America

I ALWAYS WANTED TO MEET LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

di Thomas Libetti

9 Novembre 2014

‘In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see

the people of the world

exactly at the moment when

they first attained the title of

‘suffering humanity’

They writhe upon the page

in a veritable rage

of adversity

Heaped up

groaning with babies and bayonets

under cement skies

in an abstract landscape of blasted trees

bent statues bats wings and beaks

slippery gibbets

cadavers and carnivorous cocks

and all the final hollering monsters

of the

‘imagination of disaster’

they are so bloody real

it is as if they really still existed

And they do

Only the landscape is changed…’

I’m sitting in a square near my home where I sometimes go to sketch.

This evening got dark early due to a day that was grey and rainy.

My seat is on a bench under a lamppost where I start to draw anything automatically.

Traffic rushes up Avenue of the Americas.

An overdramatic fountain in the square’s center—redundantly spewing water into the air of an already wet city.

Church bells attempt to make the square feel like an authentic piazza.

Seated on an opposite bench is an older, sea-fairing-like man with a hat and white beard, proudly taking in the place.

I always wanted to meet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I once read how Tom Waits took his copy of ‘A Coney Island of the Mind’ to the City Lights Café in San Francisco where Ferlinghetti hangs out, and left it for him to sign.

I’d like to do the same.

We share things in common, the poet and I.

Apart from our last names rhyming with spaghetti; he was born in Yonkers—I grew up there.

He lives on the west coast—I’m left-handed.

He was born in March, 1919, and wrote a great piece a long time ago called, “The Old Italians Dying.”

Whenever I used to sit down at the table to eat as a kid, my Nonna, to no avail, would always try and put the fork in my right hand.

Opening excerpt from A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND, Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A New Directions Book. ‘The title, A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND, is taken from Henry Miller’s INTO THE NIGHT LIFE. It is used out of context but expresses the way I felt about the poems when I wrote them – as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul.’ – Lawrence Ferlinghetti