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Constantly risking absurdity theme

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The American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti passed away in March 2021 just a few weeks shy of reaching his 102nd birthday. Last year I wrote about Ferlinghetti in a few places: the James Joyce Quarterly published my review of Ferlinghetti's final book, I also wrote about Ferlinghetti and Joyce at my other blog, then I wrote more about Ferlinghetti and his incredible final book on this blog.

April is both National Poetry Month and the opening month of the baseball season, so as April comes to a close I'm going to pay tribute to the late poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti by looking at how he wrote about baseball in his works. Ferlinghetti grew up in Yonkers, New York (located right above Manhattan Island) and after spanning the globe on manifold adventures he settled in San Francisco right around the time the Giants baseball team moved their home base from the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan out to the Bay Area of San Francisco. Reading through Ferlinghetti's books, one gets the impression that baseball was a ubiquitous aspect of his life. His writings on baseball also tend to intersec

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‘Resist and Disobey!’

Near the end of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s autobiographical novel, Little Boy, the narrator is people-watching at a café in his adopted hometown of San Francisco: “everyone on their portable universes their handheld computers and nobody talking to anyone else.” Why are we here, he wonders, and what are we supposed to be doing on earth? But this is a quaintly existential question coming from a man who piloted a submarine chaser in the Normandy invasion on D-Day; witnessed the aftermath of the atomic payload on Nagasaki; wrote his dissertation on French poetry at the Sorbonne on the GI Bill; founded City Lights bookstore and publishing house with an eye to an international cohort of midcentury authors; was arrested on obscenity charges for publishing Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and then, defended by the ACLU, won a landmark case in court; and has collected multiple honors in the US and Europe, including Commandeur, French Order of Arts and Letters, for his writings and translations. There are almost a million copies in

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  • Intro
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line
    Explanations
  • Poetic
    Devices
  • Vocabulary &
    References
  • Form, Meter, &
    Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources

The Full Text of “Constantly Risking Absurdity”

The Full Text of “Constantly Risking Absurdity”

  • “Constantly Risking Absurdity” Introduction

  • “Constantly Risking Absurdity” Summary

  • “Constantly Risking Absurdity” Themes

    • The Difficulty and Beauty of Poetry

      Where this theme appears in the poem:

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Constantly Risking Absurdity”

  • “Constantly Risking Absurdity” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Consonance

      Where consonance appears in the poem:
      • Line 1: “Constantly risking absurdity”
      • Line 2: “death”
      • Line 7: “climbs,” “rime”
      • Line 9: “balancing,” “eyebeams”
      • Line 10: “above,” “sea,” “faces”
      • Line 11: “paces”
      • Line 12: “side,” “day”
      • Line 13: “entrechats”
      • Line 14: “sleight,” “tricks”
      • Line 15: “theatrics”
      • Line 16: “mistaking”
      • Line 19: “super realist”
      • Line 20: “perforce perceive”
      • Line 21: “taut tr

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