Americus, Book I - Softcover

Ferlinghetti, Lawrence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811216411 ISBN 13: 9780811216418

Publisher: New Directions, 2005

Synopsis

Lawrence Ferlinghetti lights out for the territories with Book I of his own born-in-the-U.S.A. epic, Americus.

Describing Americus as "part documentary, part public pillow-talk, part personal epica descant, a canto unsung, a banal history, a true fiction, lyric and political," Ferlinghetti combines "universal texts, snatches of song, words or phrases, murmuring of love or hate, from Lotte Lenya to the latest soul singer, sayings and shibboleths from Yogi Berra to the National Anthem, the Gettysburg Address or the Ginsberg Address, that haunt our nocturnal imagination." This book is a wake-up call that breaks new ground in the grand tradition of Whitman, W.C. Williams, Charles Olson, and Ezra Pound, as Ferlinghetti cruises our literary and political landscapes, past and present, to create an autobiography of American consciousness.

About this title

About the Author:

In 1953 Lawrence Ferlinghetti cofounded City Lights, the first paperback bookstore in the United States, a Mecca for millions. His Coney Island of the Mind is one of the best-selling volumes of poetry by any living American poet. Born in Yonkers, New York, in 1919, Ferlinghetti has received the Robert Frost Memorial Medal and the first Literarian Award of the National Book Foundation.

From Publishers Weekly:

The world-famous poet (A Coney Island of the Mind) and founder of San Francisco's City Lights bookstore and press tackles more material than ever in this first volume of verse since How to Paint Sunlight (2001). Twelve untitled sections packed with quotations and references seek, and in part arrive at, an inclusive history of America, from the startings out of its first poets to the hope and peril of the early 1960s. Calling America "the greatest experiment on earth" but warning against "Bush League Presidencies/ in totalitarian plutocracies," Ferlinghetti goes on to praise his heroes and models, "Whitman's wild children and grandchildren," from Vachel Lindsay to Ginsberg and beyond. A multi-page verse-essay on the art of poetry argues that "A poem should still be an insurgent knock on the door of the unknown." Later sections knock on the doors of various moments in modern Western historyâ€"the Wright brothers, the Kennedy assassination, German Expressionism, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Both world wars come in for extended treatment: "No end to the sweet births of consciousness to the bitter deaths of it in vain." Ferlinghetti's exuberant, loquacious catalogues and collages try to rival previous encyclopedic and historical poems, from Eliot, Pound and Olson (all of whom he cites repeatedly) to Neruda and Paulin. This an ambitious effort, but one marked with a lack of subtlety, and an overdependence on its famous models.
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About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0811216411
• ISBN 13: 9780811216418
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 90