Contemporary Poetry

performance and the poem 101

COUNTERCULTURAL PERFORMANCE: LAWRENCE
FERLINGHETTI

In his essay ‘Modern Poetry is Prose’ ( 1978 ), Lawrence Ferlinghetti
nostalgically looks back at a tradition of song in modern American
poetry:

Wallace Stevens with his ‘harmonious fi ctive music’. And

there was Langston Hughes. And Allen Ginsberg, chanting

his mantras, singing Blake. There still are others elsewhere,

jazz poets and poetic strummers and wailers in the streets of

the world, making poetry out of the urgent, insurgent.^5

Ferlinghetti’s poetry is associated with the countercultural move-
ments of 1950 s America. The Beats’ emphasis upon the impor-
tance of the spoken word meant poetry inhabited the public sphere,
often as protest. The emergence of Ferlinghetti’s poetry in the
1950 s coincides with the movement of poetry from the confi nes of
the academy to a more accessible and spontaneous form – or what
Robert Lowell referred to as the difference between ‘the raw and
the cooked’.^6 In an early poem, ‘Constantly Risking Absurdity’
( 1958 ), Ferlinghetti pinpoints this emphasis upon performance as
a trademark of the poet’s work.^7 The poet is both an acrobat per-
forming ‘above the heads / of his audience’, balanced precariously
on the ‘high wire of his own making’ (p. 45 ) and a comedian enter-
taining the audience as ‘a little charleychaplin man’ (p. 46 ). The
‘acrobat’ poet strives towards the ‘high perch’ where the fi gurative
ideal of ‘Beauty stands’ (p. 46 ), whereas the ‘comic’ poet has the
task of catching her ‘spreadeagled in the empty air’ (p. 46 ). In the
poem the poet embraces two roles: one stuns with his daring feats
and risks in the face of danger, while the other acts as a performing
comic everyman. This is not unlike the description of poetry in
Ferlinghetti’s essay ‘What is Poetry?’ as ‘a clown’ who ‘laughs’ and
‘a clown [who] weeps dropping his mask’.^8
A powerful rhetorical appeal is performed by Ferlinghetti’s ‘I
am Waiting’ ( 1958 ), which addresses American policy-making,
historical narratives, ideas of spiritual awakening and literary
history. The performance of the poem relies upon the repeated