ferlinghetti’s phrases

cover art by Ferlinghetti – foto by Smith

I’m reading Her by Lawrence Ferlinghetti a few pages a day in the bathroom. Lady bought it used (original 1960 price $1.35) and one of the previous owners underlined the oddest lot of phrases I’ve come across – I can find no rhyme or reason, mete or metaphor, approach or pattern in their selected phrases. Sometimes there are 4 phrases underlined on one page, then dozens of unmarked pages come along.

It is a poet’s novel – all dreamy stream of conscious surreal, punny, so far in the first 63 pages no plot beyond looking for some pure Her in Paris.

There are 156 under-lined phrases. I’ve not added, rearranged or changed anything. but I did delete 59 lines, so we’re down to 97 phrases underlined by some unknown person sometime between 1960 and 2009.

I could have deleted more phrases, but the beats always tended to be long anyway, so this is truer.

Here’s a brand new Beatnik poem from a real Beatnik’s 1960 Beatnik words now 49 years re-used.

Like a Far Note in a Blue Bottle
(words by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, edit by chance and Smith)

I was bearing a white phallus through the wood of the world,
I was looking for a place to plunge it,
corresponding almost exactly to reality,
Like an extra in a grade B movie,
I was looking for the main character of my life,
merely a dumb member of the audience
strayed onto the stage by mistake,
looking for some printed program he had dropped under a seat.
I had somewhere dropped the key that explained the action,
interchanged, fused together.
ran off through the streets of the world,
a small eternity passed,
I returned and returned.
a scene I had already painted
the paint had now grown wet again
a melting mirror
suspended in silence
a waiting hush.
exiled me to spend the rest of my life picking
strings in the streets of Paris.
recurrent delusion
utmost clarity or hallucination
mounted on the beast of myself,
a toilet ball, flushed.
goop
after the beginning of eternity
one pollywog willing to lose its tail
and thus establishing the existence of free will
undecided embryo just beginning
vaguely like a statue of inhumanity
Miss Liberty on a canceled postage stamp
in a cracked shaving mirror under a bare bulb
junk
jism
fertile rain
turning over the coins of house numbers
mad hero
horny hand
wet clay statues
faint smell of parrot droppings
the streets of the earth
fossil footprints
knotted rubber bands
an anonymous receptacle into which I could pour myself
Shot sun
classic columns holding up nothing.
like an amoeba surrounding its food.
skeleton key,
keyhole,
made of real American pigeon feathers,
Love
Poetry Revolution
pocket watches hung from trees
crowds of black berets and herds of sandals
combing their hair with Grecian lyres.
mad poets
Occupation of the world,
junkie midnight sun
my face in the cracked shaving mirror beneath a bare bulb
in and out of reality.
one huge landscape of flesh,
unbaked clay
innermost swinger beyond the self,
pavement slipped under,
stationary, running.
manufacture existence,
squeezed from a tube,
sperm rain,
enigmatic smile
like the tiny tail of a swallowed goldfish,
the cool eye of the fourth person singular
light from illusion
euphoria
mad blind owl
like a far note in a blue bottle
pad parties
true beat paint-poet
ice-cream hills
ivory skin
corkscrew ladder
eternal tourist in Hell
white as the bleached skull of a cow.
made of mascara,
polyphoboisterous
black flower,
rolled my life in a cave and put a stone in front,
the green leprosy of moss
B.O. of the soul,
a round egg in a square world,
disarm
unharm
alarm
when my pinball machine registers tilt
heaven might really fall down on the whole scene
zow wow
who stole robin’s cock
wonderful wizard of odds

(taken from under-lined phrases in A New Directions Paperbook 1960 4th printing of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s novel Her. The word “zow” is not Ferlinghetti’s – it was added just before “wow” by whomever underlined Ferlinghetti’s phrases)

Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac – foto by Smith