wowza

It took five hours to read all 325 pages of ms, with time out to get coffee, food, and bathroom breaks of the shortest sort possible. Overall, a good shape to the whole story, meiner meinung nach!

Found about 8 to 10 pages about 2/3 of the way through to cut out that were making the story line sag, and came up with a plan to get the whole thing reworked, so feeling great.

Just last night read in the Special 90th Anniversary Issue of Writer's Digest an interview with Ferlinghetti at age 90, in which he recounts that Bukowski, "who wrote every single day, all day," believed that "when you weren't writing, you weren't a writer." Something to keep in mind.

Ferlinghetti was the first poet I fell in love with, seated in the library stacks at Sac City College, pulling out one book of poetry after the other. His "poem 14" of Coney Island of the Mind threw me into the clutches of poetry, forever:

poem "14", a composition of perfect carousel circuitousness:

Don't let that horse
eat that violin

cried Chagall's mother


But he
kept right on
painting


And became famous

And kept on painting
The Horse with Violin In Mouth

And when he finally finished it
he jumped up upon the horse
and rode away

waving the violin

And then with a low bow gave it
to the first naked nude he ran across

And there were no strings
attached

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

found this at
http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/story/the-circus-in-your-soul

hooray for (the internet) today!

plus, Ferlinghetti says he was not of the Beats, but before them, a bohemian...

gorgeous!

Once I went to see him read in person at Sierra 2. His dog sat beside him the whole time, scratching.

I wrote the first line of a poem about him, but never added anything to it:

Ferlinghetti's dog has fleas.