This New Directions paperback from 1958 brings together a selection of poems from Ferlinghetti's first, self-published collection Pictures of the gone world (1955) with two new, longer poems, "A Coney Island of the mind" and "Oral messages".

The title poem, "a kind of circus of the soul," in 29 sections, taking its title from a line of Henry Miller's — is something like the Ferlinghetti version of "Howl", a confrontation between the poet's sensibility and the banality of Eisenhower's America. But it's all a lot more playful and literary, full of mischievous echoes of everyone from Wordsworth, Keats and W B Yeats to T S Eliot and James Joyce. Where Ginsberg's lines thump out at you in a merciless rhythm, Ferlinghetti dances down the page in unexpected leaps and pirouettes. And comes to a fabulous conclusion in section 29 where he manages to condense Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake, Anna Karenina, Hemingway, Proust and Lorca (and much else) into about 100 breathlessly unpunctuated lines.

"Oral messages" are jazz poems, meant for live performance but still quite effective on the page, again full of clever puns and literary references that you would probably only pick up on a very subliminal level in performance. "Pictures of the gone world" range a little more widely, with a few nods to the lyrical tradition, but still in the light-footed style of "Coney Island".

The typographic design, with its classic underground "typewriter-style" look, is superb — I loved that they even went as far as using freehand underlining for emphasis instead of italics. Freda Browne is credited as the designer, while the cover is by Rudolphe de Harak. ( )

I wasn't familiar with the work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti until I read this title -- The Beat writers whose work I know the best are: Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Although, according to Wikipedia, Ferlinghetti did not consider himself to be a Beat poet -- The poems in this collection remind me of Kerouac's style (the poetic aspect of Kerouac's writing, that is). The poem, in this work, which blew my mind more than any other -- Was written when Ferlinghetti was circa 35-36 years old (Poem #2 on p. 78 of this edition, from "Pictures of the Gone World", 1955). It could be that Poem #2 came into being as a result of either intuition, instinct -- Or both (according to the "Encyclopedia of World Biography", Ferlinghetti's father, Carlo, died six months before L. Ferlinghetti's birth; L. Ferlinghetti's mother, Clemence, was then thrown into a downward spiral and eventually institutionalized). In any case, I was amazed by what I perceived to be Ferlinghetti's visceral understanding of mortality, in the way that he juxtaposed an image of the young, lighthearted and oblivious -- With that of the old and decrepit, in Poem #2. Despite my being a person who's not usually interested in poetry -- I was impressed with this collection. And so I'll end with the text of Poem #2 from p. 78 of this edition -- As it had such a profound effect on me (the text is left-justified below i.e. not formatted in the way that Ferlinghetti did in this book).

just as I used to say
love comes harder to the aged
because they've been running
on the same old rails too long
and then when the sly switch comes along
they miss the turn
and burn up the wrong rail while
the gay caboose goes flying
and the steam engine driver don't recognize
them new electric horns
and the aged run out on the rusty spur
which ends up in
the dead grass where
the rusty tin cans and bedsprings and old razor
blades and moldy mattresses
lie
and the rail breaks off dead
right there
though the ties go on a while
and the aged
say to themselves
well
this must be the place
we were supposed to lie down
and they do
while the bright saloon careens along away
on a high
hilltop
its windows full of bluesky and lovers
with flowers
their long hair streaming
and all of them laughing
and waving and
whispering to each other
and looking out and
wondering what that graveyard
where the rails end
is
( )

This 1950s poetry collection is the most famous writing by Ferlinghetti, who was also lauded as an activist, publisher, bookseller, and painter. It has three principal sections: the title piece, "Oral Messages," and poems from "Pictures of the Gone World."

The title of the book and its first section was taken "out of context" from Henry Miller's Into the Night Life. Ferlinghetti said that it was to describe the carnivalesque aspect of his own subjective experience in composing the poems. But a different and credible reading is to see the US society that the poet engages in his verse as a mental amusement park: corralling minds into circuitous rides that exhilarate, games that impoverish, and technology that dazzles and mystifies. Still, the weight of these poems often rests not in social criticism but in aesthetic contemplation, libidinal impulse, epistemic anxiety, and similar dilemmas.

The second section of the book is "Oral Messages," seven longer poems composed for recitation with "jazz accompaniment" (48), and to incorporate experimentation and spontaneity. Although this mode is a paragon of Beat Generation performance, and Ferlinghetti did publish prominent Beat authors, he rejected the "Beat" label for his own work. My favorite of these poems is "Junkman's Obbligato," which urges downward economic mobility in order to champion life and freedom. But a close second is the diffident brag of "Autobiography" ("I am the man. / I was there. / I suffered / somewhat.") succumbing irregularly to atypical end rhyme.

The final thirteen poems are selected from a volume "Pictures of the Gone World" that Ferlinghetti had written just three years previously. These are similar to some of those in the first section (briefer, and like them individually numbered rather than titled), and they tend toward a narrower and more intimate sensibility--even though the eleventh has the great wide scope of the world as the place for life and death.

Ferlinghetti offers some unflinching anti-Christian blasphemy in the fifth "Coney Island" poem (15-6), but the "Oral Messages" seem to exhibit sincere apocalyptic anticipation ("I Am Waiting") and a hope of obscure divine palingenesis ("Christ Climbed Down").

Despite Ferlinghetti's use of popular culture and accessible idiom, his texts are still in dialog with the canons of elite art and literature. The first poem of the book orients to the painting of Goya to reflect on "maimed citizens in painted cars" (10), and the second one alludes to Homer's Odyssey to indict "American demi-Democracy" (12). Later verses cite Hieronymus Bosch, Morris Graves, Franz Kafka, Dante, Chagall, Proust, and others. The poet fulminates against the enclosure of culture by experts and institutions in poem 9 of "Pictures of the Gone World," but he had an M.A. in English literature and a Ph.D. in comparative literature, and the consequences of this training are everywhere visible in his poems.

Twenty-first century readers may occasionally struggle with a dated allusion or two in these pages (nothing too arcane for a 'net search to remedy, though). Ironically, it is the "popular" and contemporary references from the 1950s that are more likely to have passed into obscurity. On the whole, the verses have aged well and still have a sense of immediacy sixty-four years later.

Greatest book of poems only second to Whitman. ( )

Ferlinghetti lends us another master piece with this moving collection. There isn't much else to say, Ferlinghetti's style is his own unmistakeable; You either get it or you don't. I'll never tire of these glimpses of brilliance ( )