December 15, 2005

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Americus I (New York: New Directions, 2004). 90 pages. $21.95 (hard).

___, Tryannus Nix? (New York: New Directions, 1969). 92 pages.

All of the protest poetry floating around right now sent me searching through some of the latter-day Vietnam era protest material to see how it all stands up 30 or more years later. Tryannus Nix's handwritten scrawl has all the immediacy of a mimeographed manifesto rant: "Oh Quaker King I hope you do not turn out still to have the Jupiter Complex with the idea you can win all war if you throw enough thunderbirds" (49), and it never once lets up. Change a few of the proper nouns (Bush for Nixon, Iraq/Afghanistan for Vietnam, etc...) and this would stand up with the best of what's circulating now (minus some of the Buddhist lotus flowers though).

Americus I is a definite departure for Ferlinghetti even from 2001's How to Paint Sunlight, let alone the anti-establishment, mega-phone toting prophet of Tryannus. It's a canto cycle in every sense. More Whitmanesque in its catalogue style (see for example "III," pp. 11-7) and inclusion than Byron, Pound or Zukofsky, Ferlinghetti's poems chronicle the events (primarily) of the last century, using headlines, quotes, letters, and other documents to flesh out his subjects and expand the scope of his discussion. There is a touch of the Poundian/Talmudic conversations across centuries and continents, but again and again Ferlinghetti returns to the core of an American collective consciousness: FDR, JFK, Brooklyn, baseball ....