"A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND" | June 20th 2008

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It's been 50 years since the first print of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "A Coney Island of the Mind", writes Ariel Ramchandani. Spiffed up and re-released, the collection of poems brings to light the seedy wonder of Coney Island, and the ambiguities of nostalgia ...

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"They say you can't go back again," intone sage voice-overs in treacly films. Perhaps this means nostalgia is misleading--that things are never quite as we remember them to be. Or maybe it suggests the opposite: that it is in fact possible to go back, regardless of what "they" nay-say. The past can be evoked all too clearly with the right song lyrics, dank-basement smell or carnival pastry.

The ambiguities of nostalgia come to bear on "A Coney Island of the Mind", Lawrence Ferlinghetti's classic book of poetry, which has just been reissued by New Directions in honour its 50th anniversary. The original softback, which begged to be carried in a back pocket alongside a pen, has been upgraded to hardcover. The new edition shines bright white, the title announced in Day-Glo carnival-style writing, with a whirligig cd nestled in the back jacket featuring the author reading his poetry. Pure bookshelf material, a permanent collection for the ages. I, for one, am very happy to have this gleaming lollypop of a book on my shelf.

It is impossible for me to know what this Beat tome meant on first publication. I've never set foot in the San Francisco-based City Lights bookshop, which Ferlinghetti himself founded in 1953. And I was born too late to experience a time when poetry was angry and energetic, capable of causing as much trouble as vandalism or stealing. I met the book but three years ago, in the belly of an academic building in a small poetry seminar. "I'm going to read a poem from 'A Coney Island of the Mind'" the professor said. The title was all it took to wake me up.

"A Coney Island of the Mind" conveys vivid multi-faceted sensory imagery: a salty-sour smell, mingled with a whiff of sugar, the sound of people screaming on a ride and your flip flops smacking against the boardwalk, the grainy-sticky feeling of sand sticking to a sunburn--a sense of seediness and wonder. The poems are rooted in the real place, where the water meets the shore at the southern edge of Brooklyn, but they are mixed with the fantastical and imaginary, the Coney Island of our minds. Which is why I like the book's title so much. It implies the internal impression of the place as much as the place itself; the energy it conveys as much as its realities.

It's not Ferlinghetti's phrase, originally--it comes from Henry Miller's "Into the Night Life". On the opening page Ferlinghetti writes: "The title of this book...is used out of context but expresses the way I felt about these poems when I wrote them--as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul." Indeed both Miller and Ferlinghetti hit on the idea of letting go, of giving in to your senses. They suggest we should embrace the chaos of the carnivalesque, the overstimulated bawdiness of the burlesque. And they evoke moments when we may have no choice otherwise.

The first poem of the book ("1") places us immediately "In Goya's greatest scenes", where we "seem to see/ the people of the world/ exactly at the moment when/ they first attained the title of/ 'suffering humanity'". The word "seem" hinges us, we are hanging on Ferlinghetti's every word for his interpretation of the events, for what twist will come our way. The people are "...so bloody real/ it is as if they really still existed/ And they do". We wait, as he fills the space of the page with lyric lilting flow and abrupt stops. Phrases dangle off cliffs. We wonder what piece of the puzzle we will be exposed to next.

I'm particularly attracted to the way these gaps--these literal turns of phrase--work in 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

The poem forms a circle, incised by a fractured rythym. It builds through the repetition of the ands, and then breaks at each line. The images come alive, we move between Chagall and his painting in rapid strokes, readied for an ending that reads as an elaborate aural and visual pun.

It is no accident that the two poems I chose to share are about paintings. Whether the poem hinges on an actual painting or is simply a collection of bright, vivid imagery (such as in the jazzy "Junkman's Obbligato", in which words and energy pile up like wonderfully pungent trash at a junkyard), Ferlinghetti charts visual and sensory topography with his own verve.

Which brings us back to the idea of Coney Island. The energy of the place--as it is or as we remember it--is what carries us, connects the two and keeps it all fresh. Nostalgia is an essential part of a carnival's seedy charms, but it's a living nostalgia, still breathing, still multiplying, like bacteria in a Petri dish, but with sequins. This coming weekend is the annual Mermaid Parade at Coney Island, a tradition that started in 1983 and pays homage to the original Mardi Gras parties held at Coney Island from the turn of the century until the 1950s--the leisure destination's heyday. It's a party not to be missed.

And then there's the reader at home, paging through the glamorous new edition, which may tower awkwardly over the ratty original. I speculate that these readers, as well as those coming to the book for the first time, will find it just as exciting as ever--the words, as Ferlinghetti hopes, imbued with "the direct impact of speech." Like a slap. Like a stiff drink. Like the sun on the boardwalk in summer. The excitement may be well-worn, but it has not worn off.

Image by Seamus Murray