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Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry as Insurgent Art

Lawrence Ferlinghetti died this week at 101. I can’t remember when I picked up my copy of Poetry as Insurgent Art. The latest copyright in the back is 2007, so that rules out college.

I was ready to claim the title page as an inspiration for the look of Steal Like An Artist, but if I didn’t get the book until my first trip to City Lights in San Francisco, that was in 2012 on the Steal book tour.

(I do think sometimes that artists tend to claim influence apocryphally — you put your work in the world and then you find all the stuff you should’ve looked at before you made the work.)

The thing I remember most about my first visit to City Lights in North Beach — other than the wonderful poetry room with the big dictionary in the corner — was all the hand-painted Ferlinghetti signs everywhere. I think I liked looking at those as much as I liked browsing the books.

One thing to know about Ferlinghetti is that while best known as a poet and a publisher, what he really wanted to be was a painter. He wrote about it in “More Light”:

I never wanted to be a poet. It chose me, I didn’t choose it. One becomes a poet almost against one’s will, certainly against one’s better judgment. I wanted to be a painter but from the age of ten onward these damn poems kept coming. Perhaps one of these days they will leave me alone and I can get back to painting.

There’s a great story on the City Lights website about how he discovered the basement and the signs you see behind him in the photos above:

Ferlinghetti also discovered signs painted on the walls by a Christian sect that had used the basement for prayer meetings, and on the walls today you can still fragments of them: “Remember Lot’s Wife,” “Born in Sin and Shapen in Niquity,” “I and My Father Are One,” and “I Am the Door.” Ferlinghetti made a deal with the landlord, put in a staircase, persuaded the Chinese Dragon to leave, and expanded the store into the basement.

Surely, those signs must’ve inspired him to make his own.

* * *

Every Friday I pull one of my favorite books off the Bookshelf. To see more of my favorite books, check out my reading years.

The good enough parent

Dan Sinker is one of the writers who I think is best capturing the fury and heartbreak and fleeting moments of beauty involved in being a parent right now.

I loved this piece about bird-watching during the pandemic and this epic thread of his kid’s drawings:

He recently published “There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Good’ Parent in a Pandemic” in Esquire:

Every parent wants to be a good parent. And every parent, every day, fails at that because, right now, being a good parent is literally impossible. A fine parent? Maybe. An OK one? Possibly. But a good one? We’re eleven months into a pandemic that sent all our children home, laid waste to jobs, killed a half-million people in this country, and sickened many millions more. Politicians like Ted Cruz ensured it would hurt as much as possible by fighting against public health measures and relief efforts that would have made a difference. So no: a good parent isn’t really an option. We’re all just barely getting by.

“Every parent—every single parent—has known the crash this year,” he writes.

Yup.

lower your expectations bumper sticker

I have two of these bumper stickers: one in my studio, and one on our refrigerator.

What I hang onto these days is the D.W. Winnicott’s concept of the “good-enough” mother.  “Success” in caring for children, he wrote in Playing and Reality, “depends on the fact of devotion, not on cleverness or intellectual enlightenment.” All the devotion required is an ordinary devotion, as he put it. No particular need for extraordinary skill or expertise.

In Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2016), she jokes about the concept’s popularity:

Winnicott’s concept of “good enough” mothering is in resurgence right now. You can find it everywhere from mommy blogs to Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Are You My Mother? to reams of critical theory. (One of this book’s titles, in an alternate universe: Why Winnicott Now?)

“If you are satisfied with being a good enough parent, and have no illusions that perfection is possible,” Peter Gray writes, “you see this problem for what it is, a problem to try to solve, not a tragedy, not an occasion for blame or shame.”

Me, I’m trying to see it as a comedy, or a farce, or maybe just bad improv. Making do with what we have.

We might not be able to be good right now, but we can be good enough.

* * *

See also: “Manifesto of the Idle Parent” and “You are forgiven!”

Learning to pray with James Martin and Mary Karr

A few nights ago I had a glass of wine and doodled while I watched Mary Karr interview James Martin about his new book, Learning To Pray:

Once upon a time, before Martin’s newest book, I asked Karr for a reading list on prayer and she obliged:

See also: On praying, whether you believe it or not

The stream I go a-fishing in

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.”
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Musician James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem has taken up fishing during the pandemic.

“I’m somehow able to get outside myself,” he says, “unburdened for a few hours by whatever it is I really should be doing, while I, instead, do this repeated motion, over and over…”

He says that there’s “a meditative quality to the work” and he often repeats to himself, “Slow is fast. Slow is fast.”

“I needed for time to be meaningless so I could justify spending a few weeks learning how to do this new thing.”

It tickles me that he talks about learning to fish the way some people would talk about learning to play music.

I’m also thinking, well beyond the pandemic, we can declare time “meaningless” any time we want, and give ourself permission to learn new things…

Filed under: fishing

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