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A sequel to A Coney Island of the Mind (written forty years after the original in what the author has called "a poetry seizure" that lasted more than a year), A Far Rockaway of the Heart is a sequence of one hundred and one related poems with recurrent themes. The author also thinks of it as a kind of caustic critique of modern poetry, including confrontations with or parodies of major figures in the literary avant-garde before the arrival of the Beat generation, notably Pound and Eliot, Beckett and Joyce.
Nearly four decades after the publication of A Coney Island of the Mind, Ferlinghetti offers this companion, a bardic, blasphemous and somewhat blissed-out wake-up call for 20th-century America to find its lost soul. One of the iconoclastic survivors of the Beat generation, Ferlinghetti, who is approaching his 80th birthday, serves up his first collection of new poems since 1988's Wild Dreams of a New Beginning. These 101 numbered poems, most occupying a single page, burn through modern America's absurdities and unrepentant historical revision in a glorious rant against mediocrity, greed, capitalism and boring poetry, with serious riffs on painting and love. Ferlinghetti blasts the "defeated Romanticism/ of T.S. Eliot/ and his pathetic phallusies" claiming Whitman and NerudaBlake would work, tooas his ancestors. Staggered lines and unfettered associations serve to bypass the cerebral ("It is not the mind that hears it/ but an ear of what we call the soul") while insisting that poetry maintain its political and social missions as well: "But I still hear singing/ still the voices of poets/ mixed with the cry of prostitutes...." Dubbing himself a "stand-up tragedian," Ferlinghetti's commanding voice draws on humor and the everyday (in poem #16, God uses a "portable Mac" while the devil whispers "`Life sucks...'"), anger and even a note of pathos and allows him to speak with the stentorian resonance that has made him legendary: "I still would love to find again/ that lost locality/ Where I might catch once more/ a Sunday subway for/ some Far Rockaway of the Heart." (May)
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John Pacelli
reviewed Far Rockaway of the Heart on January 04, 2012 Far Rockaway of the Heart
Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island Of The Mind made me become a serious poet. I've written poetry for as long as I could write, but I read that in college and I became a different kind of writer. I wrote with purpose, realizing that I could use words to be someone.
Now, over ten years after first reading that collection, I borrowed A Far Rockaway Of The Heart. I have no reasons for not reading it sooner. I've read a lot of Ferlinghetti's other stuff. I've seen it on the library shelf. Finally, now that I have the time to read more, I plucked it up, knowing that I could spend time reading and then rereading my favorites. I knew I'd have favorites.
Turns out, they are all my favorites. Ferlinghetti has a timelessness about his poetry that no other writer has been able to capture in the same way. He rails against inequalities and unfairness. He supports change for the better. But whereas many political poets find a voice for a particular cause, Ferlinghetti's cause is all causes, but still certain, not vague.
Far Rockaway came out in 1997. The rhythm of New York has not changed; the imagery is eternal with skyscrapers, suits, and subways. He revisits Neruda, Whitman, Mozart, Beethover, Eliot, DeKooning, Van Gogh, and Rodin. He explores California. He captures Europe. He bemoans America's material and financial crises. He questions religion. He frowns on war.
It is now 2009. The rythm of New York has not changed. America faces crises at home and abroad. As the first line of the first poem affirms, "Everything changes and nothing changes." That latter part includes my love for Ferlinghetti. I am forever thankful that he exists and writes and shares the human experience. I don't know what I'd be without him.
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