A Coney Island of the Mind ...

American poet and activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti outside the bookstore he co-founded, City Lights Booksellers, in the North Beach neighborhood, San Francisco, California, September 1977.

Janet Fries/Getty Images

Cool guy, long lived, talented and giving, Lawrence Ferlinghetti died at the ripe young age of 101. Back in 1958, using graphical layouts connected to poetry, he created a new genre of writing as seen in his A Coney Island of the Mind 9 poem residing in, of course, A Coney Island of the Mind.

See

      it was like this when

                              we waltz into this place

a couple of Papish cats

                             is doing an Aztec two-step

And I says

                 Dad let's cut

but then this dame

                       comes up behind me see

                                       and says

                           You and me could really exist

Wow I says

                   Only the next day

                        she has bad teeth

                                  and really hates

                                                           poetry

The impact Ferlinghetti had on other creatives was enormous. To whit ...

The poet was known for stacking small fractured lines on top of each other in unique geometric shapes like Jenga towers, with each thought supporting the ones above it. His best-known collection of poems, 1958’s A Coney Island of the Mind, presented vivid images in the language of his day, describing Jesus Christ as “a kind of carpenter from some square-type place like Galilee … claiming he is hip” and Morris Graves’ mystic paintings of the Pacific Northwest as “a wild white nest in the true mad north of introspection.” Ever the experimenter, his late Sixties anthology, Starting From San Francisco, presented a mix of traditional and avant-garde forms.

In between releasing his own books through his City Lights imprint, which he cofounded with Peter D. Martin, he nourished a generation of poets. He issued Allen Ginsberg’s sprawling, controversial Howl and Other Poems in 1956, and in the years that followed put out books of poetry by William Carlos Williams, Gregory Corso, Jacques Prévert, Frank O’Hara, Pablo Picasso, Jack Kerouac, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and several others. Ferlinghetti’s still-operating City Lights bookstore, located in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, was a frequent meeting place for the poets he published.

The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller's "Into the Night Life" and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950's—as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind—a kind of circus of the soul.

RIP youngster. :)