Lawrence Ferlinghetti Autobiography

Autobiography" was written especially for oral presentation within the newly evolving techniques of combining poetry with jazz. Ferlinghetti describes the experiment thus: "It really developed along with the Cellar sessions. My whole kick has been oral poetry. The poets today are talking to themselves, they have no other audience. The competition from the mass media is too much. And the poets don’t write their poems with the idea of its being read aloud in mind when they write it. Poetry used to have an audience. Rachel Linsay went around the country reciting poems for bread — that was his phrase. And Sandburg, when he was younger, went around with a guitar and had an audience. We’re trying to capture an audience. The jazz comes in as part of the attempt to get the audience back. . . "I make use of phrases which are floating around in people's minds from advertising or from some slogan and I give them a little twist. I was always trying to write so that the poems could have a public surface which any one can get, but there's no reason it couldn't have another level which only the instructed can get. You can have all kinds of allusions to ‘Waiting for Godot’, Joyce, or Hamlet or anything else as long as it has a public surface too, which doesn't depend on this." This PowerPoint production is the conclusion of my talk on the San Francisco Beat Poets.    • The San Francisco Beat Poets