As they say, I guess, because it is so often true, it’s a sad day when the sun comes up but someone, whose life and life’s work made a Homeric difference in your life, is no longer there to see the sun or moon rise or set.

That is why, now, five years after his passing, I still remember Lawrence Ferlinghetti.   

Fifty years ago, a friend, who always seemed to know what was up more than me, or anyone we hung out with at that time, pulled a slim paperback with a dazzling black and white cover off one of her bookshelves and read several of its poems to me.

Published in 1958, that book remains in print today, with several copies on my bookcases, and is one of only a handful of collections of American poetry that has sold more than 1,000,000 copies.
Why?

I suspect it is because it is ripe with word play, savvy satirical humor and, to paraphrase Dylan, it is forever young. The book is A Coney Island of the Mind. Ferlinghetti published it when he was 39 years old. 

For his remaining 62 years above ground, while growing his popular, independent City Lights Bookstore and press, he published some of the most cutting edge, enduring American literature of the Twentieth Century, kept his pen to paper despite his celebrity and financial success and remained true to his poetic voice that now, although silent beyond the pages of his 38 books, continues to resonate with poets and readers of poetry around the world.   

While I cannot say why it caused legions of writers and readers in my youth to do double takes when they read his work, I feel his body of work is something like the sunlight my cupped hands hold onto during my brightest days, during my darkest hours.

His poetry taught me volumes about writing poetry because he was a life-long student of a genre that pre-dates, by 5,000 years, its written and printing press metamorphosis from its millennia of reaching our hearts through our ears.