Writing Across the Landscape

Starred review from June 29, 2015
This compilation of a half-century’s worth of travel journals, most of them previously unpublished, constitutes a lively “on the road” chronicle for poet and City Lights Booksellers cofounder Ferlinghetti. Spanning 1960 to 2010, these “peripatetic pages,” as he calls them, capture their author criss-crossing America, traveling through Europe and Latin America, and, in one memorably bleak report, riding the Trans-Siberian Express across Russia in midwinter in 1967—and then riding it back to Moscow after being denied berth on a Japan-bound ship. Some of Ferlinghetti’s accounts, like those of his travels to Latin America in 1960, are little more than
collages of photographic details of the land and its people. Others, like his “Mexican Night” journal from 1970, are freewheeling fantasias rife with ribald imagery. Two standout chronicles, of travels through postrevolutionary Cuba in 1960, before the Bay of Pigs invasion, and through Spain under the Franco regime in 1965, are examples of travel writing at its best, filled with sympathetic and enlightening
portraits of people and countries whose reality frequently contrasts with depictions of them in the popular press. Ferlinghetti punctuates a number of journal accounts with poems and beautiful poetic imagery, such as his description of dunes on the beach in Mexico “as if the mountains had allowed the wind to come through and make these shadows of themselves out of sand.” Illustrated with many of his hand-drawn sketches, these journals illuminate the inspirations for some of Ferlinghetti’s best poems and are a major addition to his literary legacy.

Starred review from June 15, 2015
Six glorious decades in the life of an iconic artist, poet, and self-described philosophical anarchist. Culled from his own journals and more obscure volumes unearthed by editors Diano and Gleeson from the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Ferlinghetti (I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955-1997, 2015, etc.) shares his globe-trotting adventures spanning the revolutionary 1960s to contemporary times in Mexico and Belize in 2010. After having been abroad as a Navy captain in World War II, he earned his literary doctorate at the Sorbonne and married in San Francisco. There, he opened City Lights Bookshop, the Beat poet's refuge through which he published many works by his friend and traveling companion Allen Ginsberg. In unrushed, conversational prose, his writings escort readers through the lengthier and much more heavily politicized years of his life in the 1960s and '70s. In often wry and deliciously witty entries, he chronicles his ventures to post-revolutionary Cuba, getting arrested for anti-war protesting in Oakland, California, and his adventurous journey crossing Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express. Ferlinghetti ably captures his wanderlust on cross-country trains hurtling through Paris and Dresden, only to retire in disappointing three-star Verona hotels ("two of the stars must have burned out some time ago"). The author's raw sketches and original works of lyrical poetry add depth and texture to a narrative already spiced with unfettered cultural criticism ("Paris is now a totally decadent museum of the past"), swatches of stream-of-consciousness "running thoughts," internal observations, and "curious sexual Italian stories." Readers curious about how Ferlinghetti's mind works will find this whirlwind ride through Europe and beyond the ultimate vicarious escape, as his anecdotal musings hover over a richly savored life enjoyed without regret or misgivings. The artistic intensity of life suffuses this epic memoir spanning the "interior monologues" of a gifted American artist.

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August 1, 2015

Poet, publisher, painter, and bookseller, Ferlinghetti, age 96, has made a considerable contribution to contemporary arts and letters. This hefty volume gathers six decades of journal entries, including two previously published collections, The Mexican Night (1970) and Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre (1984). Chronologically arranged entries record the author's reactions as he travels the globe, visiting or revisiting a wide range of places domestic and foreign, such as Cuba, Haiti, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Greece, Russia, and Australia. They also recount meetings with friends and colleagues Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Andrei Voznesensky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Ernesto Cardenal, and Ezra Pound, among others. Ferlinghetti's descriptions of these places are rich, but it is the responses they arouse in him that are most riveting, particularly as they relate to art, religion, and politics. Toward the book's end the prose turns nostalgic as Ferlinghetti remembers friends who have passed on, his thoughts on mortality filtered through the lenses of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. A generous selection of drawings and several poems are included. VERDICT Avid readers of Ferlinghetti's work will welcome this collection as the 100th anniversary of his birth in 2019 draws ever nearer. It may also provide grist for future biographers.--William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY

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