Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the last representative …

“We can’t just be salon poets,” he said. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the last poet and editor of the beat generation, who died at the age of 101 at his home in San Francisco from lung disease. Ferlinghetti founded the bookshop and publisher City lights, with which he published in 1956 To scream, by Allen Ginsberg, a book that won him a public trial of obscenity for the foul language about homosexuality used by the author. “Poetry must communicate with people, this is not the time for minority poetry. It’s a luxury we cannot afford as we watch Rome burn. Too many poets just whisper in their breath. Poetry must be intelligible to the man in the street, ”suggested the publisher and mythical poet.

Ferlinghetti, born in New York on March 24, 1919, was the youngest of five children from a family of Italian immigrants. Her father died before she was born and her mother, French, suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted at the age of two. In 1941 he received a BA in Journalism from the University of North Carolina and soon after served in the Navy during World War II. After the atomic bomb in Nagasaki, he became a staunch pacifist and opposed to nuclear weapons. When he moved to San Francisco in the 1950s, he opened his own bookstore City lights in 1953, meeting point of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Gary Snyder, among other members of the Beat Generation, a movement that shook cultural foundations and played in the big Bang of the counter-culture. Ferlinghetti had the idea that the bookstore should be a center of intellectual activity. From the publishing house of the same name, it spread to authors little known at the time, such as the poets Denise Levertov or Diane di Prima. Without Ginsberg there wouldn’t have been a generation beatbut a bunch of writers in a vast landscape. He is the creator of everything, ”recalled the poet and editor in a 2016 interview with The country from Spain. “Writers don’t stop until they can hold the pen. I’m working on something that looks like a novel, it’s more of a torrent of thoughts, ”Ferlinghetti admitted five years ago.

Perhaps his role as publisher and bookseller has eclipsed his work, consisting of a dozen books, among which stand out An island of the spirit of Coney (1958), one of the most successful collections of poems in American literature, with one million copies sold. The style that emerges from this collection of poems is part of the oral tradition; these poems were written to be read aloud and accompanied by jazz. The Cordoba publishing house Alción has two translated Ferlinghetti books in its catalog: Poetry as an insurgent art Yes The blues of procreation and other poems. There are also poems by Ferlinghetti in the anthology Beat poetry, published by Buenos Aires Poetry. Tireless traveler, he lived in France, he was in Spain, Italy, Russia, Chile, Peru, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Cuba, and met Pablo Neruda, Ernesto Cardenal and Nicanor Parra, among other poets. He also painted pictures for many years. He was never a harmless salon poet; With his poems, Ferlinghetti brought to light a radical way of being in the world.