Lawrence Ferlinghetti (born Lawrence Ferling on March 24, 1919) [1] is an American poet and painter, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. Author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, he is best known for A Coney Island of the Mind (New York: New Directions, 1958), a collection of poems that has been translated into nine languages, with sales over 1,000,000 copies. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in Yonkers, New York on March 24, 1919. His mother, née Clemence Albertine Mendes-Monsanto was of French and Sephardic-Portuguese heritage. His father, Carlo Ferlinghetti, was born in Brescia, Italy, in 1872, immigrated to the United States in 1892, and worked as an auctioneer in Little Italy, NYC. Carlo Ferlinghetti shortened the family name to “Ferling.” Ferlinghetti reverted to the original Italian “Ferlinghetti” in 1955, and in the same year published his first book of poems under his restored name. Ferlinghetti's father died before he was born, and his mother was hospitalized immediately after his birth. He was raised by his French aunt Emily, former wife of Ludovico Monsanto, an uncle of his mother from the Virgin Islands who taught Spanish at the U.S. Naval Academy. Emily took Ferlinghetti to Strasbourg, France, where they lived during his first five years, with French as his first language.
sandinista avioncitos
The little airplanes of the heart
with their brave little propellers
What can they do...[read poem]
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with their brave little propellers
What can they do...
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