Back in 1978 the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti made a trip to the Pacific Northwest.
Today it’s a quiet, sunny morning in August. I’m in a high-ceilinged apartment in the Rue de Surène, remembering my student days in the Grands Boulevards of Paris 40 years ago.
Here I reflect on the moments, and the rivers, between these events – as well as other rivers, and other journeys.
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Northwest Ecolog
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is best known as one of the Beat Poets in 1950s America. A native New Yorker, he founded the publishing house and bookshop City Lights in San Francisco, and published the classic Pocket Poets series of volumes that included Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.
As a young man in his 20s, Ferlinghetti studied literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. His PhD thesis was on the symbol of the city of Paris in modern poetry. He met his wife-to-be, Selden, on a ship from America to France: she too was heading off to study at the Sorbonne. They married in 1951.
In the late-1970s, now in midlife, Ferlinghetti headed north from San Francisco, up the Pacific Coast Highway, to the Pacific Northwest – with its forests, volcanic mountains and river valleys. While he was there, he undertook a voyage with the environmental charity Greenpeace.
The resulting book of poems was Northwest Ecolog (a) – Ferlinghetti’s word Ecolog blending eclogue (a historic term for a poem in a rural setting), and ecology.
The settings of the poems in Northwest Ecolog include raft trips over rapids, watching animals through binoculars, and sitting on a sleeping bag in the shadow of mountains. Like all his poems, the poems of Northwest Ecolog are written without punctuation.
Ferlinghetti explores the fragility of nature. But the main theme of the collection is human fragility and mortality: the prospect of his own death, and the loss of people dear to him as the years pass by.
His main image of time passing is the flowing of a river.
Wild Life Cameo, Early Morn begins as a descriptive poem set on the bank of a river in central Oregon, watching a group of deer:
By the great river Deschutes
on the meadowbank greensward
sun just hitting
the high bluffs
stone cliffs sculpted
high away across the river
At the foot of a steep brown slope
a mile away
six white-tail deer
four young bucks with branched antlers
and two small does
mute in eternity
drinking the river
By the end of the poem, the deer have become a symbol of something else:
One by one they
drink silence
one by one
climb up so calm
over the rim of the canyon
and without looking back
disappear forever
Like certain people
in my life
Reading Apollinaire by the Rogue River is set by a river that flows through southwestern Oregon. Ferlinghetti sits on its bank, reading a volume of poems by the early 20th century French-Polish poet Guillaume Apollinaire:
Reading Apollinaire here
sitting crosslegged
on sleeping bag and poncho
In the shadow of a huge hill
before the sun clears it
Woke up early on the shore
and heard the river shushing
The choice of Apollinaire is more than coincidence: it evokes an image etched into his memory from his own days studying literature in Paris, and his PhD on the poetic image of Paris.
Apollinaire’s most famous poem is Le Pont Mirabeau (1912), set on a bridge that spans the Seine in the western part of Paris. Like Ferlinghetti, Apollinaire describes the incessant movement of the river, in flowing lines without punctuation:
Days pass by and weeks pass by
Neither past time
Nor past loves will return
Under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine
Ferlinghetti, on the bank of the Rogue River in the Pacific Northwest, remembers his youthful reading of Apollinaire as a student in Paris. Ferlinghetti’s poem meanders through reflections on streams, cayons, watersnakes, native American myths, and the final end of all things. It closes with a moment of deeply personal connection:
As I sit reading a French poet
whose most famous poem is about
the river that runs through the city
taking time & life & lovers with it
And none returning
none returning
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Return to Paris
Six years after Northwest Ecolog, now in his early 60s, Ferlinghetti returned to Paris as part of a trip to Europe. The resulting poems were published as European Poems & Transitions (b). The French capital remains for Ferlinghetti a place of indelible memories:
I left my memory in hock
on the rooftops of Paris
where the grey light of Paris lies
like the shadow at the back of old mirrors
He revisits old haunts and paints cameos of places he once lived:
The white sun of Paris
softens sidewalks
sketches white shadows on skylights
traps a black cat
on a distant balcony
While in Paris, he revisits the Bridge where he first read Apollinaire as a student:
The big barges push through
under the Pont Mirabeau
A huge sculpted mermaid
with golden torch looks down upon them
This image of the river flowing by, taking with it life and friends, never left Ferlinghetti, who died in 2021, at the age of 101. He called his volume of selected poems These are My Rivers (1993) (c). The epigraph at the start of the collection quotes from the World War I poem Rivers, by Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti.
Ungaretti’s Rivers is set by the River Isonzo, which runs through western Slovenia and northeastern Italy. For Ungaretti it sparks memories of other rivers he has known, including the Seine. The poem is a kind of quest for Ungaretti’s roots, a search for home in a world being rapidly changed by the Great War. At the start of his own collection, Ferlinghetti quotes from Rivers:
I have revisited
the ages
of my life
These are
my rivers
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Heraclitus and the River
This image of the flowing river representing time passing is an ancient one. Back around 500 BC it dominated the writings of a grumpy Greek philosopher called Heraclitus. He lived in the great city of Ephesus, a port on the western coast of what we call Turkey – then part of the Persian Empire. The city was dominated by the vast and recently rebuilt Temple of Artemis.
As Heraclitus surveyed the world of his day from his home in Ephesus, all he could see was constant, restless change. This stands in contrast to some other Greek thinkers, who emphasised the static nature of the universe and unchanging values. Two-and-a-half millennia after he lived, two of the phrases ascribed to Heraclitus are still remembered:
Everything flows.
You can’t step into the same river twice.
With Heraclitus begins a tradition of thinkers and writers reflecting on time as tensed – in other words, comprising past, present and future tenses – symbolised by the flowing of the river.
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A Bookshop in Leamington Spa
I grew up in small-town Warwickshire. In my late teens I used to visit an alternative bookshop in Leamington Spa. Located at the shabby end of town, the far side of the River Leam and away from the imposing Regency architecture of the upper town, it stocked volumes of radical politics and avant-garde poetry, all piled in chaotic jumbles.
It was there that I found a slim pocket-sized book of poems, Northwest Ecolog by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In part, I was drawn to the cover, which featured a piece of indigenous art: a stylised black-and-white image of what I assumed to be a sea-monster.
I knew nothing about Ferlinghetti, Beat Poets, or the Pacific Northwest. But I had found a small book, and the poem that haunted me in it was Reading Apollinaire by the Rogue River. I had never been to Paris, or America, and I had no idea who Apollinaire was.
At the age of 18 I headed off to university, to study French literature. By my final year I was specialising in the era of poetry that included Apollinaire.
My first trip to Paris was for a holiday admin job in the export division of Peugeot-Citroën (I offer heartfelt apologies to anybody in Sénégal in the early 1980s who received the wrong manual in their shiny new Citroën).
I then spent a year in Orléans, as a teaching assistant in a French school and helping in a local radio station. During my year in Orléans I’d jump on the train up to Paris and spend weekends pottering aimlessly around the city’s quartiers. I was gripped by the psychogeography of the Grands Boulevards and the course of the Seine. I still haven’t really fallen out of love.
On Sundays I’d visit St Michael’s, the English-speaking Anglican Church in the Rue d’Aguesseau, close to the Place de la Concorde, and hang out with an international group of students – many of them Francophone Africans.
One of the few books I took with me to France was Northwest Ecolog.
One day I visited the Pont Mirabeau. I stood on the Bridge and read the poem written by Ferlinghetti in the 1970s Pacific Northwest, which cited the poem by Apollinaire from the 1910s. Both referenced the Bridge where I was standing, the Seine flowing beneath my feet watched by the huge sculpted mermaid with the golden torch (d).
What I didn’t know at the time is that Reading Apollinaire by the Rogue River was written by a man in his 50s, remembering his days as a student of French literature in Paris in the late 1940s. It’s a poem that quietly and indirectly evokes a young man’s memories of being in love, in love with poetry, in love with Paris, in love with life.
The other thing I didn’t know that day is that Ferlinghetti himself was back visiting Paris around the same time I was there as a student – this time, in his 60s.
A lot of water has flowed under lots of bridges since the day I first stood on the Pont Mirabeau.
Today I’m sitting in a high-ceilinged apartment in the Rue de Surène, in my early 60s, remembering my student days walking the same Boulevards Ferlinghetti walked in the late 1940s. I’m the same age now that he was when he revisited Paris in the 1980s, and stood again on the bridge.
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These are My Rivers
Today I’ll walk from the apartment to the Pont Mirabeau. I’ll read Ferlinghetti’s poem, the one he wrote on the bank of the Rogue River, about Apollinaire in the 1910s looking down from the Pont Mirabeau into the dark waters of the Seine.
I’ll think of the older Ferlinghetti, revisiting Paris years later, at the same time I was a student in the city – both of us thinking about Apollinaire and his lost loves.
Today I’ll imagine a scenario that probably never happened. It involves Ferlinghetti and me, both crossing the Pont Mirabeau on the same day in 1983 or 1984 – him in his 60s, me a student of 20 – each of us with a slim volume of poetry in hand, catching each other’s eye, and nodding as we pass.
Tomorrow I’ll lead the service at St Michael’s in the Rue d’Aguesseau, the church I used to visit as a student. I’ll speak on the ancient city of Ephesus and the Temple of Artemis, and on the passing of time. In my own mind, I’ll picture old Heraclitus peering down into a river that ran through a dry landscape to the Aegean, pondering what it all meant.
I’ll speak of other events in Ephesus too, which would go on to shape the way an entire culture came to frame its understanding of time, hope and human fragility. I’d like to think there may be a visiting student or two present, their heads full of questions, dreams, and verbs.
Heraclitus was right: everything flows; we never step into the same river twice. Apollinaire too: days and weeks pass by; neither past time, nor past loves will return. And Ferlinghetti: the river runs through the city, taking time and life and lovers with it, none returning.
But on the way there are moments of connection. Oh my goodness, those moments.
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(a) Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Northwest Ecolog (City Lights, 1978).
(b) Lawrence Ferlinghetti: These are My Rivers (New Directions, 1993), pp 251-304.
(c) Lawrence Ferlinghetti: These are My Rivers (New Directions, 1993).
(d) One of four giant allegorical statues that adorn the bridge, representing Paris, Commerce, Navigation and Abundance.
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© Mike Starkey 2024
[Audio version available]
Pic: Allegory of Commerce, Pont Mirabeau - Mike Starkey
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