Coney Island Hot Dogs

I know, I know...I haven't posted any literary activity in a long while. Sorry about all that. I have posted on my other blog about mundane activities if you are interested in those.

Today's post is about a book of poetry, which many people have probably already read or at least should have read some of the poems in various journals by now. Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "A Coney Island of the Mind," instantly brought me back to my days in Worcester, Mass., and its Coney Island hot dog restaurant/stand. Yes, the title is the instant memory recaller for me, not so much the poems. The title reminded me of pre-college and the first couple years of college when friends and I would stop by and get cheap hot dogs with mustard and other condiments and the giant dill pickles for $1. We stuffed ourselves silly, only to be hungry again later.

Enough of my reminiscing, let's get back to the poetry.

One of my favorite poems in this volume is "Dog." As a dog owner, who often personifies her pet, I can completely see my dog acting in the same way the dog in the poem does. For instance, "The dog trots freely in the street/and sees reality/and the things he sees/are his reality." However, this is not just a dog, but a metaphor on some level for the working man, though Ferlinghetti does not make this abundantly clear to the reader until the latter portion of the poem. "He's afraid of Coit's Tower/but he's not afraid of Congressman Doyle/although what he hears is very discouraging, " and "He will not be muzzeled/Congressman Doyle is just another/fire hydrant/to him." I like the simple language the poet uses to set the scene of a dog walking down the street and what he sees, but it is how he views the world that intrigues the reader.

Another of my favorite poems in the volume is "9," with its amusing language to accurately pinpoint the reality of drunken encounters. Many of the other poems in the book are explicit in their depiction of adolescent fumbling in love and lust, but the language often has a lighter tone to prevent the reader from believing the poet or poem lectures them about human interaction. In fact, the lighter language helps to alleviate anxieties about sexual situations and human interactions to display the more amusing side of these encounters. In poem "9," Ferlinghetti writes "but then this dame/comes up behind me see/and says/you and me could really exist/wow I says/only the next day/she has bad teeth."

Also unique in this volume are several poems, which the author specifies should be spoken to jazz accompaniment, rather than merely read on a printed page. One of them, titled "Autobiography,"contains the song-like language: "I rest/I have travelled./I have seen goof city./I have seen the mass mess./I have heard Kid Ory cry./I have heard a trombone preach./I have heard Debussy/strained thru a sheet."

I highly recommend this poetry volume to anyone interested in amusing language and human interaction commentary. I love the imagery of these poems as well.