On Urgency, Culture Jamming, and the Words of Lawrence Ferlinghetti Rion Levy
P
oet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was a culture jammer who documented his trajectory along the Will to Playful Creation and urged his readers to do the same. Although a member of the Beat Movement, the methods with which he confronted the world did not align closely with some of the more illicit, and dangerous tactics used by his compatriots. He illustrates that everyone has their own, unique ways to deconstruct the world and culture jam and therefore must rely upon one’s own critical responses to, and interpretations of the world. Culture jamming is a modern word for an ancient process. Although today it often manifests as pushback against advertiser and corporate culture, the term can broadly apply to any non-compliant response to “the anti-pleasure ethos of mainstream capitalist society” (Klein, “Culture Jamming,” 283). In other words, to culture jam is to apply the act of détournment, the subversion and perversion of meaning, in the attempt to uncover and present a true or hidden message (Lasn 417). It is a strong rejection of the normal which frequently leads culture jammers to attract attention as they turn themselves into a spectacle. This attention is not necessarily drawn from a desire for recognition, rather, when someone acts as a dériviste and follows along the Will to Playful Creation, the free exploration of the world in the pursuit of that which one loves (242), they act in such stark defiance of the status-quo, that they are magnets for eyes. These individuals “approach life full-on, without undue fear or crippling self-censorship, pursuing joy and novelty as if tomorrow you’ll be in the ground” (424). It is their open sense of the world that offers so much hope in the face of the disparaging uncertainty of the modern-day. A close reading of Ferlinghetti’s poetry demonstrates that it is possible to feel deeply for something and to use that passion to shape it into our reality. After he served in the Second World War and received his Ph.D. from l’Université de Paris, Ferlinghetti settled in San Francisco and opened City Lights Bookstore (Charters “Beat Down”). In the 1950s, literature was rarely sold in paperback, as the culture deemed that high literature was only worthy when bound in hardcover (Charters, Constantly Risking Absurdity, 230). In his first public act of defiance, he decided his store would only sell paperback books. Two years later, the bookstore expanded, adding a publishing house where he published the first poetry anthology in The Pocket Poets Series (Charters 230). Pictures of the Gone World is Ferlinghetti’s heads-up to the world where he debuts his unique and noncompliant perspectives. In the 60th Anniversary Edition, he acknowledges that “Looking back on these poems sixty years later … there is a freshness of perception that only young eyes have, in the dandelion bloom of youth” (Ferlinghetti, “Gone World,” i). He exclaims that the world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t much mind
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