Reviews for Pictures of the Gone World, Vol. 1

The average rating for Pictures of the Gone World, Vol. 1 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-10-22 00:00:00 James Husband "They" say Beat poetry is a lot like jazz, and I think "they" have a point. But the point I'm going to make about jazz is more specific and somewhat different: East coast Beat verse compares to West Coast Beat verse like old East coast Jazz compares to old West coast Jazz. East coasters are likely to be half-mad, drug-crazed experimenters, wandering spirits and introspective soloists of the avant guard; West coasters are likely to be more outgoing, comfortable with large groups and popular success, and willing to keep the day-job. It's only fair to point out that Ferlinghetti was born in New York, but after Chapel Hill, the navy (during WW II), graduate school at Columbia, and a doctorate from the Sorbonne, he settled down'at the age of thirty-two'in the city of San Francisco, where he painted, taught French, and made a little extra money writing art criticism and translations. Then, in 1953, he founded City Lights Bookstore, the first all paperback book store in the nation, and two years after began to publish, under the "City Lights Books" imprint, the legendary "Pocket Poets Series." Number One in the series was Pictures of a Gone World. If Ginsberg personifies the East, then Ferlinghetti embodies the West. His verse is sunny, filled with humor, the beauties of nature, the pleasures of good company and human love. Although the structure of his verse owes much to the "triads" of William Carlos Williams, the imagery and music harks back to the old-fashioned, romantic lyrics of E. E. Cummings, stripped of all but the occasional rhyme. This review is based on the fortieth anniversary edition (1995), in which Mr. Ferlinghetti has added eighteen new poems to the original slim volume of twenty-seven. Here, for a taste, I give you one of the original twenty-seven. funny fantasies are never so real as oldstyle romances where the hero has a heroine who has long black braids and lets nobody kiss her ever and everybody's trying all the time to run away with her and the hero is always drawing his (sic) sword and tilting at ginmills and forever telling her he loves her and has only honorable intentions and honorable mentions and no one ever beats him at anything but then finally one day she who has always been so timid offs with her glove and says (though not in so many big words) Let's go lie down somewheres baby.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-05-03 00:00:00 Robert Oberhofer In Paris in a loud dark winter when the sun was something in Provence when I came upon the poetry of René Char I saw Vaucluse again in a summer of sauterelles its fountains full of petals and its rivers thrown down through all the burnt places of that almond world and the fields full of silence though the crickets sang with their legs And in the poet's plangent dream I saw no Lorelei upon the Rhone nor angels debarked at Marseilles but couples going nude into the sad water in the profound lasciviousness of spring in an algebra of lyricism which I am still deciphering