Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"Here are all of Ferlinghetti's poems set in the city he has lived in for over half a century. He brings alive, with wit and lyricism, scenes of city life: a Giants baseball game, the Green Street Marching Mortuary Band, bohemian North Beach, Golden Gate Park, yachts on the Bay, and more. Also included are historic photographs, scattered prose pieces, and the text of his mischievous inaugural address with his vision of the city's history as a poetic center and suggestions for keeping it that way."--BOOK JACKET.

Incident —Countee Cullen 5 Excerpt from The History of Art —H. W. Janson 11 Don't let that horse/eat that violin —Lawrence Ferlinghetti 11 The Upturned Face —Stephen Crane 14 How to Defuse the Population Bomb—Robert S. McNamara zz Population: The Uninvited Guest—Eugene Linden 30 Excerpt from My Lord, What a Morning —Marian Anderson 34 Parent and Child: What's behind spiked hair and pierced ears—Lawrence Kutner 37 Language and the Lunatic Fringe —Doris Lessing 40 Excerpt from Mr. Godolphin—Martha Sullivan Research in Brief: Flight of the Bumblebee —Mary Jones 48 How a New England Legend Came to Be —Alan Ferguson 50 Maintaining the Organic Lawn 51 Village of Snake Charmers Sees Hard Times —Barbara Crossette 52 Assault Weapons Aren't 'the Problem —Gary Kleck 54 Our Two-Sided Brain —John Chaffee 65 Stars —Sara Teasdale 80 Excerpt from Tarzan of the Apes—Edgar Rice Burroughs 91 The Waning Moon—Percy Bysshe Shelley 103 Hagar the Horrible—Dik Browne 103 The First Tastes of Vintage '93—Bryan Miller 104 '80s-Babble: Untidy Treasure —Stefan Kanfer 105 Dermatitis —Samuel M. Bluefarb, M.D. 117 A Brief History of Exercise—Victoria Roberts 143 [The Story of an Hour]( —Kate Chopin 177 I'm Your Horse in the Night—Luisa Valenzuela 183 Appointment in Samarra—W. Somerset Maugham 191 Excerpt from Elmira—Richard Brautigan 197 Excerpt from [Fahrenheit 451]( Bradbury 203 Chains 1942—Fanny Tillman Trueherz and Sandra Brown 209 Jack Luggage —William McGreevy 221 Girls of Summer —Marie Brenner 229 Death in the Orchard—Edward Brown 235 Excerpt from "No Name Woman" in The Woman Warrior—Maxine Hong Kingston 241 A Rough Ride—John Marchese 247 Marian Anderson Is Dead at 96; Singer Shattered Racial Barriers —Allan Kozinn 257 300 People of Letters Come To Pulitzer's Birthday Party—James Barron 265 How to Assay an Essay —Carmen Collins 283 Hand, Eye, Brain: Some "Basics" in the Writing Process—Janet Emig 289 Seeing and Imagining: Clues to the Workings Of the Mind's Eye—Sandra Blakeslee 295 Linguists Debate Study Classifying Language As Innate Human Skill —Gina Kolata 305 The Many Lives and Tricks of 9 —Pico Iyer 313 Cross Out a Landmark on the Chinatown Tour—Michael T. Kaufman 319 Dollie And Johnnie—William Safire 325 Into the Sunshine and Another Spring—John A. Gould 331 Language of Early Americans is Deciphered —John Noble Wilford 337 In Praise of the Humble Comma—Pico lyer 345 The 30•Second Spot Quiz —Hugh Rank 362 The Communication Collapse—Norman Cousins 371 Appearances Are Destructive—Mark Mathabane 377 Voters Assailed by Unfair Persuasion—Daniel Goleman 383 When Movies Ruled Our Lives—Theodore Roszak 399 Hue and Cry—Barbara Flanagan 407

The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller's into the Night Life and expresses the way Lawrence Ferlinghetti felt about these poems when he wrote them during a short period in the 1950's-as if they were taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul. The twenty-nice poems of the title section form an integrated sequence in which the poet's eye sees beneath the "surface of the round world," while the section entitled "Oral Messages" was particularly written to be read aloud and communicated in the voice of our times. A measure of the poet's success in this is evident in that the paperback edition of a Coney Island of the Mind is now in its nineteenth printing with a total of 300,000 copies in print.

Ferlinghetti's first book since "Poetry as Insurgent Art," a new call to action and a vivid picture of civilization moving towards its brink.

Discussion of writing career; association with Book Club of California; printers, writers. bibliophiles and artists he has known. Photographs inserted.