Americus, Book I

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Book Overview

In less than a year, Lawrence Ferlinghetti won a lifetime achievement award from the Author's Guild, received the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and celebrated the 50th anniversary of his renowned City Lights Bookstore. Now, instead of resting on these many laurels, the elder statesman of American poetry "lights out for the territories" with Book I of his own born-in-the-USA narrative, Americus. Describing his work as "part documentary, part public pillow-talk, part personal epic....a descant, a canto unsung, a banal history, a true fiction, lyric and political...," Ferlinghetti merges "certain universal texts, snatches of song, words or phrases, murmuring of love or hate, from Lotte Lenya to the latest soul singer, sayings and shibboleths from Yogi Berra to the National Anthem and the Gettysburg Address or the Ginsberg Address, that haunt our nocturnal imagination...." This sit-up-and-take-notice work breaks new ground in the grand tradition of Whitman, Williams, Olson and Pound, as Ferlinghetti stalks our literary and political landscapes, past and present, to articulate the unique voice of America and create an autobiography of our collective American consciousness.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811215784
• ISBN13: 9780811215787
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 90 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.3" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A great poetic collage

The reviewers didn't get this book. Ferlinghetti speaks to the heart of American experience here in the spirit of John Dos Passos "USA" but without Dos Passos political hysteria. Americus is a great overview of American poetics while at the same time being this incredible distillation of Ferlighetti's own vision of American and the world. To read this book is to revisit some of Ferlinghetti's best writing as he looks back on the world so far. It is an incredible achievment in a time where it is so unfashionable to be political or to see the world beyond the elitest confines of academic poetry. The Publisher's Weekly review misses the mark, he does not try to rival Whitman or Pound, but he takes that voice into our new millenium. I see him as a continuation of the work that so many modern poets are afraid to take up. I am looking forward to book II.