto", Ferlinghetti shows San Francisco to be a place where racial barriers are broken as, 'Sweet Tito' "smacks one that don't come back at all". In "The Artist", Ferlinghetti shows the people of San Francisco to be "party hoppers", not looking at art. I find it interesting that Ferlinghetti shows SF to be both socially groundbreaking, as well as dead.
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