Wednesday

Mar. 24, 2004

Yachts in the Sun

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

WEDNESDAY, 24 MARCH, 2004
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Poems: "Yachts in Sun," by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from San Francisco Poems (City Lights Foundation).

Yachts in Sun

The yachts the white yachts
    with their white sails in sunlight
            catching the wind and
               heeling over
All together racing now
             for the white buoy
         to tack about
       to come about beyond it
And then come running in
       before the spanking wind
          white spinnakers billowing
            off Fort Mason San Francisco
Where once drowned down
        an Alcatraz con escaping
          whose bones today are sand
             fifty fathoms down
        still imprisoned now
             in the glass of the sea
As the so skillful yachts
         freely pass over


Literary and Historical Notes:

On this day in Memphis in 1958, Elvis Presley arrived with his parents at the draft board on South Main Street to be inducted into the army. He became U.S. Army Private 53310761, and his income dropped from 400,000 dollars a year to 78 dollars a month.


On this day in 1955, Tennessee Williams's play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened at the Morosco Theater in New York.


It's the birthday of Dario Fo, born in San Giano, Lombardy, Italy (1926). He writes satires about people lost in the gears of bureaucracy. In Archangels Don't Play Pinball (1959), a man discovers that his identity papers show he is registered as a hunting dog. He can only unravel the confusion by entering a kennel and trying to behave as much like a dog as he can. Fo won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, and the Roman Catholic Church said it couldn't understand how the Committee could have given the award to someone who had written such "questionable works."


It's the birthday of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, born in Yonkers, New York (1919). He wrote A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), the best-selling book of poetry in the country during the sixties and seventies. He also started one of the great independent bookstores in America, San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore. He spent World War II in the U.S. Navy, took part in the Normandy invasion, and arrived in Nagasaki six weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped. He later said that was when he became a pacifist. He got a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill, then went to San Francisco, where he met the poet Kenneth Rexroth, and started a venture to publish small, inexpensive volumes of poetry. The fourth volume in the series was a long poem by Allen Ginsberg called Howl (1956). A Customs agent seized the book and arrested Ferlinghetti, and he became the focus of one of the biggest obscenity trials in the country. The book was ruled not obscene, a landmark victory for freedom of speech.

Ferlinghetti said, "Like a bowl of roses, a poem should not have to be explained."


It's the birthday of John Wesley Powell, born in Mount Morris, New York (1834). He studied botany and geology, lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh, then led nine men on an expedition down the Green River and into the Grand Canyon.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

 

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