With a title stolen directly from Henry Miller, you can expect a transcendent quality. I read Coney Island of the Mine for the first time after my AP Calc final, sitting in the back of glass trying not to think about how the test had gone. It's odd, how Ferlinghetti writes; very direct, almost unpoetic at times, themes full of ephemeral beauty but almost nothing in retrospect.

I loved the book as I read it, but I can't remember it now. I salvaged it from my trunk and I'm turning through it and it really is beautiful but only in the present moment. The words sink and are gone; they imprint upon your mind only in thematics but not in base worth. I do not know if this is genius or not; surely Ferlinghetti is an artist capable of amazing things, but his valuing of transcendentalism but also urgency does not mix. He is spectacular in the now but a ghost in the future; he's the type you cite as an influence but never directly quote. Nothing he says is all too mind-blowing; really, Ginsberg and Burroughs took up the sexual extremes, Kerouac embodied the displacement, and Corso handled the language. Ferlinghetti met and published all those men at one time or another, and all would cite him as a genius or at the very least a critical part of their work, but he doesn't stand out. He's forgotten, even among critics; he's part of the movement, but you don't see him published.

The question here is whether or not Ferlinghetti's attempts at almost hidden poetry and meaning are effective; yes the themes stay in mind but they are not always present in the text. Take for example the first poem of the book, simply labelled "1". Ferlinghetti dissects a Goya painting for meaning, finding a general purpose on its beauty and labelling it as such, then hits a fulcrum and relates it to people. The relationship to people seems almost expected, yet obviously not intended as such; Ferlinghetti's segway is for emphasis yet it is hinted at by the right spacing of the lines before it and the use of pronouns creates a sense of the casual. His dramatic turn has already been predicted in the mind of the reader thanks to the natural flow of the poem, yet it wasn't intended this way. There's nothing much to say; he creates a owerful image and a powerful contrast yet it was Goya who created the image and the reader who created the constrast and Ferlinghetti is then just the medium. It seems almost cruel that a publisher can only write as a publisher, conveying the beauty of others but not himself.

I love Ferlinghetti because hs is ephemeral, but critically, he's hardly a genius. The other beats stick in mind because they broke the norm, their style memorable because the flow worked, the breaks worked; here it just seems modifications of the classics and modifications of his peers. And certainly that means something, but I love Ferlinghetti too much to simply debase him.