Friday, March 24, 2023

Happy Birthday to Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Today we celebrate the long and fruitful life of poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was born 104 years ago today in Bronxville, NY. We first launched PennSound's Lawrence Ferlinghetti author page in March 2018 on the poet's 99th birthday and mourned his passing just shy of two years later by highlighting recordings from that collection.

The most recent recording you'll find there is an hour-long set from 1994 at Page Hall in Albany, which comes to us via Chris Funkhouser. Next we have a pair of recordings from the archives of George Drury and Lois Baum, including an appearance on the program Word of Mouth and a forty-minute reading of selected poems at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then there's Ferlinghetti's Watershed Tapes release Into the Deeper Pools, recorded in two sessions in Bethesda and Baltimore, Maryland in 1984 and 1983, respectively, and his 1981 S-Press cassette release, No Escape Except Peace. Jumping back a few decades, there's a set of poems recorded in 1969, including "Assassination Raga" and "Tyrannus Nix," which were digitized by Joel Kuszai for The Factory School, and the Ferlinghetti/Ginsberg episode of Richard O. Moore's Poetry USA series from 1966. Finally, along with a short recording from the Berkeley Poetry Conference and a few assorted recordings without dates. You can listen to any of the aforementioned recordings by clicking here.