Still Wondering
Someone who has difficulty remembering names is never going to be an expert on poetry. Fortunately, e e cummings and Lawrence Ferlinghetti are memorable names. Aside from a few Lit classes and one creative writing class in college, my background comes from forty-five years of reading poetry in between physical therapy school, clients, a husband and children and writing thousands of very dry, formatted reports. Now retired, I am re-reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, the poetry collection that launched my curiosity back when I was in high school writing essays about Shakespeare and Robert Frost.
Our teachers would show us a poem by e e cummings, hoping to scare us back to the standard high school fare and convince us to stay away from that modern stuff that might have bad words or make us think about Viet Nam. Here was a page with no punctuation and no capital letters — in an English class! — after years of stanzas and rhymes. I was in college before I found out that cummings is more accessible when read aloud.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti quietly appeared on the corner of my desk when I was a high school senior working on an English paper. The teacher had tenure. At that time, our school district was one of many that was debating banning J.D. Salinger. (I actually don’t remember how the debate resolved. We all read Catcher in the Rye, anyways.)
Ferlinghetti did use a few bad words and he could make you think about Viet Nam, although much more gently than his beat buddy, Alan Ginsberg. The poem I mostly remembered was “I Am Waiting” with that same refrain and clear images from daily life mixed ironically with familiar phrases. Coming from a patriotic, military family, it was a jolt to read about “waiting for the American Eagle . . . to straighten up and fly right”. He was funny, but challenged the status quo that I grew up with, including religion. He was the doorway for a curious teenager to a huge world of words, images and ideas.
As a teenager, I was drawn to the playful combinations of images, almost like verbal cartoons poking fun at the grown-ups. Re-reading after forty-five years, I now focus on his statements at the end of each stanza about wonder: “I am waiting for the rebirth of wonder.” Wonder is the agent for change, the “what if” arrow that points out new trails. Poetry can be a public “what if” for language, images and topics, which is why I am still reading after 45 years.
