Lawrence Ferlinghetti died today. Back in 1953, with a $500 investment, he opened what would soon become the legendary City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. Poetry, to him, lived somewhere between speech and a song. He rocketed into the public consciousness with the publication of Alan Ginsberg’s, “Howl”. City Lights became the go to scene for the Beat Generation. When I read Ferlinghetti’s, Coney Island of the Mind, although I was only a pischerka way away on the far coast of Baltimore, Maryland, I fancied myself a Beat poet as well. My first poem, “Love Is A Feeling”, was a coffee house hit. My true mensch of a life-long buddy living in Florida can still quote the thing. I remember the first one dozen words or so, and I’m embarrassed when I think of them. My then girlfriend, Shelly, with long black hair and heavily made-up eyes walked through the audience with a bread basket chanting, “Bread for the poet. Bread for the poet.” Seven bucks. I thought I was hot shit. Three days later she ran away to South America with a jazz drummer. Never saw her again. He must have been more hot shit than I was.
When I was at Yale I took a course in literary criticism in the graduate English Department taught by Cleanth Brooks, a well known lit-critic I had studied while at Morgan. “When someone tells me they want to be a writer, I ask them why? If they answer, ‘Because I have something to say,’ they’re not a writer, but if they say it’s because they love what words can do, they might just be a writer.” Me? My desert island book has always been Roget’s Thesaurus. I love what words can do, the way they play with each other, the way they sound. I never let a sentence go free unless it sounds right.
My final year at Yale all of the playwrights in my class hustled to take a course in film taught by Michael Roemer and Robert Young, wonderful filmmakers whose recent credit, Nothing But A Man, starred Abby Lincoln and Ivan Dixon along with Moses Gunn, Gloria Foster, Esther Rolle, and Yaphet Kotto, young Black actors, mostly unknowns at the time. I was taken with that film and it spoiled me forever into thinking that’s exactly what a movie should be, in other words, about something. Anyway, I remember crossing the street towards the School of Drama building while the rest of my class passed me in the opposite direction heading for the seminar in film. I was having a hard enough time learning to write a play. I didn’t want to mess with movies.
Nu?
Decades later I sold my first script to Universal and signed a three picture deal. A meeting was set at Universal/Park Ave/NYC with Jennings Lang, the exec who bought it. I had a blue wool suit which I never wore but decided to wear that day. The first words Jennings said to me when I walked through the door were, “I see you wore your Bar Mitzvah suit.” Right then and there I should’ve known better. At some point in our meeting I kvelled about my ability to write action sequences. “I didn’t buy it for the action,” he growled, “I bought it for the love story.” It was years before I finally got it: Write from the heart or don’t bother to write at all.
What follows appears to be a graceless segue, but please indulge me.
Some of my best friends have been fly fisherman (Two happen to be Jewish, but that's inconsequential). One, dead for decades now, was an ungainly guy -- big bellied with gangly arms and legs, and eyes that fixed you sure but seemed to come from two different directions. However, put a fly rod in his hand and he became pure grace. The line he looped backwards and then slipped forward was balletic, elegant, breathtaking, even gentle. His ability to place the fly exactly where the fish would take it was a joy to watch. I say "watch" because I am not a fisherman. I don't like to eat fish so see no point in catching them. My friends practice "catch and release" -- catch them; let them go -- but again I see no point in causing a creature panic just for the fun of it. It doesn't know it's going to be set free. It thinks it's going to die. However, as I was staring into the creek that flows in front of my house it occurred to me that I do practice catch and release, only in my own way.
Robert Frost said that a poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of anger, a homesickness, a love sickness. It is never a thought to begin with. When I walk my woods and stare at rushing water I have no words either. I listen to all the birds singing with no goal to capture them on a list. I don't care what they're called. I just want to listen. I have no thoughts but I do have a lump in my throat. I do have yearnings. My job (if one can call what I do a job) is to capture these feelings by putting words to them, to craft them and allow them to float free of me, to bring them to the attention of someone else, to share them. In this way I keep my thoughts from dying with me. I don't believe in any mystical after life experience. I believe the here and now is all I've got. Except for the words I choose. If I choose them properly they will live on beyond me. I catch my feelings, distill them, and craft a spell that sends them on their way, to you, I hope. When I write a book or a screenplay external factors, lots of external factors, are involved. But these blogs are written for the pure pleasure of writing them, for the freedom I felt as a little boy rolling down a grassy hill and smelling spring onions as I mashed them on the way. Of course, having spent my life as a professional writer I do believe in an audience out there somewhere. I don't believe writers who profess not to care what other people think of their work. Of course, I care, but these blogs are not written for the same reason as the work for which I sometimes get paid. They begin as a lump in the throat, not a pitch, not a log line, not a query letter, not a movie star in sight. For me they begin as something deep and mysterious. They come from somewhere and must mean something, but I don't know what until I catch them, process them, and let them go. The mystery, however, never goes. I continue to believe in the deep and mysterious, but only in all too rare moments do I catch a whiff of what it is. Only then.
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