Just Because: 'Back Roads to Far Towns After Bashō'

Along with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and William S. Burroughs, among others, writer and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (né Lawrence Monsanto Ferling in 1919 ~ his Italian immigrant father, who died six months before he was born, had shortened the family name, but Ferlinghetti went back to the original) is considered one of the premier voices of the Beat movement of the 1950s. According to The Literature Network, "The years immediately after the Second World War saw a wholesale reappraisal of the conventional structures of society. Just as the postwar economic boom was taking hold, students in universities were beginning to question the rampant materialism of their society. The Beat Generation was a product of this questioning. They saw runaway capitalism as destructive to the human spirit and antithetical to social equality. In addition to their dissatisfaction with consumer culture, the Beats railed against the stifling prudery of their parents’ generation": http://www.online-literature.com/periods/beat.php
   Ferlinghetti founded City Lights magazine and then the iconic bookstore of the same name in San Francisco, which was a gathering place for Beat artists, and in this way, in addition to through his writing, he was a major influence in the movement. His book Back Roads to Far Towns After Bashō, published in 1970 and a year later under the title Back Roads to Far Places, is one long poem, written in his hand. Here is an excerpt:

Make it new!
                                                                 Make it new!
cried the parrot
                                                                                 to the mockingbird
We were born
                                                                 under the mulberry trees
from which drop
                                                                                             the mynah birds of madness
And fish float
                                                                 thru the trees
eating the seeds
                                                                                         of the sun

All of one summer
                                                                 in a branch of water
                               shaken
                                                   by a stream
Silverdollar underwater
                                     like a small stray turtle
                                lost
                                     at the bottom of things
Passing strange mountains
                                    & dropping pine needles
                                                  in an envelope
I send you
                                             some of my bones
Morning mocks its flowers
                                                     by becoming
                                                                 Afternoon
We have our moments
                                                                 of ecstasy
                                              and then the bird
                                                                 falls into the absurd
Bashō would have liked
                                                                 a lake like this
                                       back roads to far towns
                                                                                         reflected in it ...