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. |a New York (State) |z New York |z Coney Island. |a Coney Island (New York, N.Y.) |0 |v Poetry. |a A Coney Island of the mind - Oral messages - Poems from Pictures of the gone world (1955).

|a New York : |b New Directions Books, |c |a A Coney Island of the mind : |b poems / |c by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. |a DLC |b eng |c WSU |d OCL |d NLGGC |d BTCTA |d YDXCP |d ZXN |d TTU |d KYL |d YHM |d CO3 |d IAY |d JQI |d BAKER |d HRH |d XV9 |d OCLCA |d OCLCF |d CLZ

He wrote a coney island of the mind