In “Autobiography” Ferlinghetti writes: “For I am a still of poetry. This rich collection seems just as fresh as it did at its publication in 1958, and that should be no surprise. “Manisfree” is more than a parody of Yeats’ actual place name “Innisfree ” it demonstrates a new sensibility within the form of earlier work. A strange harmony takes shape between the jesting of jazz and the classical forms it plays upon. But as layers upon layers of literature are laid down, the names and phrases disappear into the music of the poetry. At first lines like “Let us arise and go now/to the Isle of Manisfree” seem like parody or ridicule. The title itself comes from Henry Miller’s essay “Into the Night Life,” and is, as Ferlinghetti understates in his introductory note, “taken out of context.”īut once again Ferlinghetti goes beyond the deconstruction of literary antecedents. Ferlinghetti takes us down “Dante’s final/fire escape,” spoofing and lionizing, playing with our expectations, taking on Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Hemingway, Keats, the Bible… “I have seen…the Beautiful Dame Without Mercy picking her nose in Chumley’s.” References like these are interpretations, re-imaginings, and damnations of our received myths. As an English teacher I found dozens upon dozens of historical and literary allusions, both obvious and hidden. In the ensuing years, I have found Ferlinghetti again and again, each time listening more closely to his mischievous bebop. He pronounces: “Christ climbed down/from His bare Tree/this year/and ran away to where/there were no rootless Christmas trees/hung with candycanes and breakable stars.” Ferlinghetti aches for a return to the sources, while at the same time deconstructing those sources in a humorous and graceful fashion. Ferlinghetti protests and rages against the madness of the nuclear age, against the misuse of religion and politics to enslave humanity, and against the colossal indifference that allows all this to happen. I first found Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind while an undergraduate, finding the wry attacks on the established order refreshing and invigorating.
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