Baseball in the Works of the Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021)

The American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti passed away in March 2021 just a few weeks shy of reaching his 102nd birthday. Last year I wrote about Ferlinghetti in a few places: the James Joyce Quarterly published my review of Ferlinghetti's final book, I also wrote about Ferlinghetti and Joyce at my other blog, then I wrote more about Ferlinghetti and his incredible final book on this blog.

April is both National Poetry Month and the opening month of the baseball season, so as April comes to a close I'm going to pay tribute to the late poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti by looking at how he wrote about baseball in his works. Ferlinghetti grew up in Yonkers, New York (located right above Manhattan Island) and after spanning the globe on manifold adventures he settled in San Francisco right around the time the Giants baseball team moved their home base from the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan out to the Bay Area of San Francisco. Reading through Ferlinghetti's books, one gets the impression that baseball was a ubiquitous aspect of his life. His writings on baseball also tend to intersect with his political diatribes, proving once again that you cannot separate baseball from politics in America.

Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto" (1972) is the most well-known of his writings on baseball. You can listen to him reciting the poem in the video below. American history and its manifestations in present day contexts often figures into the works of Ferlinghetti. His perspective was that of a fiercely dissident poet yet he was also a WW2 vet who commanded a ship at D-Day in 1944 and later turned into a staunch pacifist following his visit to Nagasaki in late 1945. His "Baseball Canto" foregrounds what truly makes America great, its diversity and inclusiveness, but for Ferlinghetti the gameplay on the field finds metaphorical resonance with the struggles of marginalized people for empowerment and freedom within what he calls "the Anglo-Saxon tradition." Themes of racism, colonialism, and exploitative capitalism are observable in the poem. The umpires become Irish cops overseeing the action. He envisions Willie Mays as "a footrunner from Thebes." Tito Fuentes becomes a bullfighter being cheered by the Latinos in the stands. Sort of ironically, the poet is reading Ezra Pound's Cantos while sitting in the stands. Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto" opens this way:

Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn,
reading Ezra Pound,
and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the
Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto
and demolish the barbarian invaders.

Ferlinghetti once published a bizarre little book called Tyrannus Nix? (New Directions, 1969) where the text is presented in the poet's own handwriting with minimal punctuation. A satirical work, Tyrannus Nix? deploys baseball metaphors to mock and satirize then-president Richard M. Nixon. "Nixon Nixon I'm singing you this baseball Diamond Sutra from way out here in New Left Field in the International League." Nixon was from Whittier, California and Ferlinghetti writes:

This is one national sport we hope is on the way out The Whittier White Sox we hope are all washed up It's time for a new umpire and a new Hall of Fame Throw out a new ball and a new uniform and a new flag too while you're at it and make the flag green this time instead of bloody red and black-and-blue (p. 7-8)

Later in Tyrannus Nix? Ferlinghetti observes, "things are really tightening up out here And there's no relief in sight for you or us although it occurs to me that we are your relief if you'd only admit it." (p. 12) He determines Nixon to be a pitcher wearing a mask and throwing with a deceptive delivery: "But I never saw a pitcher with a mask before What've you got under it That's what I've been trying to fathom ever since they brought you up from the minors Did you learn that windup with the Whittier Quakers It's the most deceptive ever seen in a World Series a windup that gives away nothing and telegraphs nothing so that nobody still knows what's coming We hope not a fast change-up One wild pitch and you've blown it Your windup is so weird." (p. 13-14)

Glad I picked this up. In 1969 Ferlinghetti wrote a book attacking and satirizing Nixon called “Tyrannus Nix?” Text is presented in Ferlinghetti’s own handwriting. The writing is loaded with baseball metaphors pic.twitter.com/9IHkqeB5GD

— pq (@PQuadrino) February 23, 2021

I would not consider Tyrannus Nix? among Ferlinghetti's best books, it feels dated and many of the jokes fall flat, but as a time capsule and example of the prominence of baseball in Ferlinghetti's work it's kinda cool. It's also an especially polemical display of Ferlinghetti's attitude about the poet's role in society, from the same guy who went on to publish the handbook Poetry as Insurgent Art (2007). Ferlinghetti also wrote a two-part epic poem on the history of America, the second part of which is surely one of his best books. In that book, called Time of Useful Consciousness (Americus, Book II) (New Directions, 2012), he quotes this line from the poet Philip Lamantia: "Baseballs lost among the Pleiades (quoth Lamantia)." (p. 7) Ferlinghetti made no bones about taking lines from other poets, many of his writings are loaded with literary allusions and borrowed phrases, he liked to celebrate that TS Eliot or Pound tradition of poetry, "summarizing the past by theft and allusion" he called it. Some of his books have helpful notes in the back with sources for these allusions. His last book, Little Boy: A Novel (2019), is filled with literary references but does not have any footnotes. I'm hoping there will eventually be an annotated edition of the book, but some lines are identifiable via Google, especially when he provided them in quotes. One that sticks out to me is this sequence from the poem "Truth" by John Masefield which he immediately follows with a baseball reference:

"Man with his burning soul has but an hour of breath to build a ship of Truth in which his soul may sail---sail on the sea of death for death takes toll of beauty, courage, youth, of all but Truth" and it's three strikes and you're out at the Old Ball Game 

(Little Boy, p. 122)

Little Boy: A Novel contains numerous baseball references, everything seems to return back to baseball. It was his final book and seemingly all the major themes of his previous works are gathered in Little Boy, a densely-packed word-hoard that goes into American history, his own life story, with lyrical escapes into mystical contemplation of the cosmos and the precariousness of life in our present existence on Earth. The latter half of the book often reads like Ferlinghetti's mind swings on a pendulum between despair over the dark state of affairs and ecstasies of blissful poetry about life. Somehow these oscillations often seem to involve baseball. For example, on p. 150 he wonders: 

And so why am I watching baseball to escape the pain or ecstasy of existence and the Reds are beating the Yankees and should I be happy It's all relative and life depends on the simplest things to yield a crop of happiness as if it were something you could harvest (p. 150)

Despair and happiness waver back and forth. One beautiful sequence on pgs 154-155 revels in "the jet streams of light in the upper air of the spirit of man in the outer space inside us Endless rubaiyats and endless beatitudes endless shangri-las endless nirvanas sutras and mantras satoris and sensaras Bodhiramas and Boddhisatvas karmas and karmapas! Endless singing Shivas dancing on the smoking wombs of ecstasy!" and so on and on until just a few lines later his perspective again shifts. It seems like he remembers who the president was at that moment (the same president who was booed at the World Series) and suddenly he's back to thinking about baseball:

and the Man without Shoulders who can't lift his weight in butterflies is now in charge of the world And is there any reason to watch the World Series on TV while this is going on as if the fate of the world were on the Men with Shoulders out there on the Field of Dreams as if a bases-loaded home run could change the fate of the spinning world spinning with a curveball or one-hundred-mile-an-hour fastball to wipe out our enemies and save the world from whatever Yeah play the 'Star-Spangled Banner" and sing about "bombs bursting in air" to show "our flag was still there" 

(p. 155-156)

Later towards the end of Little Boy, there's a dream sequence presented in italics where the poet drifts off into the depths of memory in search of his earliest moments of consciousness, seeking the roots of his existence, the exact place where he was born. The book is partly about Ferlinghetti's difficult childhood, he basically grew up as an orphan who bounced around different homes and never truly had a family. In this dream sequence he's simultaneously dreaming of going to and recalling when he physically went back to find the house where he was born, the address on his birth certificate, a house located just north of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The tiny details recalled of life in that house at that time then summon up more vivid memories:

All at once, an incredible overflowing feeling of happiness surges up from nowhere. Born here!. . . some three hundred yards north of the northwest corner of Van Cortlandt Park. It must have been all country back then. The kids must have played ball in this green park with its worn diamond and its ancient rusted screen behind the batter's box. I can hear the bat hit the ball (perhaps pitched by Pop). And my brother running for first base ended up in Baltimore forty years later . . . Shouts and laughter tears and whispers fill the air. (p. 174)

Little Boy: A Novel is so many things at once, a perfect culmination for Ferlinghetti's prolific career as a poet. It's really more of an epic poem in prose than a novel, plus it's sort of an autobiography. In a flourish of wordplay on page 119, Ferlinghetti describes his project this way: "I unlock my word-hoard of ruminations meditations exhortations celebrations condemnations excitations lamentations liberations and ecstasies plotless as a life." The one precursor to the style of Little Boy (2019) was the novel Ferlinghetti published almost sixty years prior called Her (1960), a plotless word-stream of prose wherein the reader swims from one dream vision to the next, following Ferlinghetti in search of his soul or his muse or his anima. Just as in Little Boy, the visions of the poet veer into baseball themes:

Perhaps I was merely a dumb member of the audience strayed onto the stage by mistake, looking for some printed program he had dropped under a seat. I had somewhere dropped the key that explained the action, and one could not tell the players without a program, for the faces interchanged, fused together. There they moved on their dark illuminated field, playing their curious night-game, bounding after stray balls, winding their pitches on grassless mounds, or squatting behind a batter in their tools of ignorance. I was a world's catcher, I crouched there, wearing my tools, a fat receiver. I received signals, sent out signals to others, squatting with a signal fingers hanging down between my legs, crooking a penis finger now and then, calling someone in. They all moved too far out, other figures ran, white celluloid shadows, as in a strip of film held up to a light, and the film running away with them. I could not catch them, and they ran off through the streets of the world, until only one figure was left, a white clay figure I had started with, who might have been myself. It was not. It was a her. (Her, p. 10-11)

New article in the James Joyce Quarterly on Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Front cover of JJQ volume 57.3-4. Cover art by David Nowlan.

I am excited to have a new piece that was published in the latest edition of the James Joyce Quarterly. This piece is a book review of the newest book from the legendary American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a fascinating and entertaining text called Little Boy: A Novel. The full article is behind a subscription wall, but you can read the first half of it here. 

Here's the opening paragraph: 

The American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti turned one hundred years old in 2019. To mark the occasion, he published Little Boy: A Novel, a compulsively readable feast for the mind stuffed into a breezy 192-page text. Though calling itself a novel, it is hardly fiction. The book reads more like a memoir written as an epic poem in a lyrical thought-stream prose style devoid of plot, bereft of punctuation, laced with literary criticism, and seared with socio-political commentary. It is a novel in the truest sense of the word: Ferlinghetti made something new.

If you're wondering why this review of Ferlinghetti's latest book was in the James Joyce Quarterly, it's because Little Boy is a sort of homage to Joyce. You can find Ferlinghetti quoting from Finnegans Wake and Ulysses from his earliest published works like A Coney Island of the Mind (1958). He continued to bring Joyce into his poetry for decades and Little Boy is a sort of culmination or capstone of Ferlinghetti's career, an epic poem in the form of a stream-of-consciousness in which he quotes and imitates Joyce frequently (among countless other literary allusions). Over at my "Finnegans, Wake!" blog I shared a post with a bunch of examples of Ferlinghetti alluding to Joyce throughout Little Boy: A Novel.

Besides the prominent Joycean element, the reason I wrote the review is because I absolutely loved Little Boy: A Novel. It has to be one of the best books I've ever read. Little Boy is both moving and laugh-out-loud funny, the language is incredibly rich and engrossing with sentences that go on for pages and build up momentum, mixing lyricism and mysticism with memoir, literary criticism with social commentary, the author's earliest memories and experiences with his observations on modern society while sitting inside a cafe in San Francisco. There are reflections on several famous literary figures Ferlinghetti was friends with like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, etc. Ferlinghetti has had a very rich century of existence---he commanded a sub chaser in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day in 1944, he went to Nagasaki in 1945 after the atomic bomb dropped and was so horrified he became a staunch pacifist and activist for the rest of his life. In 1953 he founded City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and went on to publish Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems which led to him going to jail for obscenity charges. He's published dozens of books of poetry, novels, and plays and is also a talented painter.

In January I randomly picked up A Coney Island of the Mind from my bookshelf and started reading it. I had discovered the book back in 2018 on a trip to the Bay Area where the title had caught my eye as I perused the bookshelf of a friend I was visiting. Didn't know anything about it at the time, but having grown up in NYC and played hockey at Abe Stark Arena in Coney Island for many years, the title of that dog-eared slim volume intrigued me. So when I later visited City Lights bookstore on the same trip, I picked up a brand new copy of A Coney Island of the Mind. At the time I didn't know was Ferlinghetti's most famous book and that I was standing in Ferlinghetti's own bookstore purchasing it. Once I finally started reading it earlier this year, I got hooked immediately. 

For the next few months I read and re-read several books by Ferlinghetti, my favorite being the second volume of his epic poem on the history of America called Time of Useful Consciousness (published in 2012, the title is derived from an aeronautical term denoting the time between when one loses oxygen and when one passes out, the brief time in which some life-saving action is possible). Then I picked up his newest book, Little Boy: A Novel (2019), and it just blew me away. While I haven't read every single one of Ferlinghetti's books yet, I have read most of them now and I can say with some certainty that Little Boy is his greatest work. A perfect distillation of all the knowledge and experience he's acquired over a century of existence neatly packed into a relatively short book. The structure is economical because there are no chapter breaks and after the first 15 pages or so there are even very few sentence breaks. The text becomes a rushing river of poetic prose. The language is full of informal dialects, street talk, puns, and idioms. Ferlinghetti is a (now) 101-year-old poet who has owned a bookstore for more than six decades so his knowledge of literature is virtually unsurpassed among those walking the earth. He's also an old New Yorker with a great sense of humor. This creates an irresistibly rich and entertaining gestalt that never seems to leave anything out. 

I enjoyed it so much that when I finished reading Little Boy: A Novel, I immediately turned back to the first page and started reading it again. Then I finished it a second time and immediately read it again a third time. Reading books has been my main hobby for a while now and I can't recall having that kind of experience where I read one book cover-to-cover three times in a row. 

Trying to summarize why I love this book so much, I come up this: as a NY native, I relate to Ferlinghetti with all his memories of Yonkers where he was born (and where I played many hockey games at an outdoor rink where I once scored a hat trick); I relate to Ferlinghetti's obsession with Joyce, especially Finnegans Wake; the informal, playful language he uses makes him a joy to read; there's so much to learn from his literary allusions and stories; he also loves baseball and refers to it frequently in this book; Ferlinghetti views the world thru the eye of a mystic; with all of his experience, knowledge, and wisdom, he is exactly the person whose perspective I am hoping to learn from as he comments, in longwinded jeremiads, on our current political and environmental predicaments. 

The review I wrote for JJQ was restricted by a word count so I had to keep it short and here I am going on about this book and I've barely touched on its most moving element as a memoir. Besides all the cultural-political-social commentary and piles of literary allusions, the core of Little Boy is about the little boy Lawrence Ferlinghetti who had a difficult upbringing which impacted him the rest of his life. His father died shortly before he was born. His mother couldn't handle another child and ended up in a mental hospital so she gave the baby to her sister. Ferlinghetti was raised by his Aunt Emilie and learned to speak French. For a while they lived with a wealthy family who his aunt was working for until suddenly she just left with no explanation, never to be seen again, and young Lawrence grew up without any real family around. As the book carries on we get more insight into the imprint of his childhood in which he never received real love or affection.

There are so many passages in this book that I've starred, underlined, and annotated and I'm tempted to quote from it at length. As I describe in the JJQ review, the style of this book is totally unconventional. Sentences span several pages with no punctuation and he jumps from one thing to the next and back again. I will share a long section here from pgs 93-96 where you can get an idea of how this book works. Note: A big block of unbroken text ensues. Not always easy to follow, but always richly rewarding to read.  This selection begins immediately after Ferlinghetti quotes from an unusually profound Levi's advertisement he saw in San Francisco one recent summer: 

And who was that speaking if not Whitman or every common man on earth or elsewhere who else if not an American certainly not a European with all his baggage of centuries like Pasolini said when he came to New York in the 1960s and met the New Left rads and wrote that he envied these Americans who could act without first having to wade through thirty centuries of intellectual baggage like what would Heidegger do or what would Descartes do or what would Plato say or Plutarch or Herodotus or Gramsci or some other great looming intellect haunting their old Euro heads yeah you can imagine what with the European Communist parties tied up in knots and eventually destroying the student revolution or revelation of 1968 And what Tarquin said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger and so today the messenger embodied now as the media spreads confusion and doubt as to any eternal verity as indeed so do the philosophers or other heavy-headed thinkers who spread doubt in every direction even as Socrates did So that so that today there is a veritable clearance sale of ideas strained through the semiliterate media which ends up giving us a kind of Gazpacho Expressionism or cut-up consciousness as in William Burroughs' Naked Lunch or in John Cage's cut-up of any classic text as he did Finnegans Wake annihilating the beautiful hushed talk of Irish washerwomen gossiping in the gloaming while doing their washing on a riverbank where field mice squawk and dusk falling and night descending into doubt and despair and fear and trembling O lord save us Blind in our courses we know not what we do or where we go O the semiconscious existential despair of not knowing who we are and the boy all his life looking for himself and where he came from Father lost Mother in a madhouse and he the little kid wandering around knowing nothing having been told nothing of where he came from and who was to tell him the little kid plunked down on earth somewhere alone like a stray cat or pup without a collar or name tag and how was he to find himself in this twirling world spinning to the music of the spheres which is the sound of Om in which all sound is absorbed in which all thought all feelings all senses are absorbed yes and Om the sound of living itself the great Om of all our breathing the voice of life the voice of our buried life the voice of the voice of the blood then coursing through us through even the penis that strange appendage a peninsula of sorts a third arm or leg that so imperiously asserts its authority and inopportunely rises up and inserts itself into affairs personal or worldly and then so arrogantly lets us down at critical moments at the very gates of paradise or Nirvana or hell and refuses all our incitements "of mind and hand" as some Frenchie philosophe said even as he let down his pants in the queen's chamber indeed indeed and we are left with the perpetual astonishment of man on earth when confronted with himself or his penis indeed what a piece of work is man and this his daybook his nightbook and I am not writing some kind of Notes from the Underground as if I had any idea where any underground is these days if I ever knew since I've always been off in my own burb in some suburb of consciousness dreaming away or otherwise goofing off or picking my nose in hopeless cellars with fellow travelers or their ilk imagining I'm going to change the world or something and so I'm just some kind of literary freak and my mind the constipated thought of the race all too shallow to be called nihilism while all the while all I want to do is walk around the earth cooking the Joy soup What else is there to do with the rest of eternity and would you tell me what it is we're all supposed to do on earth anyway I mean truly just sit right down and think of an answer to all that while there's still time just give me a concrete answer as to what humans are supposed to do with all our time what on earth that is are we just to sit around like blobs of perspiring protoplasm or like chimps in trees scratching our fleas or whatever I mean maybe in fact it's just dreaming that we're supposed to do after everyone is fed after all is said and done oh no that's just a big evasion of the basic burning question What I want to know is what in hell are we here on earth for anyway baby baby Am I your bedroom philosopher or Doctor of Alienation Am I a willing well-fed participant and protagonist in our consumer society a consumer-gatherer or a rebel antagonist revolutionary an enemy of the state or something in between neither fish nor fouling-piece Tell me tell me the night is young and you're so beautiful pardon me if I am overdutiful Babeee and that's what he was asking himself as he grew up into something new and strange at least in the eyes of some totally objective journalist sent down here to earth by some managing editor with a low tolerance for malarkey who wants the truth and nothing but the truth so let 'em have it tell us what is what and who we are and what we are doing down here anyway The top-dog editor wants to know the straight story and are you man enough to tell it or are you brain enough to tell it and are you man enough to say I love you man   (Little Boy: A Novel, pgs 93-96)

"Pity the Nation" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
   And whose shepherds mislead them
 Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
            Whose sages are silenced
  And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
 Pity the nation that raises not its voice
          Except to praise conquerers
       And acclaim the bully as hero
          And aims to rule the world
              With force and by torture
          Pity the nation that knows
        No other language but its own
      And no other culture but its own
 Pity the nation whose breath is money
 And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
      Pity the nation oh pity the people
        who allow their rights to erode
   and their freedoms to be washed away
My country, tears of thee
                   Sweet land of liberty