How to Paint Sunlight: Lyric Poems & Others

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

This collection of recent poems is graced with a short introduction by the poet in which he says, "All I ever wanted to do was to paint light on the walls of life." For more than fifty years Ferlinghetti has been doing just thatilluminating both the everyday and the unusual, all the while keeping true to his original dictum of speaking in a way accessible to everyone. He has been, and remains, "One of our ageless radicals and true bards" (Booklist) and his voice is well-known in many places around the world. He was one of the two American poets (the other being John Ashbery) chosen to participate in the 2001 Celebration of UNESCO's World Poetry Day in Delphi, Greece, where he along with his international confreres each poetically addressed the Oracle.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2001

About the author

A prominent voice of the wide-open poetry movement that began in the 1950s, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has written poetry, translation, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration, and essays. Often concerned with politics and social issues, Ferlinghetti’s poetry countered the literary elite's definition of art and the artist's role in the world. Though imbued with the commonplace, his poetry cannot be simply described as polemic or personal protest, for it stands on his craftsmanship, thematics, and grounding in tradition.

Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers in 1919, son of Carlo Ferlinghetti who was from the province of Brescia and Clemence Albertine Mendes-Monsanto. Following his undergraduate years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he served in the U.S. Navy in World War II as a ship's commander. He received a Master’s degree from Columbia University in 1947 and a Doctorate de l’Université de Paris (Sorbonne) in 1950. From 1951 to 1953, when he settled in San Francisco, he taught French in an adult education program, painted, and wrote art criticism. In 1953, with Peter D. Martin (son of Carlo Tresca) he founded City Lights Bookstore, the first all-paperbound bookshop in the country, and by 1955 he had launched the City Lights publishing house.

The bookstore has served for half a century as a meeting place for writers, artists, and intellectuals. City Lights Publishers began with the Pocket Poets Series, through which Ferlinghetti aimed to create an international, dissident ferment. His publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl & Other Poems in 1956 led to his arrest on obscenity charges, and the trial that followed drew national attention to the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat movement writers. (He was overwhelmingly supported by prestigious literary and academic figures, and was acquitted.) This landmark First Amendment case established a legal precedent for the publication of controversial work with redeeming social importance.

Ferlinghetti’s paintings have been shown at various galleries around the world, from the Butler Museum of American Painting to Il Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. He has been associated with the international Fluxus movement through the Archivio Francesco Conz in Verona. He has toured Italy, giving poetry readings in Roma, Napoli, Bologna, Firenze, Milano, Verona, Brescia, Cagliari, Torino, Venezia, and Sicilia. He won the Premio Taormino in 1973, and since then has been awarded the Premio Camaiore, the Premio Flaiano, the Premio Cavour. among others. He is published in Italy by Oscar Mondadori, City Lights Italia, and Minimum Fax. He was instrumental in arranging extensive poetry tours in Italy produced by City Lights Italia in Firenze. He has translated from the italian Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Poemi Romani, which is published by City Lights Books. In San Francisco, his work can regularly be seen at the George Krevsky Gallery at 77 Geary Street.

Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind continues to be the most popular poetry book in the U.S. It has been translated into nine languages, and there are nearly 1,000,000 copies in print. The author of poetry, plays, fiction, art criticism, and essays, he has a dozen books currently in print in the U.S., and his work has been translated in many countries and in many languages. His most recent books are A Far Rockaway of the Heart (1997), How to Paint Sunlight (2001), and Americus Book I (2004) published by New Directions.

He has been the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Kirsch Award, the BABRA Award for Lifetime Achievement, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award. Ferlinghetti was named San Francisco’s first poet laureate.

Reviews

[Loretta · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up in a used bookstore in Halifax, and stood there reading the title poem, which just broke my heart open in the best possible way. I could read it again and again and again.

There are other lovely poems in this collection. But that first one is the one that changes the world, for the instant in which you inhabit the poem and its world. And maybe afterwards too.

And I just looked for a couple of lines to quote here, but I can't just quote a few lines, I would have to write down the whole poem, because it is a whole and, just, go read it, if you never have. Or re-read it if you have but don't remember it well enough.

http://penn.typepad.com/penn/2005/10/...

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

He has some brilliant beyond brilliant lines here and there, but I could never actually say that I loved an entire poem. I think I side more with Billy Collins on this one.

[Eden Luymes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read the blind poet aloud blindfolded but peaking a bit in golden gate park. Some real goddamn gems in here.

Toward the final nirvana !!!

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sitting in the Poet's Chair at City Lights in San Francisco and reading through this book was a truly magical experience. As he writes in the foreword, "Poets and painters are the natural bearers of [light], and all I ever wanted to do was paint light on the walls of life. These poems are another attempt to do it." Indeed, I read this book and cried, "More light!" Beautiful.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

All I know is
I’m fed up with this mouth
This mouth that’s been feeding me
all these years
that’s been kissing people for me
and trying to do a lot of other things to people
on my behalf
Anyway I’m stuck with it
There’s no changing it
I can’t sew it up
So what am I to do with it
except keep accepting
what it eats for me
what it says for me
And who knows
maybe someday
it’ll break right open
and blurt right out
some great poetry
in some primal tongue
made of love and light and dung
some great immortal song
no human ever heard before
not ever sung

from “Mouth”

[Amelia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just not for me I guess. Imagery would take unexpected turns, and not in the good way. He'd drop a banger of a line and then follow it up with some hot-garbage nonsense. With a collection called "How to Paint Sunlight" I expected more nature and grand landscape imagery, instead I was greeted with urban and industrial analogies and "you had to be there" references, like I just wasn't in on the joke.

[Alyson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Favorite stanza:

"I asked a hundred painters and a hundred poets
how to paint sunlight
on the face of life
Their answers were ambiguous and ingenuous
as if they were all guarding trade secrets
Whereas it seems to me
all you have to do is conceive of the whole world
and all humanity
as a kind of art work
a site-specific art work
an art project of the god of light
the whole earth and all that's in it
to be painted with light"

[Penny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ferlinghetti is an interesting poet. There are several sections in this book. I liked many in the section the book is titled after, but especially "Instructions to Painters and Poets." Poems in the section "Into the Interior" are sort of Carl Sandburg-ish and I think Carl would have liked "The Freights," "Overheard Conversations," and "Moored."

[Bjlevek · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorites, in order of appearance: Instructions to Painters & Poets, The Light of Birds, Library Scene, Manhattan, Dirty Tongue, Are There Not Still Fireflies, Moored, Into the Interior, Blind Poet, and Mouth.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fleeting light refracted through the poet’s imagination in kaleidoscopic images. Favorite: “Big Sur”

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ferlinghetti is such a brilliant stylist. This collection is filled with radiant and moving images.

[Becca Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful. Strongest in the first section (titular How to Paint Sunlight) and the New York section. My copy has marginalia but only on the first poem and I always wonder...

[Nelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 Stars

This book was beautiful nothing. The poems were well written and beautiful, but most of them just felt meaningless. Generally, this book just wasn’t what I look for/what I enjoy in poetry.

[Alan Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I now know how to paint sunlight.

[Grady Ormsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read A Coney Island of the Mind in 1967. Since then Lawrence Ferlinghetti has been one of my favorite poets. You can imagine how excited I was to run across How to Paint Sunlight: Lyric Poems & Others (1997-2000). My expectations were fully met. This collection has all the power, insight and clarity that I've always associated with Ferlinghetti. In the brief introduction he writes, "All I ever wanted to do was paint light on the walls of life". Indeed, light is a motif found in many of the poems in the collection. Poets, painters and musicians are seen as bearers of light in dreams and in the world around us. There is light from many angles and places: Big Sur, Manhattan, Ohio, Indiana. I enjoyed what I like best about Ferlinghetti; the imagery, the irony, the humor, the biting satire and the profound vision. Particularly touching were the poems at the end which focused on Ferlinghetti's dear friend Allen Ginsberg.

[Newton Public Library Iowa]

He was the controversial publisher of Ginsberg's banned "Howl" and the owner of the first paperback bookstore; because of these things people often overlook Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poetry. A collection of poems from 1997-2000, this volume includes an elegy to Ferlinghetti's friend called "Allen Ginsberg Dying" and, as was common with the Beat Generation, a reference is made even all these years later to Thomas Wolfe. Though clearer and cleaner than most of the writings by the Beat authors, Ferlinghetti's voice remains strong; the poems are just as musical as the title suggests. Fans of the Beat generation will enjoy having new material by one of the few remaining writers, and more traditional readers of poetry will be pleased to discover Ferlinghetti's talent for the lyrical.

[Avory Faucette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ferlinghetti is my favourite poet, and so I opened this collection with dread, as I often do with poets whose earlier work I loved. I needn't have worried, in fact. I wouldn't recommend reading cover to cover, necessarily, as the poems are grouped so that several are very repetitive (especially the first group about light and the group about Ginsberg's death). That said, I absolutely loved the title poem, and I found several of the poems contained therein inspiring, if not necessarily exactly what I expect from or love about Ferlinghetti on the basis of his earlier works.

[David Burns · Rating 4 out of 5]

I early learned to love birds
the light of birds the kingdom of birds
in the high treetops
stricken with light
living their separate
weightless lives
Light years they lived
apart from us
flashing in sunlight

How to Paint Sunlight: Lyric Poems & Others by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (March 24, 1919 – February 22, 2021) ** Read in Saudi Arabia (Mar-Apr 2021)

[Cal40 · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Cultures, subcultures, and countercultures consumed and reduced to one cheap chip on the erect silicon penis of one forty year old e-trader from the World Bank. While overhead, visible from everywhere, huge illuminated billboards pulse in the night. And swept with con, the millions salivate under the signs"

damn son.

[Brandon Montgomery · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slim volume of poetry with a rhythmic quality, some of which are touching (the three eulogistic poems addressing Ginsberg's death) others are clever, and some seem like non-sequiturs. It certainly isn't Ferlinghetti's best, but middling Ferlinghetti poetry is better than most other people's poetry.

[E · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wow, I wanted to like this much better than I did.

[Claudia Cutino · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gorgeous poet, every word is a touch of poetic magic. I particularly enjoyed his poem "Dirty Tongue", it appeared to come from the soul and thus I perceived it as a poem written rather sincerely.

[Marsmannix]

slim volume of beat poetry.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ferlinghetti maintains his usual excellence here.