Ferlinghetti, Lawrence

San Francisco Poems

ISBN: 1931404011
San Francisco, CA: City Lights Foundation, 2001. First Printing. Softcover. “I certainly was surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far-out city on the left side of the world, and I gratefully accept, for as I told the Mayor, "How could I refuse?" I'd rather be Poet Laureate of San Francisco than anywhere because this city has always been a poetic center, a frontier for free poetic life, with perhaps more poets and more poetry readers than any city in the world. When I arrived in the City in 1950, I came overland by train and took ferry from the Oakland mole to the Ferry Building. And San Francisco looked like some Mediterranean port - a small white city, with mostly white buildings - a little like Tunis seen from seaward. I thought perhaps it was Atlantis, risen from the sea. I certainly saw North Beach especially as a poetic place, as poetic as some quartiers in Paris, as any place in old Europa, as poetic as any place great poets and painters had found inspiration. Above and beyond all this, poetic intuition and the intuitions of great poetry still remain our best medium for fathoming man's fate,” writes Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021) in the much-abridged quotation included above from his “Inaugural Address” as the newly-crowned Poet Laureate of San Francisco (August 1998). The piece, which opens this book of San Francisco Poems, is a prescient meditation on the changing social, as well as economic landscape of San Francisco which to date has borne out & metastasized beyond Ferlinghetti’s grim predictions (which are expressed in his inaugural but purposively not quoted above). The curious reader will have to obtain the volume for themselves if they’d like to see those (ha-ha), — for Your Devoted VP-of-Operations here at TMB chooses here, as elsewhere, to bring attention to the vigor-inducing cheeriness & retrospective ingenuity of the great Ferlinghetti. Of particular note to scholars is the fact that this volume contains an earlier, pre-revised version of what LF later repackaged, expanded, and re-published over two small volumes: What is Poetry?, initially published in 2000 (at the end of Ferlinghetti’s term as Poet Laureate of San Francisco), and 2007’s Poetry As Insurgent Art, which remains the greatest book on method published (thus far) this century. For a full list of contents, see the photographs attached to this listing. This slim volume, put simply, is a must-have for Ferlinghetti collectors & a must-read for young poets whose familiarity with LF is limited. From the archive of Thomas Rain Crowe, the legendary American poet and co-authorial founder of the Second San Francisco Renaissance. For more information on the Thomas Rain Crowe archive (assembled & curated by Third Mind Books), see our book, Starting from San Francisco: Thomas Rain Crowe in Conversation with Third Mind Books (Item No. 3071) & the catalog for the Crowe archive (Item No. 1010), which contains several excerpts and quotations from the book as well as a full listing of the archive’s contents, which are now being offered for sale individually on the Third Mind Books site. Small, trade-format softcover original: First Edition, though not explicated as such on copyright page; First Printing, as indicated by number sequence thereon. In strong fine condition with mild-to-moderate shelf-wear to fine-edges & corners of front, back covers & spine-edge & some light curling to same; otherwise, clean. Fine. [Item #7495]

Price: $45.00