Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals 1960-2010
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
This long-awaited volume provides a panoramic portrait of art and life across the twentieth century, from Mexico to Morocco, Paris to Rome, and beyond.
Over the course of an adventured-filled life, now in its tenth decade, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been many things: a poet, painter, pacifist, publisher, courageous defender of free speech, and owner of San Francisco’s legendary City Lights bookstore. Now the man whose A Coney Island of the Mind became a generational classic reveals yet another facet of his manifold talents, presenting here his travel journals, spanning over sixty years. Selected from a vast trove of mostly unpublished, handwritten notebooks, and edited by Giada Diano and Matthew Gleeson, Writing Across the Landscape becomes a transformative work of social, cultural, and literary history.
Beginning with Ferlinghetti's account of serving as a commanding officer on a Navy sub-chaser during D-Day, Writing Across the Landscape dramatically traverses the latter half of the twentieth century. For those only familiar with his poetry, these pages present a Lawrence Ferlinghetti never before encountered, an elegant prose stylist and tireless political activist who was warning against the pernicious sins of our ever-expansive corporate culture long before such thoughts ever seeped into mainstream consciousness.
Yet first and foremost we see an inquisitive wanderer whose firsthand accounts of people and places are filled with pungent descriptions that animate the landscapes and cultures he encounters. Evoking each journey with a mixture of travelogue and poetry as well as his own hand-drawn sketches, Ferlinghetti adopts the role of an American bard, providing panoramic views of the Cuban Revolution in Havana, 1960, and a trip through Haiti, where voodoo and Catholicism clash in cathedrals "filled with ulcerous children's feet running from Baron Hunger." Reminding us that poverty is not only to be found abroad, Ferlinghetti narrates a Steinbeck-like trip through California's Salton Sea, a sad yet exquisitely melodic odyssey from motel to motel, experiencing the life "between cocktails, between filling stations, between buses, trains, towns, restaurants, movies, highways leading over horizons to another Rest Stop…Sad hope of all their journeys to Nowhere and back in dark Eternity."
Particularly memorable is his journey across the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1957, which turns into a Kafkaesque nightmare in which he, lacking a proper visa, is removed from a Japan-bound freighter and forced back across the Russian steppe to Moscow, encountering a countryside more Tolstoy than Khrushchev, while nearly dying in the process. Readers are also treated to glimpses of Ezra Pound, "looking like an old Chinese sage," whom Ferlinghetti espies in Italy, as well as fellow Beat legends Allen Ginsberg and a dyspeptic William S. Burroughs, immured with his cats in a grotto-like apartment in London.
Embedded with facsimile manuscript pages and an array of poems, many never before published, Writing Across the Landscape revives an era when political activism coursed through the land and refashions Lawrence Ferlinghetti, not only as a seminal poet but as an historic and singular American voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.