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Last night I had the luck to hear an outstanding reading by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the most celebrated poets of the Beat generation, at an event hosted by the Poetry Center of Chicago. Spry, articulate, and still very much an active bard at the age of 83, he read with vitality and even supplemented some of his poems with sight gags. It was a real event — the audience of 500 (a guess) thronged and admired him like a rock star, albeit a fragile one. As far as I could tell, the Chicago media was nowhere in attendance, clueless bastards that they are whenever something real and unsensational or unfunded by their advertisers occurs.

Ferlinghetti read poems about Allen Ginsburg dying, about dogs and bag ladies, about fireflies. One poem was written yesterday morning. Everything he read was infused with the poet's special talent for the deepest forms of humanism, and never mawkish, even when versifying about September 11. Then he signed the audience's books, some more than fifty years old, until there were no more takers. An enchanting and inspiring evening.

If you want to know more, here's his google.

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