Translated into nine languages and with over a million copies sold. Safe to say this book is an absolute classic. It carries an element of cool that can be hard to find in poetry books and despite being of its age, it still delivers with gut-punch and gusto today. It’s all I’ve read of Ferlinghetti, but it has a swagger that means I’m looking forward to digging into more.
The spiel at the start of the video about it being stories that differentiate us human-types from other animals was lifted from the start of Sapiens in which Yuval Noah Harari details the many ways we collectively believe fabricated tales in order to maintain society via cohesive collaboration.
“Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”
“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
I love that Ferlinghetti twists a tale that carries more weight than most and makes it his own whilst shining a light on some of the idiosyncrasies of religious belief. I say this without any intention to offend and with a healthy bout of agnostic chin scratching about what lies out there in the great beyond.
I wrote a poem about exactly this called A Glimpse and the Ghost and you can find that on my Instagram here where I shared a post shortly after it was published in Dreich Magazine. I’ll add a photo below too, and you can hear me break it down on the Words in Chalk podcast too ⬇️
podcast
Sometime During Eternity by Lawrence Ferlinghetti