Wild Dreams of a New Beginning by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I've been feeling very poetic lately--perhaps due to a poem I was made to write for reasons that really don't matter here… At any rate, this compilation of sometimes-inciteful and sometimes-eclectic poems from the 70s stood out to me on the library shelves and I decided to take a whack at reading it.

I am not really a fan of revolutionary poetry that uses seemingly completely unrelated imagery to express political opinions. So this one was a bit of a stretch for me.

What really helped was my understanding of the places Ferlinghetti mentions in his poems. He throws around locations and pop culture references like Jelly Bellies in a Reagan museum. If you don't get that sentence--I mean, really get it--you will not get some of his poems. A lot of California culture and subcultures are referenced in the blink of an eye.

My favorite poems in the book were "Alienation: Two Bees" and "Reading Apollinaire by the Rogue River." The bee poem was perhaps his most conventional. Not only did it have a plot--dear god!--it had two very explicit themes that made sense--the most obvious of which was obviously alienation. *wink*

I told you I'm feeling weird and poetic!

The other poem that I liked juxtaposed the methods of Apollinaire in giving life to the literary world (literally forming it visually for the reader) with the personification of nature--in this case the Rogue River. Personification isn't quite the right word, but Ferlinghetti offers up the image of the Rogue as a snake being drowned in the ocean, it's tail forever following after it, not knowing how it's head has already perished.

On that note, I think I'll simply say that there were some poems in this collection I connected with, but many more that were just too beatnik or off-kilter for me to appreciate. And thematically, the collection meandered a bit too much.

~6/10~