Ferlinghetti on San Francisco

It’s so easy, with the jaded attitudes of the modern day, to write off some of the things that Ferlinghetti says about San Francisco (in his essays, but sub-textually in some of his poems) as a sort of naiveté. Not the ignorance of youth or lack of experience, but the naiveté of someone who has seen a great time and thinks that it is possible for such a time to exist again. His railing against automobiles and tourism for instance; it’s hard for someone who never witnessed what I guess could be called the beat age to imagine the City like that, and even harder to imagine it ever being like that again. It’s in that vein then that I’ll say what the most profound effect of Ferlinghetti’s poetry was on me. It was the way it represented the city with such light as to banish, if even just for a moment, those thoughts and inspire a vision of San Francisco not as a place with a frighteningly bad ratio of income to living cost, but as, well, his “far-out city on the left side of the world.”

Without going into too much detail on any particular work, I think there is one major accomplishment throughout all these poems that helps to bring them home. You could call it accessibility, but I want to risk disagreement and call it simplicity. One could argue that these poems are anything but simple, and I wouldn’t say they’re not thematically complex, but the colloquial dressings of language that they employ I think represent a literal, textural resistance against the cars and tourism, against postmodern convolutedness. And yet, within what would seem to be the limitation of his simple language, the words themselves are beautiful. A North Beach Scene, which is my favorite poem in this compilation, is dripping with imagery of aesthetic loveliness, yet its artistry is still found in simplicity. I can only describe it as elegance.

If there is one way these poems describe San Francisco, it is with hope. They suggest that there is still hope for the City to go back to the way Ferlinghetti clearly remembers it. Even if they weren’t also great poems, that would be enough to justify their writing.