Chris on Ferlinghetti

To: <88v@dept.english.upenn.edu>
Subject: Ferlinghetti
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 1999 20:43:47 -0800
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    Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto" and "Dog" both take the reader through
clever and insightful thought-experiences.  One can imagine the poet
actually seeing the Baseball game in relation to Ezra Pound's *Cantos*.
The poet sits, envisioning Juan Marichal destroying the Anglo Saxon
tradition, and his thoughts/comparisons/musings are developed and recorded
in the poem. He sees the dog, and completely experiences the simple
reality of the dog, but adds to this experience witty and ironic
narrative.  That the dog is "a real realist", a "democratice dog" and a
"living questionmark" are not just a record of the "dog" reality, but they
are the comments of a hypersensitive, empathetic human mind stretching
itself to the reality of the dog, but never leaving behind its own
intellectual foundations.  These are wonderful musings, and the form is
sponaneous and wild, but a little less intense than "Howl".  The poems
enumerate abstraction with extemporaneous surges of poetic inquiry, and
they are explosions of description unified by one original idea.  I think
that they are fantastic.

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