Ferlinghetti's San Francisco

Through his long span as a poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has presented many different views of the city of San Francisco through his work. In his poet laureate series, these disparate images of the same frontier city are presented together in one body of text, San Francisco Poems. Among these poems are Ferlinghetti’s initial impressions of the city, his changing observations with the passing of time, and his hopes and aspirations for what the city can become. These themes are spread through the entirety of the text, but found in comfortable proximity within the poem “Great American Watershed Poem.” In this poem, Ferlinghetti casts light on the many wonders of San Francisco, while simultaneously unearthing the paradoxes that plague the city’s core.

One of the most prevalent themes in San Francisco Poems is the conception of San Francisco as a frontier city, a point at which the lines between east/west, past/present, are blurred. Ferlinghetti introduces his poem with the lines, “San Francisco land’s end and ocean’s beginning … the place where the story ended the place where the story began … Beginning of end and end of beginning” (55). Immediately, the temporal space of the city is prepared in a paradoxical juxtaposition of itself. Ferlenghetti presents an idea of San Francisco as a nebulous space, without definite boundaries. It’s sense of time and space is its own construction, resistant to outside influence. Simultaneously, San Francisco is full of potential – not only a place of endings, but of beginnings as well. It is powerful in its symbolic potential to both create and destroy.

This image is further supported by the description of the city as “The first frontier the last frontier” in the passage as well, for while the city is still just that, a city, and therefore part of civilization, it still provides the author the option to “[spend] most of my divorce from civilization in and out of water front hangouts” (55). With its position as a frontier city, it provides the space in which one can comfortable be both within, and outside the constraints of society.

Due to San Francisco’s precarious position as a frontier city, it is subject to rapid progress. While the city one time presents Ferlinghetti with an image of a Mediterranean village, a city of white, time and progress have since covered this image with soot. The once glorious city is commodified, suddenly its glamour and prestige up for sale. Ferlenghetti presents the correlation between the cultural loss of important lands to the coercive forces of capitalist expansion in the image of “An Arab on the bridge his turban flying Passing Alcatraz he buys it The Last of the Mohicans reels in his line On the end of it a string of beads once lost in a trade for Manhattan Island” (57). Here, even some of the key iconic things that make San Francisco are up for capital trade. These poems propose that these changes in the city have come with a devastating cost.

It is unclear at the end of the poem what it is that San Francisco truly offers. While providing the space for counter-culture, the city has changed itself, into a less progressive space. “Will they let Man be free or won’t they … The tide is at the ebb The phone rings,” the poem ends on these hollow notes (58). Like the space of the city, the conclusion of the poem is nebulous, providing the readers with more questions than answers. Ferlenghetti’s frontier city of San Francisco is a city of possibility and wonder, but with these benefits come threats as well, and no where is this dichotomy presented as clearly as within “Great American Watershed Poem.”