Ferlinghetti is a national treasure, and his voice has become part of our collective conscience. Some of his most famous poems from this collection such as "I Am Waiting" and "Junkman's Obbligato" were created for jazz accompaniment. Written in the conservative post-war 1950s, his poems still resonate, as they will continue to resonate, with a joyful anti-establishment fervor that beats a rhythmic portrait of humanity. Ferlinghetti sings of a world in which "the heart flops over / gasping 'Love'," "cadillacs fell thru the trees like rain," and where "we are the same people / only further from home / on freeways fifty lanes wide." This special 50th Anniversary Edition comes with a newly recorded CD of the author reading the 29 poems of the title section of A Coney Island of the Mind as well as selections from Pictures of the Gone World.

Choosing his own best work from his eight previous books of poetry, beginning with "Pictures of the Gone World", Ferlinghetti also includes a long poem, "Endless Life", from a work in progress.

"Lawrence Ferlinghetti has influenced American culture like few other poets. But in 1955, shortly before he would gain fame as the beloved author of A Coney Island of the Mind, he was an unpublished and mostly unknown poet. He launched City Lights Publishers that year with a five-hundred-copy letterpress edition of Pictures of the Gone World, Number One in the Pocket Poets Series. A classic collection of early work, Pictures includes many of Ferlinghetti's most iconic poems. This limited edition sixtieth anniversary hardcover restores the book to its original selection, and is a must for collectors and fans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a poet, painter, and founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers"--

Here are all of Ferlinghetti's poems set in the city he has lived in for over half a century. He brings alive, with wit and lyricism, scenes of city life: a Giants baseball game, the Green Street Marching Mortuary Band, bohemian North Beach, Golden Gate Park, yachts on the Bay, and more. Also included are historic photographs, scattered prose pieces, and the text of his mischievous inaugural address with his vision of the city's history as a poetic center and suggestions for keeping it that way. Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a bookman, painter and author of poetry, fiction, essays and plays. His most recent books are How to Paint Sunlight (poetry) and Love in the Days of Rage (fiction).

Short and inspiring, but rarely surprising, this collection of remarks, aphorisms and exhortations about the nature and purpose of poetry began in the late 1950s, when Ferlinghetti was just coming into his own as a Beat poet and publisher of City Lights Books. After 50 years of revisions and additions, his claims may not strike experienced readers as fresh-and some may even seem cliched: "The state of the world," his first page declares, "calls out for poetry to save it." On the other hand, Ferlinghetti's very large body of fans (he is one of the bestselling 20th-century American poets) should find reason and justice in these eternal verities, couched in up-to-date lingo: "Poems are e-mails from the unknown beyond cyberspace," for example. Beginning teachers of creative writing should also find Ferlinghetti's instructions of use: "Read between the lines of human discourse." Two groups of aphorisms make up most of the volume, to which Ferlinghetti adds a short essay and two 1970s poems. "Modern Poetry Is Prose" encourages young writers to discover the "dark spirit of earth and blood"; "Populist Manifesto #1" hopes "Whitman's wild children," however pressed down by modernity, will soon "Awake and sing in the open.

A sequel to A Coney Island of the Mind (written forty years after the original in what the author has called "a poetry seizure" that lasted more than a year), A Far Rockaway of the Heart is a sequence of one hundred and one related poems with recurrent themes. The author also thinks of it as a kind of caustic critique of modern poetry, including confrontations with or parodies of major figures in the literary avant-garde before the arrival of the Beat generation, notably Pound and Eliot, Beckett and Joyce.

"In 1969, Allen Ginsberg wrote to his friend, fellow poet, and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Alas, telephone destroys letters!" Fortunately, however, by then the two had already exchanged a treasure trove of personal correspondence, and more than any other documents, their letters-intimate, opinionated, and action-packed-reveal the true nature of their lifelong friendship and creative relationship. Collected here for the first time, they offer an intimate view into the range of artistic vision and complementary sensibilities that fueled the genius of their literary collaborations.Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were two of the twentieth century's most influential literary rebels, and their correspondence documents a time when both were rising to the peak of their notoriety and international fame, traveling, writing, publishing, and performing their poetry during times of unprecedented social and cultural experimentation and upheaval. Ferlinghetti was Ginsberg's publisher and editor, and the correspondence begins with a telegram from Lawrence after hearing Allen's legendary reading of "Howl" at the Six Gallery: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?"The majority of the letters collected here have never before been published, and they span the period from 1955 until Ginsberg's death in 1997. Facsimiles and photographs enhance the collection, an evocative portrait of an inspiring and enduring relationship.Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an internationally renowned poet, painter, publisher, and founder of City Lights Books.Allen Ginsberg was a leading member of the Beat Generation and an award-winning poet best known as the author of Howl & Other Poems, among many other works"--

Beatnik poetry from the owner of City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco.

Selected works reveal the modern poet's thoughts on personal, social and political concerns.

"To all those who have for several years sought to discredit the new American literature, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has just dealt a most powerful blow," wrote French critic Pierre Lepape in 1961 when Her was published in France as La Quatrième Personne du Singulier. Calling it "a masterpiece of the young American novel," Lepape declared it was "the confirmation of a great American writer who, in the hall of American literary glories, takes the place left vacant by the death of Hemingway." Lepape went on to speak of the "incredible verbal virtuosity" by which the reader is led through this "laby-rêve," and it is this image of the "labyrinth-dream" which relates Her to the anti-novels of the young French school of Robbe-Grillet and Butor. Being thus very far from the kind of novels produced by Ferlinghetti's immediate contemporaries (whether Beat or academic) this book has met with little but bafflement among American critics. With well over 50,000 now in print Her nevertheless continues to make its own way.

Poems deal with identity, loneliness, hope, the past, divorce, paintings, identity, nature, travel, and dreams

Hardcover Very Good. No Jacket Book. 7 3/4 By 7 3/4`` Poetry, Record of author reading three chapters included. Pocket holding 33 1/3 record has been torn with large piece missing. Slight signs of age to hardcover. No DJ.

Six long poems in which Ferlinghetti reflects on American events of the late sixties and a winter journey across Russia

"Tyrannus Nix is a development of a very American and special genre which the author characterizes not as poetry but as 'political-satirical tirade' on the subject of President Nixon."