THE CONEY ISLAND OF LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
JACK FOLEY . POETRY FLASH . 1996
In this original profile of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, we cycle over bone white and pink pale rooftops of San Francisco’s North Beach. Ferlinghetti invites us to drive through wide dusty lonely American highways and across to the narrow winding streets of an imaginary Paris. We are led into the deep ravines of isolated Big Sur, where the poet goes to meditate on redwoods, ocean, and his Temple of the Zen Fool. We move through crowded venues of New York, including the famous 1994 Beat Exhibition at NYU, and a visit to immigrant Ellis Island. In all of this travel one senses the living presence of Ferlinghetti’s wise and wild poetry. Ferlinghetti the poet, the shaman, and amusing clown who loves to dream poetic visions of Charlie Chaplin’s zany antics. His Beat pals, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Andre Voznesensky and Anne Waldman add color to the action, as does the poet's 75th birthday party and the Via Ferlinghetti dedication.
Parts of the film take place in City Lights Bookstore, Ferlinghetti’s publishing house. As publisher, he blasted forth in the mid 1950’s with Allen Ginsberg’s prophetic Howl. A true iconoclastic and lyrical poet in his own right, Ferlinghetti’s early collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind, is the best selling poetry book of all time. Felver’s steady hand is in sync with the poet as he snipes away at the American dream, jumps coasts and hurdles the imagination. We get the full expression of what it means to be a rebel poet, a renegade publisher and a bearer of the traditions born of Francois Villon, Arthur Rimbaud, and Walt Whitman. The film is a moving gallery of a man’s being, and expresses, in its unpretentious artistry, a real and lasting impression of an American original.
WHITMAN'S WILD CHILD: A REVIEW OF CHRISTOPHER FELVER'S FILM, THE CONEY ISLAND OF LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI . 1996
Poetry is the dissident branch of literature and San Francisco is the dissident
part of the United States.
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti in the film
Where are Whitman’s wild children,
where the great voices speaking out
with
a sense of sweetness and sublimity,
where the great new vision
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Populist Manifesto”
Christopher Felver’s enormously engaging film, The Coney Island of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, is a love song to a poet who has been an active part of the “San Francisco Scene” ever since his arrival in the city in 1950, when he began to write the superb poems later collected in Pictures of the Gone World (1955) and A Coney Island of the Mind (1958). The latter became one of the best-selling poetry books in the history of American letters. The Ferlinghetti we see in Felver’s film is an extraordinary figure: over seventy-five years old, handsome, bearded, wearing his Charlie Chaplin bowler, sporting an earring, he rides his bicycle, reads poetry, discusses issues, is playful and serious—often playful and serious at once: “The role of the artist? There’s all kinds of rolls. Hot cross buns. Croissants. Depends...”